The Eyre Telegraph Station is a building on the remote south coast of Western Australia, on the Great Australian Bight.

Built in 1897 of local limestone, it is a substantial one-storey structure, with a wide timber-framed verandah and a corrugated iron roof, that housed a telegraph repeater station on the line between Adelaide, South Australia, and Albany, Western Australia.

Eyre Telegraph Station

It is now within the Nuytsland Nature Reserve, below the Nullarbor Plain escarpment, and is surrounded by mallee woodland and sand dunes. The station is south of Cocklebiddy, close to "Eyre's Sand Patch", the site where explorer Edward John Eyre found water and rested for three weeks in 1841 during his epic 3200 km overland journey along the coast of the Great Australian Bight. The building replaced an earlier and less substantial wooden one built when the telegraph was first constructed in 1875–1877. It would have been manned by a Telegraph Master with one or more assistants.

Eyre Telegraph Station

After operating for 50 years, the telegraph station was closed in 1927, and the building was left to decay for the next 50. In 1977, it was the focus of a restoration program by the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, now BirdLife Australia, with assistance from the Western Australian Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and the Post Office Historical Society, to establish it as the Eyre Bird Observatory, Australia's first. The building is listed on the Australian Register of the National Estate.

Eyre Telegraph Station

See also

Australian telegraphic history

References

External links

Eyre Telegraph Station

Eyre Bird Observatory

Buildings and structures in Western Australia

Nullarbor Plain

History of telecommunications in Australia

1897 establishments in Australia

1927 disestablishments in Australia

Telegraph stations in Australia

Limestone buildings

State Register of Heritage Places in the Shire of Dundas