The building dates to 1897, raised from local limestone to house a repeater station on the telegraph line strung along the coast of the Great Australian Bight between Adelaide and Albany. Telegraph signals weaken over distance, so repeater stations like this one received the faint clicks of Morse code and sent them onward, fresh and strong. It replaced a flimsier weatherboard structure that had stood since the line was first built in 1875 to 1877. A Telegraph Master and one or two assistants lived and worked here, tapping out the news of a young nation in one of the loneliest postings imaginable, where the nearest neighbours lay days away across the plain.

The station stands close to a place that earned its name in desperation. In 1841 the explorer Edward John Eyre struggled along this coast on an overland crossing of some 3,200 kilometres, one of the most punishing journeys in the history of Australian exploration. Near here he found fresh water seeping at a spot now called Eyre's Sand Patch and rested for three weeks, the soak quite possibly saving his life. The telegraph station, the observatory it became, and the highway far above all carry Eyre's name. He passed through a country that nearly destroyed him; the maps have remembered him ever since.

The station worked for half a century before history moved on without it. In 1927 the telegraph line was shifted some 150 kilometres north to follow the new Trans-Australian Railway, and the limestone house was abandoned to the wind and salt. For the next fifty years it decayed quietly, too remote to be looted, too solid to fall down. Its very isolation, and the shelter of the dunes against the Southern Ocean, kept it standing where lesser stations crumbled to nothing. A building can outlast the reason it was built, if it is lonely enough and made of the right stone.

Rescue came in 1977, exactly fifty years after the silence began. Volunteers from the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, now BirdLife Australia, restored the old house with help from the Western Australian Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and the Post Office Historical Society, and turned it into the Eyre Bird Observatory, the first such observatory in Australia. It sits within the Nuytsland Nature Reserve, ringed by mallee woodland and dunes, and offers simple accommodation to those who make the rough journey in. The setting is extraordinary for birdlife: well over two hundred species have been recorded across this stretch of coast. A relay station for human messages became a place to listen, instead, for birds.