Qualla: Cowarie Station

Cowarie Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Sharon Oldfield's husband Grant died, she was left with a cattle station on one of the loneliest roads in Australia and three children aged eight, five and two. A former Sydney nurse who had once come to the outback chasing a backpacker's daydream of being a cowgirl, she stayed, learned the country, and ran Cowarie so well that in 1999 she won a national award for it. She was carrying on a tradition older than she knew: at Cowarie, it is often the women who hold the reins.

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Cowarie Station: Where the Rivers Become One

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cowarie sits in the far northeast of South Australia, 216 kilometres north of Marree and 225 kilometres southwest of Birdsville, strung along the legendary Birdsville Track. It occupies a remarkable piece of hydrology. Here the Diamantina River meets the Mulligan, and out of that...

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Cowarie Station: A Hill Called Cowarie

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The lease was first granted on the very last day of 1875, a 21-year term taken up by William Benjamin Rounsevell over an area of around 400 square miles. The name comes from a nearby hill, an Aboriginal word for a marsupial rat once common in the area. Cowarie was among the first...

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Cowarie Station: The Oldfield Line

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Oldfield family has held Cowarie since 1940, when Claude and Dora Oldfield bought the lease, and five generations have worked it since. Sharon, the third generation to run it, took the reins under the hardest circumstances and made conservation central to the operation; her 1...

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Cowarie Station: Heat From a Thousand Metres Down

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not far from the homestead lies Mirra Mitta Bore, sunk in 1903 as part of a government scheme to space watering points along the Birdsville-Marree stock route so droving herds could survive the crossing. The bore reaches more than 1,000 metres into the Great Artesian Basin, and a...

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