Sentence:  There is a really good sketch of Micky, the lonely boundary rider, whose wonderful stock of news comes by “the <WSD>mulga wires</WSD>,” who is full of scandal about the squatter′s rams.... 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  A story thus received; a component in the network (either a person or an imagined wire), and so in plural the network itself.