From the Frontier

This is the story of three men and three frontiers. In the nineteenth century the centre of the continent was, to white Australians, a vast forbidding emptiness. The completion of the Overland Telegraph Line in the 1870s brought with it a new knowledge of the area, as well as a number of intruders to a landscape familiar to Aboriginal people for thirty millennia. Among the newcomers were a policeman, Ernest Cowle, and a telegraph official, Paddy Byrne, living in frontier settlements hundreds of