Category Archives: Historical

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.

Continuing on with Bruce Swann’s work, I was interested to see he’s sketched two historc buildings at Beltana in South Australia’s far north.

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.