Stations

The northwest tip of Tasmania, the tea-tree scrub is all but ironed flat by the prevailing westerly winds. The raw and rugged coast looks as though somebody hacked it out with a blunt knife, and the...

A ring of Akubra hats glows incandescent beneath the overhead light of the Carlton Hill workshop where manager Stirling Fearon meets daily to give morning orders to his 19-strong crew. Beneath each...

As a child, I lived all over the world from Holland and Sweden to Thailand but when I first saw “Mount Bellevue” I knew I’d found somewhere I could really call home,” says...

 The easterly wind hangs heavy with the musty, unmistakable smell of goats a good mile out from Lloyd’s windmill on Wynyangoo Station. At 11am it’s already 40 degrees Celsius in the...

 Opening the cracked leather and vellum-bound volumes that fill the floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the library of Burrundulla homestead is something more than a little incongruous: the boot...

Silvery moonlight recedes on the meandering cattle pads along the Fortescue River as a new day dawns on Mardie Station. The biggest muster of the season lies just beyond daybreak and if you could...

The Sullivan clan reckon they got the best of both worlds when they bought Cave Creek Station in Australia’s famous ‘Never Never’ country in 1990. All three generations –...

Cantaur Park has been on the edge of a monsoon trough playing havoc in far north Queensland for a month. Unlike further north, Cantaur hasn’t been receiving torrential, flooding rain, but the...

With the first crisp whisper of daylight, Emma and Katie Turner climb into the Toyota with their father Scott. There are 900 steers in the yards they’re moving to a new paddock and...

George and Sally Falkiner relax on the balcony of Jackaroo Lodge, enjoying another magical sunset over the Macquarie Marshes with daughters Eleanor, Olivia, Grace and Florence (“Floss”)....

The Pentecost River slides along beneath the Cockburn Range’s softly glowing sandstone cliffs. Sitting on its stony bank as the late afternoon light morphs around him, Nick Bradley thinks about the...

Along the southern border of Arnhem Land, savannah woodland punctuated by rocky escarpments stretches out on both sides of a meandering creek that eventually spills into the Roper River. In this...

After several dozen kilometres of nondescript scrub, the gently curving road to Nockatunga’s Nockabarrara yard reveals a spectacularly red sandhill, the vivid colour contrasting dramatically...

Melaleuca Station was big on natural beauty but going nowhere as a pastoral enterprise when it came up for sale in 1992. Apart from an unfinished homestead and a smattering of broken-down...

Henry Ward is perched on the verandah of the homestead on Western Australia’s Glen-Ayle station, a hand on his ever-present walking stick. A look of contentment flickers over features chiselled...

Ted Fogarty and his wife Kath achieved what most would write off as an impossible dream. They started with nothing in 1962 but have managed to buy a sizeable cattle station for all five children....

Stefano ‘Steve’ DiGiorgio gets back into the Triton after shutting yet another farm gate on Sterita Station. The 70-year-old gazes out over the dry, dusty paddocks, caught in the grip of...

The horses stand resolutely with their tails to the dirty wind, eyes and ears away from the blowing grit. It’s the second dust storm within a week on Kidman’s Glengyle station. “It...

In 19th century Australia, the word ‘home’ had a totally different meaning than it does to contemporary Aussies. ‘Home’ was in a wet country, not a dry one. It was green...

Once upon a few million years ago, during an evolutionary squeeze of the surrounding layers of earth, the Mount Howitt anticline was born. The technicalities are best left to geologists but,...

Dawn on Dunbar Station in Queensland’s Gulf Country. The horse transport – a battered Blitz Buggy hand-painted a decidedly unmilitary red – pulls up on the side of the road and the...

If you’d been born and bred on Monkira Station and never strayed far from the homestead, you could be forgiven for thinking the earth was flat. Apart from the shallow ravine that runs down to...

It is one of the Northern Territory’s most far-flung cattle stations, fringing the Tanami Desert. It’s also a comparative minnow alongside most of its neighbours on the sweeping rangeland...

Hosting 270 people for lunch on Easter Saturday this year was just another busy day in the hectic lives of Will and Narda Roberts. Aided by numerous friends and extended family, the Lord/Roberts...

The vehicle steadily winds its way north towards the station, past groups of cattle sauntering across the road in the darkness, over creeks, up stony hills and through numerous gates. Eventually,...

Anne Paull is a woman of the outback in every sense of the phrase. Alongside husband Geoffrey, she runs 400,000-hectare Noreena Downs in Western Australia’s Pilbara with a calm persistence that...

Wide, green paddocks; fat, red cattle; a big, old homestead with a picket fence; tall trees; numerous sheds; various vehicles – it appears to be a typical well-managed Queensland...

Danny Webb-Smith has always held the belief that if you want something badly enough, and are prepared to work hard, you will win through. After years of work in the bush he never lost sight of his...

Ian Rush has an uncanny mind for details. He can rattle off obscure dates from decades past like they were only yesterday. There was the day of his first job (March 3, 1968), the day he arrived in...