Qualla: Anna Creek Station

Anna Creek Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leon Stahlkopf, CC BY-SA 4.0. A single cattle property out here is larger than the State of Israel. Anna Creek Station covers roughly 23,677 square kilometres of arid country in the Far North of South Australia, which makes it the largest working cattle station on the planet. To stand at its heart is to be a long way from anywhere: the only township is tiny William Creek, which the station completely surrounds, and the nearest town for freight is the opal-mining outpost of Coober Pedy. The scale is hard to hold in the mind. Anna Creek is more than 8,000 square kilometres bigger than its closest Australian rival, and over seven times the size of the largest ranch in the United States. Yet for all its vastness, this is thin, hard country, and it has always been Arabana land first.

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Image: Leon Stahlkopf | CC BY-SA 4.0

Anna Creek Station: Arabana Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before any lease was drawn on a colonial map, this land belonged to the Arabana people, and in law it belongs to them still. The country around the great salt lake the Arabana have always known, the lake settlers later called Lake Eyre, carries their stories and their water ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Anna Creek Station: Sheep, Dingoes, and a Switch to Cattle

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kerry_Raymond (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. The European story began in January 1863, when Julius Jeffreys, John Warren, and William Bakewell took up the lease from the colonial government and built their first homestead at Strangways Springs. They tried sheep. The land had other ideas. A brutal drought gripped the propert...

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Image: Kerry_Raymond (talk) (Uploads) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anna Creek Station: The Day Canberra Stepped In

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kerry_Raymond (talk) (Uploads), CC BY-SA 3.0. For most of its history Anna Creek was part of the cattle empire of S. Kidman & Co. When that empire came up for sale in 2016, Anna Creek became briefly famous for reasons that had nothing to do with cattle. A Chinese-led consortium moved to buy the Kidman holdings, but Anna Cree...

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Image: Kerry_Raymond (talk) (Uploads) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Anna Creek Station: Mustering an Empire

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CyberneticProject, CC BY-SA 4.0. Running cattle across a property this size demands a different kind of work. In the old days a large crew of stockmen rode the boundaries on horseback, weeks at a time in the saddle, gathering scattered cattle across distances most farms could never imagine. Today the muster is d...

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