IT has been unused for more than 60 years, but the century-old stockman's quarters, hidden away in a central Queensland valley, has been given a new lease on life, thanks to an unlikely source.
A gaggle of musicians from Brisbane and Melbourne have been making an annual pilgrimage for the past six years to convert the sturdy building structured from sawn iron bark into a recording studio.
The connection is Ben Salter, a well-respected singer-songwriter who has firmly put his stamp on the national music scene through his involvement with an array of bands including Giants of Science, The Gin Club and Wilson Pickers.
According to Ben, the idea for a rural recording studio grew out of a Giants of Science album recording at Byron Bay and a mindset that the band could record where they didn't live.
"There was a sense of adventure," he said. "We knew we had a bit of a budget to do our third album and I wanted to go to Prior Park, as I loved it and had visited it regularly since I was 16. We went up there and did the demo and decided to do the tracking, and since then it has been a no-brainer."
Folk-rock outfit The Gin Club, a collective of seven singer-songwriters from Brisbane, have visited five times to record and even put on a gig on the back of a cattle truck one year.
Other well-known artists have also made the trek north, including Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin from rock outfit The Drones, and Mick Thomas from legendary band Weddings Parties Anything.
"The main benefit for us is there are no noise problems other than the noise we make, as the closest house it about 300 metres away," Ben said.
"The inverse of that is in a studio you would have sound-proofing."
The building is open, made up of one main room, a small bedroom, an unused kitchen, and is surrounded by a verandah.
So each trip the musicians bring mattresses and blankets to place against the horizontal pine tongue-in-groove walls, one of which has been eaten through by white ants.
There is the slight issue of the stockman's quarters being right next to the cattle yards, and the annual trip made in winter quite often coincides with weaning. It is not quiet.
"We have a song called In the Valley and there is a line about the cows, and in the background you can hear the cow bellow right on cue," Ben said.
In fact, it is one of those strangled sounds that only a cow recently removed from her calf can make.
"Although we have had problems with the weaners, it's mainly the birds - there are a lot out there and we are nocturnal."
However, that has not been a drawback as The Gin Club has recorded three of their five albums on the property.
What can be an issue for some of the musicians is the distance.
"Getting there is an eight-hour drive from Brisbane, so people from Sydney and Melbourne would think it ludicrous."
For Ben, it is a special place he has visited regularly since the early 1990s.
"The other band members love it and they have really started to develop an attachment to the place, in particular The Gin Club."
This winter, Ben made the trip with Melbourne musicians Adrian Stoyles, Gus Agars and Dan Luscombe, as well as Brisbane sound engineer Murray Paas, to record his second solo album.
He was the recipient of an Arts Council of Australia song-writing grant in 2012-13 that saw him travel throughout Europe and meet up with local and ex-pat musicians.
"The hospitality is amazing and the status accorded to musicians over there is a lot higher. It's not a complaint - just an observation."
Out of that, Ben wrote 30 songs, but released an EP titled European Vacation last year and the rest of the songs he recorded at the property.
The album will come out in February, and he is currently finishing the over-dubs and string arrangements back in Melbourne.
When not recording, Ben plays regular gigs throughout Melbourne.
