I’ve lived on Worlds End Highway, a spit of a road north of Adelaide that leads to a billabong at Worlds End Station. As its name implies, the rugged settlers who named it felt it was as far as anyone should go.

The first day my partner, Jan, and I walked through the stone house in the tiny town of Point Pass, we bought it. Built in 1871, it was derelict from the outside, like a Hollywood set in a dusty town on a highway going to, well, Worlds End.

We had a glimpse of the outside of the property the day before. It was advertised as the ‘Butter Factory.’ Did they once make butter in that big building with the curved roof? From the street it was hard to tell how the buildings were sited.

The front veranda was falling from the building and lay at an angle. The long green painted fence was giving way to rust (it still is). A taste of expert masonry on one side wall led into the property from the fence. We knew there were more buildings and land. Importantly, the price met our budget. When we inquired at the real estate office, the agent said, ‘The Butter Factory? It’s magical.’

That December day was at the apex of an eight-year drought. Dry and crisp and thirsty. At the south of the state of South Australia, the Murray River barely trickled to the fragile Coorong Lagoon and out to sea. Contingency plans were proposed to somehow block salt water from the Southern Ocean flowing back up the mouth of the river and destroying the already damaged ecosystem. Farmers were hurting. But along the highway we had seen rolls of hay scattered throughout the fields, wheat cropped close to the ground and scatterings of sheep in pastures. Native bushes and trees had turned their leaves grey side up and everything was waiting for rain.

Time lengthened as we investigated room after room. It would have been a comfortable house when it was built. The main building consisted of six rooms, stone walls covered in plaster. The next building was the kitchen, ample sized, and connected by a passageway. Through the kitchen, two steps took us to another passageway, then into a courtyard.

A series of rooms of faded blue ran along a veranda, each with a door opening into a charming English garden. Dappled sunlight filtered onto a statue of a maiden pouring water amongst a few trees and a sprinkling of pink flowers.

Turning around I caught my breath on seeing the extraordinary stonework of the structure built on the end of the residence. Skilled workers had hauled and cut blocks of stone that had been raised and fitted, clearly as an eye-catching feature. The stonework continued on the long north wall, more than three metres high. Terracotta, burnt umber, sienna, with stripes of dark or light and blotches of yellows, some blocks a metre long and half a metre high. Inside was a large room.

This was when I took a few excited-panicky breaths. The rooms, the garden, the kitchen and the hall were perfect as a retreat. For a few years we had been running a meditation-yoga centre in Semaphore, a beach town in the western suburbs of Adelaide. Regularly we had brought groups for retreat weekends in the nearby Clare Valley and were looking for a permanent facility.

I looked around. It would need significant renovations.

What had the property been used for?