The church began with a problem and a gift. Services in Barcaldine had been held in the court house until 1898, when a £250 bequest from England, the Marriott bequest, set a building fund in motion. Edwin Hockings of Rockhampton drew the plans with input from Archdeacon George Halford. Then a severe fire tore through nearby Longreach in October 1898, driving up the cost of labour and materials, so the church was built in two stages to save money. The first stage gave Barcaldine a sanctuary, chancel and short nave, and St Peter's was dedicated on 28 October 1899, the feast of St Simon and St Jude, before it was even quite finished. The nave was extended and a baptistery, porch and turret added in 1913, completing the building the town had started fourteen years earlier.

The Brotherhood of St Andrew was created by the first Bishop of Rockhampton to solve an impossible problem: how to provide pastoral care across a diocese that was enormous, sparsely settled and chronically poor. The answer was a band of unmarried clergymen who lived simply and travelled constantly. Aramac, Ilfracombe and Barcaldine were among their first charges. The Brothers came over from Longreach and spent a month at a time here, sleeping in the vestry and eating at the hotel. The cost of that ministry was real. A memorial in the church remembers Guy Roxby, the first Brother to die in service, killed by typhoid in 1913. Hulton-Sams, the boxing parson, was killed in France in 1915 while carrying water to wounded soldiers. These were not comfortable churchmen. They were missionaries to their own frontier.

Step inside and the furnishings tell a story of a congregation reaching back to the old country. The lectern is a copy of the one in Exeter Cathedral, carved and donated by a man from Ilfracombe in Devon. The stone font was the gift of children from Archdeacon Halford's old English parish of St Peter, Jarrow-on-Tyne, its inscription offering it 'to the Glory of God' from one St Peter's to another half a world away. Stained-glass memorial windows above the altar depict the Ascension and scenes from the life of St Peter. Rarest of all is the open timber rood screen dividing nave from chancel, its six posts hung with heraldic shields and linked by Gothic tracery. It is believed to be the only screen of its kind in western Queensland.

The church was always more than a place to pray. Its parish hall housed the first secondary school in western Queensland between 1909 and 1911, a venture that took both boys and girls when that was far from assumed, and a succession of church schools followed until the hardship of the 1930s finally closed them. From 1964 to 1969 the Reverend Frank Neubecker ran an Anglican Far Western Mission from here, reaching outlying stations in a light plane he named the Saint Michael. As the rural economy turned in the 1980s the congregation thinned; by 1990 the parish could no longer afford its own priest, and worship is now led by lay preachers. Yet little about the building has changed, and after more than a century it remains exactly what it was built to be: the spiritual and social anchor of a town on the edge of the dry country.