Qualla: Clifton Hills Station

Clifton Hills Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a place in the South Australian outback so large that, after Anna Creek down the road, no cattle station on the planet is bigger. Clifton Hills sprawls across roughly 16,500 square kilometres of the Channel Country, the largest single holding on the entire Birdsville Track. It is bigger than some countries, and yet for most of the year it is a place of dust, gibber, and silence, waiting, like everything in this country, for the water to come down from the north.

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Clifton Hills Station: Where Three States' Rivers End

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Clifton Hills lies about 132 kilometres south of Birdsville and 200 kilometres northwest of Innamincka, taking in part of the Sturt Stony Desert. On its edge sits Goyder Lagoon, one of the great inland sinks of Australia, where the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek finally exhaust ...

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Clifton Hills Station: A Century of Cattle and Floods

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The station was established in 1876, and its history reads as a ledger of vast herds and bigger weather. In 1881, 1,000 cattle were overlanded in from Aramac Station in Queensland; by 1891 the run carried 14,000 head across 4,000 square miles. Floods punctuate the record like exc...

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Clifton Hills Station: The Truck That Changed the Track

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1960, under owner Hector Brooks, Clifton Hills made a small piece of transport history. Brooks was the first to send cattle to the Gepps Cross market in Adelaide using the new "beef roads" idea, loading a consignment of 53 bullocks onto a truck and driving them down the Birdsv...

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Clifton Hills Station: Still the Second Largest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Clifton Hills came up for sale in 2018, reportedly for the first time in 60 years, it was described as the second-largest cattle station on Earth: 16,510 square kilometres, an estimated 18,000 head of organically certified cattle, and a licence for up to 21,500. Late that ye...

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