Qualla: South Galway Station

South Galway Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1951, with floodwater rising across the Cooper, the owner of South Galway Station did something no stockman on horseback could manage alone: he hired a pilot. A flyer from Trans Australia Airlines brought in a de Havilland Dragon, a fabric-and-plywood biplane, and used it to muster cattle from the air, banking low over the spreading water to push a marooned herd toward higher ground. All but 300 head were saved, sparing the owner 10,000 pounds. It was an audacious answer to an ordinary Channel Country problem, and it captures exactly what kind of place South Galway is: a property where the land itself dissolves into water, and survival means improvising against the flood.

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South Galway Station: Half Land, Half River

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

South Galway stretches across 4,876 square kilometres along Cooper Creek, about 64 kilometres southwest of Windorah and some 275 kilometres east of Birdsville. Its geography is split almost in two. Roughly half the property is flooded river country, threaded by the shallow braide...

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South Galway Station: The Duracks and the First Settlers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

South Galway was among the earliest runs taken up in this remote corner of Queensland, established in 1873 by Patrick and Michael Durack alongside John Costello, names that recur across the pioneering history of the Channel Country. Once known as Galway Downs, it changed hands re...

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South Galway Station: Flood, Fire, and the Year of 1951

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The year of the aerial muster was a brutal one all round. The same biplane heroics that saved the herd were followed, later in 1951, by bushfires that tore through more than a thousand square miles of the station. Stockmen from South Galway stood at the fire front for five days t...

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South Galway Station: A Working Station Still

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today South Galway is owned by the Australian Agricultural Company, one of the oldest pastoral companies in the country, and it remains a working cattle station running flood-fed herds on Cooper Creek country. The fundamentals have not changed since the Duracks rode in. When the ...

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