Peter Shaw helped with a Morse code condolence to the palace last September on the death of Queen Elizabeth, eschewing the email system hundreds of thousands of others used.

"It's pretty difficult to do these days, since there's only really four people in Australia who can probably do it," he said.

The idea came out of Beechworth, which is home to one of the last stations of its kind, along with its 170 year old Morse code equipment.

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Peter Shaw has a long connection with that station, which he helped revive decades ago to share his now rare set of skills with children and tourists.

He still plugs his own equipment in regularly to receive messages from children visiting Beechworth, all from the receiver in his Eaglehawk home's dining area.

Then Mr Shaw writes out telegrams that can be sent on to their intended recipients, much as he did for Bendigo's post office in Morse code's golden era.

"We don't get very many condolence messages at all - I mean, mostly because the sender's got to be at Beechworth," he said.

"We get a lot of messages from people saying they are having a lovely time, or 'we saw Ned Kelly riding down the street today' and that sort of thing.

"We would do about one and a half thousand telegrams a year."

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Leo Nette and his Beechworth team were the ones who came up with the idea of sending King Charles a condolence message by Morse code and telegram when Queen Elizabeth died back in September.

He received King Charles' gracious reply a few weeks ago in a posted telegram.

Everyone in the Morsecodian Fraternity of Beechworth were "tickled pink", Mr Nette said.

"It gave us all a thrill, it was lovely to use such old technology to correspond like that, that's what we're about really, keeping this method of communication alive," he said.

"A lot of the young ones come in here and have no idea what a rotary dial telephone is, so to see this old apparatus is quite fascinating to them."

People who grew up in Bendigo may remember Mr Shaw and the late Ted Rankins visiting primary schools to teach children about Morse code from the late 1990s onwards.

The pair would send Morse Code messages between grade three and four classrooms.

"We did probably every primary school in Bendigo," Mr Shaw said.

- With The Border Mail

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