100 years ago it was Australia's northern capital. Now it's a ghost town

In an abandoned hotel in the Northern Territory ghost town of Newcastle Waters, Wayne Kraft says he can hear the walls talk.

Walking through the building, he imagines the patrons and staff occupying what was once the only pub for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

"It's the pub with no beer," he says from the front bar, a stubby from home in hand.

Today Newcastle Waters is a humble collection of deserted buildings and tin sheds, but imagine an alternate reality where the town is not only alive, but thriving as the capital of North Australia.

How did this community rise to have the status of a capital city, before entering terminal decline?

In 1926, the NT was still governed by the federal government in Canberra, which felt the best way to run its most far-flung jurisdiction was to split it in two.

Alice Springs would be the capital of Central Australia, and Newcastle Waters would take the crown off Darwin and become the new capital of the north.

This made sense for two reasons, according to Mr Kraft, an amateur historian from Alice Springs.

There was no road access to Darwin, and the city was generally accessed by sea.

And Newcastle Waters was already a hive of activity, due to the famous Overland Telegraph Line located nearby and the stock routes that converged on the settlement.

"I've walked in here on my own and I can hear the walls talk, go into the kitchen and just visualise people, the ladies cooking with their long gowns," says Mr Kraft, known as Krafty.

"There's big mobs of cattle moving through here. I can only visualise what it would have been like."

The town was built on the edge of a cattle station of the same name, which still operates today. At its peak Newcastle Waters was a vital stop for drovers taking thousands of cattle from as far as Western Australia's Kimberley on a 1,500-kilometre journey to Queensland.

A small school remains for Aboriginal communities in the region, but there are no residents.