Qualla: Nappa Merrie

Nappa Merrie: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peterdownunder, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the evening of 21 April 1861, three starving men staggered into a camp on Cooper Creek and found it deserted. Carved into a coolibah tree beside the waterhole was a single word - DIG - and beneath it, buried rations left by a relief party that had ridden out that very morning, hours before. Robert O'Hara Burke, William Wills and John King had walked to the Gulf of Carpentaria and back, and they had missed rescue by a matter of hours. That tree still stands today on Nappa Merrie, a cattle station spread along the Cooper in the far southwest corner of Queensland, where the land runs flat to the South Australian border and the creek is the only reliable water for a hundred miles in any direction.

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Image: Peterdownunder | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nappa Merrie: The Word on the Tree

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hughes, Public domain. The Dig Tree is a coolibah, the kind that lines this stretch of Cooper Creek, and it is believed to be two to three centuries old. On 21 April 1861, William Brahe and his party blazed it before abandoning the depot camp they had held for months, waiting for Burke's group to retur...

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Image: John Hughes | Public domain

Nappa Merrie: The People Who Knew How to Live Here

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hughes, Public domain. Burke and Wills died in a country that had sustained people for tens of thousands of years. The Yandruwandha, whose lands take in this stretch of the Cooper around Innamincka, watched the explorers struggle and offered what the strangers could not find for themselves - fish, seed...

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Image: John Hughes | Public domain

Nappa Merrie: Conrick's Eleven-Month Drive

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hughes, Public domain. In 1873, a colonist named John Conrick brought the first cattle to this country. Barely into his twenties, Conrick set out from Koroit in Victoria with five companions all under the age of 21 and a herd of 1,600 head, guided across the inland by a Wongkumara stockman, Jimmy Bosto...

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Image: John Hughes | Public domain

Nappa Merrie: Flood, Fire, and Gas

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Hughes, Public domain. Life on Nappa Merrie has always been dictated by the Cooper's moods. The creek broke its banks in catastrophic floods in 1950, and bushfires swept the property in late 2011, stripping away the feed that stock depended on. When the airmail service to the remote outback stations be...

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Image: John Hughes | Public domain