140 years ago this building must have seemed like an outstation on the moon.

Even today it takes a 4-wheel drive vehicle to get the last few kilometres to it. Back then the trip would have been of astronomical proportions.

This is the Peake Telegraph station, constructed as part of a commutations network that crossed the Australian continent from north to south.

The Peake is an outstation on Anna Creek Station, the world’s largest cattle property run by the S. Kidman Company.

I did the photography for a story on Anna Creek for the R.M. Williams Outback magazine back in March this year.

The telegraph station is on this section of the property. It’s just south of Oodnadatta on the Ooodnadatta Track.

Two things stand out about this old telegraph station. The first – how substantial the buildings are. The second – the beauty of the surround landscape.

It was one of 12 repeater stations between Adelaide and Darwin and its completion brought Australia closer into contact with London via telegrams when news could arrive in around 24 hours instead of months.

Getting back to my point about an expedition to the moon….back in 1872 or thereabouts when the telegraph line opened between Adelaide and Darwin this was remote in the extreme. To get here people had to cover some of the most rugged and dangerous country in the world and be completely self sufficient at the same time.

36,000 poles and 3,200 kilometres of wire were used to link the two cities at a time when explorers had only just before passed through or died only a few years before.

A project of epic proportions.

Looking at tombstones in the bush is an interesting pastime……there’s always a story behind every one.

A case in point is the grave of Benjamin Daggett, accidentally shot in the kitchen of the Anna Creek station homestead in outback South Australia back in April 1883.

“Erected by his friends and fellow workmen” says the inscription.

No mention of cheating in a game of cards that’s rumoured to have led to the shooting.

The details lost in the the sands of time.

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Thanks to all those people who sent me emails with best wishes for the opening of my Lake Eyre exhibition. It was a successful evening with lots of positive feed back from those who attended.

Everyone enjoyed themselves…..a relaxed group, a great meal and entertainment provided by local musiician and songwriter John O’Dea which went into the early hours next morning.

I’ll spare you the pictures.

A painting by artist Bruce Swann caught my eye in his book, Swann’s Australia.

It’s the Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church at Dawson. I’m not familiar with the church, but Dawson is one of those tiny, almost forgotten townships north of Peterborough in South Australia.

The thing that caught my eye was the architecture of the church and it reminded me of St Cecilia’s Catholic church at Cradock which is of similar design, if a little more grand.

It’s astonishing this beautiful building still stands in such an isolated of place. But it was built to withstand the test of time and the workmanship, both inside and out, is meticulous.

St Cecilia’s for a time became the venue for murder mystery nights – a bit of a come down from it’s more holy beginning. Now even the murder mysteries have died off.

Beltana is almost a ghost town these days but, for almost 50 years until the 1920s, it was a hive of activity because of the mining operations there and in the surrounding district. It had a population of around 500.

This is the old Australian Inland Mission which first served as the manse for Reverend John Flynn, the founder of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, in 1911. It was turned into the Mission nursing home in 1919 and continued untll the 1950s.

In the above shot I’ve photographed it as closely as I could to the aspect used by Bruce Swan and over exposed it to try to get an effect similar to his drawings.

Similarly he sketched the rear of the Beltana Hotel, once an imposing 17 room building with a colourful history, that closed as a pub in the 1950s but remaiins in reasonable repair to this day.

And again, this is what the back of the old pub looks like today. I over exposed the shot above to try to get a good comparison with the artist’s drawings.

The former hotel in all its current glory.

He often sketched telling scenes that depicted life on these outposts of civilisation – stockyards, tack rooms, old carts and equipment, even outback racecourses and their dunnies. (Dunny – outside toilet)

This drawing inside a woolshed captures some of the paraphernalia associated with shearing – the wool press, scales and stencils used to label the bales filled with wool.

It’s an interesting sketch because I was trying to achieve the same thing when photographing the Nilpena station woolshed, which today is unused because beef cattle have replaced the sheep..

A couple of months ago I was given a book that has inspired a greater interest for me in the many ruins and old buildings of the Outback.

It’s a collection of drawings, water colour and oil paintings of Outback homesteads, woodsheds and stockyards by South Australian artist Bruce Swann.

It was given to me by his son Phil and it turned out to be a better gift than he could have imagined.

His father was a stock auctioneer who travelled much of Outback Australia with his work. His greatest talent though, was drawing and painting the buildings and structures he saw in his travels. A lot of them have now become disused or ruins, others modernised or pulled down so it’s a good record of a changing world.

From time to time I come across the same buildings Bruce Swann drew decades ago and there’s now a link there for me to work with, for he’s caught the peace and beauty that is often associated with these old buildings or the sense of adversity in what is a hard and arid landscape.

There are at least four books that have been published of Swann’s work and some of his original drawings and painting are among some major collections here and overseas.

From the book “Swann’s Australia” I’ve taken these two water colours of the Nilpena Woolshed along with two of my own photographs.