[1] In the late 1880s, the small, former colony settlement of Broome located on Roebuck Bay in the north of Western Australia consisted of two stores and a few scattered houses.

[1] Between 3 and 9 March 1889, the prefabricated ironwork and timber making up the building for the cable station was transported to Broome as deck cargo on the CS Seine.

Due to depth limitations in Roebuck Bay the material was gradually offloaded onto a smaller pearling vessel, which was being sheltered in Broome over the cyclone season.

The sections were then retrieved at low tide, dragged manually up the creek, over the mud and stored on the beach, prior to being transported to the station site and erected on the land now bounded by Frederick, Hamersley, Stewart and Weld Streets.

A comment in the engineer's report stated that "it seemed a pity to treat polished teak in this way, but no other method was practicable and no real harm was done though the appearance suffered a little."

The Chinese people who had collected and loaded the teak in Singapore travelled with it, to erect the house, and it was those labourers who had to cart everything across the mudflats.

Many employees of the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company Limited were recruited at a young age, 15 to 16 years.

Many of the men from the town enlisted and there were fears that the German SMS Emden would raid Broome and destroy the local wireless station (built in 1913 for ship-to-shore communication).

[6] There was little demand for the property when conditions returned to normal after the war; the buildings the government used for justice purposes were no longer adequate and the cable station was acquired for conversion to a courthouse, which opened on 6 September 1921.

The size and fabric of the station were not changed and it stands today in 3 acres of landscaped tropical gardens, a magnificent iron and timber building, as an excellent example of 19th century Colonial Architecture.