Qualla: Banjawarn Station

Banjawarn Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Banjawarn is the kind of place a person goes to disappear. The station sprawls across more than 400,000 hectares of mulga scrub and saltbush on the edge of the Great Victoria Desert, 350 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, with four creeks, a few waterholes, and not much else for a hundred kilometres in any direction. For most of the twentieth century it ran sheep and then cattle, an ordinary if enormous pastoral lease. Then, for a single year in 1993, Banjawarn was bought by a Japanese doomsday cult, and one of the loneliest properties in Australia became one of the most sinister.

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Banjawarn Station: A Working Run in Empty Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Banjawarn's story begins long before any of that. In 1928 the Warren brothers held the lease and ran a flock of a thousand sheep across the wanderrie grass and saltbush. The land is harsh but not lifeless: gum trees and mulga trace the watercourses, and lake systems hold water wh...

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Banjawarn Station: The Cult Comes to the Outback

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In April 1993, a man named Kiyohide Hayakawa arrived in Western Australia. He was the second-in-command of Aum Shinrikyo, and on his sect's behalf he purchased Banjawarn. Officially the group had come prospecting for uranium and praised the local ore, though some of those notes a...

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Banjawarn Station: What the Investigators Found

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two years later the world understood. On 20 March 1995, Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, killing thirteen people and injuring thousands of commuters on their way to work. In the investigation that followed, Australian Federal Police examined Banjawarn a...

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Banjawarn Station: The Banjawarn Bang

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is one more mystery here, still unsolved. On the night of 28 May 1993, while the cult held the lease, a powerful seismic event shook the region. Witnesses reported a fireball in the sky and a long, low rumble; the shockwave registered with the force of a small explosion. Wh...

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