Midnight Oil House

A few kilometres north of Burra on the Barrier Highway, a solitary stone farmhouse stands in open paddocks — instantly familiar to anyone who owned Australian records in the late 1980s. Photographed by landscape photographer Ken Duncan, the house became the cover of Midnight Oil's 1987 album Diesel and Dust, home of Beds Are Burning, and has since become one of the country's most photographed ruins.

The house sits on private farmland at the spot known as Cobb & Co Corner, so it cannot be visited up close — but it photographs beautifully from the roadside, especially in early morning or late afternoon light when the paddocks turn gold.

It is a two-minute detour when leaving Burra northbound, and a fitting postscript to the town's story of boom, bust and abandonment told in Cornwall in the outback.