Qualla: Bexley Station

Bexley Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1950 the floodwaters that swept across Bexley Station drove the snakes indoors. By the time the family had finished, twenty-seven of them had been counted in the homestead alone. It is the kind of detail that captures life on a sheep station north of Longreach, where the country can be generous and merciless in the same season. Established before 1890 and still a working pastoral lease today, Bexley has measured out more than a century in wool bales, dry paddocks, and the occasional disaster that the outback delivers without warning.

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Image: Public domain

Bexley Station: Fire at the Beginning

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Bexley began under hard conditions. Edward Goddard Blume took up the property some time before 1890, and almost at once the country tested him: the paddocks burned out that same year, destroying most of the feed and some of the fencing before the station had properly found its fe...

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Image: Public domain

Bexley Station: Changing Hands on the Plains

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Blume held Bexley for nearly half a century. When he finally sold in 1939, the transaction itself told a story of how these vast leases were carved and kept: he passed roughly 39,800 acres, completely unstocked, to T. Scanlan, while holding back the 44,215-acre Yanburra portion f...

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Image: Public domain

Bexley Station: Weather That Makes the History

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. On the outback plains the weather is not background; it is the main character. The 1950 flood and its plague of snakes were one chapter, the brown waters pushing every living thing toward the high ground of the house. Another came in November 2001, when a single storm dumped 200 ...

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Image: Public domain

Bexley Station: Still a Working Run

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. What makes Bexley remarkable is precisely that it is not remarkable, that it simply kept going. There is no grand homestead in the heritage registers here, no famous owner, only the unbroken thread of a pastoral lease worked through fire, flood, and drought for more than a centur...

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Image: Public domain