To understand the courthouse, you have to picture the river as it was. In the 1880s the Darling carried a steady traffic of paddle steamers, and Bourke sat near the head of it as a major inland port. Wool came overland from stations hundreds of kilometres away, hauled in by bullock teams, horse teams and strings of camels, then loaded onto barges and shipped downriver toward the railheads and the coast. The traffic was extraordinary for so dry a country: by 1890 there were at least 170 steamers working the roughly 5,600 kilometres of the Murray-Darling system that was navigable. The original bridge across the Darling at Bourke even had an opening span built into it, so the tall vessels could pass through. River trade brought money, ambition, and the legal machinery to govern it - including, eventually, the maritime jurisdiction that makes this landlocked courthouse unique in the country.

The building that stands today is the third courthouse Bourke has had, raised between 1897 and 1900 at a cost of 9,596 pounds. Its design is credited to George Oakeshott, working under the New South Wales Government Architect Walter Liberty Vernon, and it was built by J. Douglas of Orange. The style is Federation Free - confident, eclectic, a little theatrical - and it was deliberately adapted to the punishing climate of the far west. The central courtroom dominates the composition, its importance announced by a corner turret, the whole thing assembled from rough-cast render and face brick beneath hipped roofs of slate.

Look closer and the building reveals how carefully it was made for where it stands. Bourke summers are brutal, and the courthouse answers them with architecture rather than machinery. Covered walkways run between its scattered pavilions, throwing shade across the routes people walked. An enclosed garden court sits at its heart, drawing air and offering relief from the glare. The composition breaks into several pavilions of different scales precisely so that air can move around and between them. It is a public building that takes the climate as seriously as the law - a design philosophy of verandahs and sheltered courtyards that defined the best Federation buildings of the dry interior.

The river trade faded as railways pushed further inland and the steamers fell silent, but the courthouse endured. It was restored in 1968, and its courtroom bench seating renewed in 2010 - a project that drew some local outrage at the time, a reminder that people in Bourke still feel a fierce ownership of the building. It remains in service for the justice it was built to dispense. Today it is recognised as one of the finest Federation Free style public buildings in Australia and a defining landmark of Bourke's streetscape, listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register in 1999. It stands as a monument to a vanished moment - the years when an outback town on a brown river believed it would be a great inland city, and built accordingly.