Qualla: Beltana Station https://qualla.com/beltana-station en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:28 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Beltana Station https://qualla.com/beltana-station Beltana Station: Introduction https://qualla.com/beltana-station/ On New Year's Eve 1865, a crowd gathered at Port Augusta to watch something no one in South Australia had seen before: more than a hundred camels being hoisted, one by one, onto the dock. They had come by ship, and with them came thirty-one men from what was then loosely called Afghanistan - cameleers who knew how to coax these animals across waterless country. Their destination was Beltana Station, a vast pastoral lease in the dry rangeland between Lake Torrens and the Flinders Ranges. Here, on land grazed by sheep since 1854, Sir Thomas Elder would build the camel stud that helped unlock the Australian interior.

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/4/d/1/beltana-station-wp/r4d1-beltana-station-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Beltana Station: The Pastoralist's Gamble https://qualla.com/beltana-station/ John Haimes first ran stock on this country in 1854, and the explorer John McDouall Stuart surveyed it the following year. But it was Thomas Elder, taking over the lease in 1862, who turned Beltana into something more than a sheep run. Elder understood a hard truth about the Aust...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/4/d/1/beltana-station-wp/r4d1-beltana-station-the-pastoralists-gamble.mp3 0:06 2 full Beltana Station: The Men Who Walked Beside the Camels https://qualla.com/beltana-station/ The animals were only half the equation. The cameleers - lumped together by white Australians under the catch-all name "Afghans," though they came from across present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond - were the ones whose skill made the camels useful. Elder gave them living q...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/4/d/1/beltana-station-wp/r4d1-beltana-station-the-men-who-walked-beside-the-camels.mp3 0:06 3 full Beltana Station: The Town That Vanished https://qualla.com/beltana-station/ A short way from the station stands Beltana township, and its story is the quieter, sadder counterpoint. Once a real town of nearly four hundred people, it lived off the telegraph, the railway, and the nearby mines. One by one those reasons disappeared. The railway moved its line...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/4/d/1/beltana-station-wp/r4d1-beltana-station-the-town-that-vanished.mp3 0:06 4 full Beltana Station: Still a Working Station https://qualla.com/beltana-station/ Beltana Station itself never died. It still sprawls across roughly 1,574 square kilometres and runs thousands of head of livestock. In 2017 it sold at auction for 8.4 million dollars. The historic homestead is listed on the South Australian Heritage Register, and the camel connec...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/4/d/1/beltana-station-wp/r4d1-beltana-station-still-a-working-station.mp3 0:06 5 full