Long before any map called this place Strangways Springs, the Arabana people knew it as Pangki Warrunha - 'white ribs' - for the pale sedimentary banding that rings its springs like the bones of something half-buried in the earth. In their accounts of the creation time, two ancestral snakes, Kurkari the green snake and Yurkunangku the red-bellied black snake, made camp here for the night, and the land still carries the shape of their stopping. Water rises here from impossible depths, pushed up through the desert from the Great Artesian Basin to form a complex of mound springs and soaks spread across nearly two square kilometres of gibber plain. In a landscape where rain is rare and rivers run dry, this is a place where water has never stopped coming. People have gathered at these springs for centuries - and the marks of every era who came are still legible in the ground.
The mound springs of the western Lake Eyre basin are geological marvels: rainwater that fell on the distant Queensland ranges, swallowed by porous rock, travelling underground for thousands of years before surfacing here. Over millennia, minerals carried up with the water have built low mounds, some metres high, each crowned with a pool. Strangways is one link in a chain of these springs running along the edge of Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, from Marree north to Dalhousie, including the famous Blanche Cup and the Bubbler. For the Arabana, springs like these were lifelines and meeting points, anchoring trade routes that carried red ochre from the south and grindstones and pituri across enormous distances. Archaeological evidence of human occupation just west of the springs dates back at least 560 to 700 years, and the connection runs far deeper than any excavation can reach.
In 1870 the colony resolved to string a telegraph line clear across Australia, from Adelaide to Darwin, to join the continent to the cables of the world. The line needed repeater stations roughly every 250 kilometres to boost its faltering signal, and Strangways Springs - chosen for its reliable water - became one of eleven. From 1872 it hummed with a new kind of life. A great stone tank was built to catch rainwater for the telegraph batteries and the staff, and the settlement grew. Messages that once took months by ship now crossed the continent in hours, tapped out in Morse by operators living at the literal edge of the inhabited world. The remote spring had become a node in the planet's nervous system - and then, in October 1896, the station was decommissioned and its work moved to nearby William Creek. The buildings were left to the weather, and the silence returned.
Before any railway reached this far north, supplies came by camel. Strings of camels driven by cameleers - men remembered as 'Afghans', though many came from across the north-west of British India - hauled goods up from Marree, and the archaeology of a camel depot still marks the springs. When the Great Northern Railway, the line that would become the Ghan, reached Strangways late in 1886, hundreds of workers poured in; for a brief season there was a hotel, an eating house, and even a police station. The first trains arrived in March 1887. A sheep station had already been established here in 1859, complete with a stone homestead and a wool scour to clean fleeces, though the relentless droughts of the 1860s and 1890s broke one owner after another. Today the whole district lies within Anna Creek Station, the largest cattle run on Earth.
Through all of this - the telegraph, the railway, the sheep and the cattle - the Arabana never left. Camps formed near the springs, which served as a ration depot and a source of work, and Arabana stockmen earned their living on the very country their ancestors had walked. A newspaper account from 1891 preserves the names and faces of several of them: Kalli Kalli, Bill Rowdy, Tilbrook. By the early 1900s, officials estimated that between fifty and a hundred and fifty Arabana people were living and working around Strangways. They adapted the intruding world to their own ends, even hiring cameleers to carry ochre and later using the railways to move it. Today the ruins are protected on the South Australian Heritage register, cared for by the volunteer Friends of the Mound Springs in partnership with the Arabana traditional owners. Pangki Warrunha is once more Arabana land - as, in the deepest sense, it always was.
Strangways Springs lies at approximately 29.15°S, 136.57°E, just off the Oodnadatta Track about 39 km south of William Creek in South Australia's Far North. From the air the mound springs read as pale, low hummocks scattered across dark gibber plain, often ringed with green vegetation where water reaches the surface - a striking contrast against the surrounding desert. The ruins of the stone telegraph station and tank are visible nearby. The nearest airstrip is William Creek (ICAO YWMC) to the north, served by scenic-flight operators; Coober Pedy Airport (YCBP) to the west offers a sealed runway and is the nearest larger field; Marree (YMRE) lies to the south-east. Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre's white salt expanse lies to the east as a major landmark. Expect excellent visibility in dry weather but few ground references between features; watch for heat shimmer and dust. Recommended viewing altitude 1,000-2,500 ft AGL to pick out the springs.