Earlier this year, we had a road trip in WA, and the furtherest east we got to was Bremer Bay, at the end of a frayed tarmac road running through scrub for 60km.

It was a place so remote it felt like the edge of nowhere – road signs pointing east pointed to Esperance and to Eucla, almost on the border with South Australia. Otherwise nothing but sea and scrub.

One day when we were there we had lunch in the Telegraph Cafe, which is an old stone building dating from 1896 that was a telegraph relay station on the East West Telegraph line which connected Western Australia to the eastern colonies, and by extension, to the outside world.

The building that is now the cafe isn’t the first telegraph station on the site. The first wooden building dated from the 1870s, and was replaced by today’s substantial stone building in 1896 after it burned down.

Remember that in the 1870s there was no east west railway line, and no road to speak of across the desert, and the only communication with eastern Australia was by ship.

Mail went at the speed of a steamship. Western Australia was isolated, surrounded by desert on one side and the ocean on the other, and very much a world of its own.

The East West Telegraph changed that. The colony was no longer isolated.

And ending that isolation was partly due to Mary Wellstead.

Mary Wellstead with her husband in the 1880s – Wikipedia

When the Bremer Bay telegraph station was commissioned in 1876 there were no staff to man it.

Mary’s father worked on the construction of the line, and when no men were available to man the new station Mary was trained in telegraphy and morse code by James Coates Fleming, then the Superintendent of telegraphs for the colony.

Fleming was confident enough of her abilities to appoint her as temporary Station Master – today we would say Station Manager – until the arrival of a male team of telegraphists the following year, making Mary Wellstead possibly the first female telegraphist in Australia, and almost certainly the first female telegraph station manager.

After her replacement by a male manager, Mary continued to work at the station until she married in 1881 – in these days, as it was until the 1960s, women were expected to leave professional and government jobs when they married.

However, should you find yourself in Bremer Bay, remember Mary Wellstead, a woman who broke the glass ceiling by simply doing her job and doing it well.