Qualla: Tanbar Station

Tanbar Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In March 1949, floodwater closed in around Tanbar Station and would not leave. For more than a month the homestead and its neighbours were islands in a brown inland sea, the roads gone, the only lifeline aircraft dropping food from above. That story tells you almost everything about this place. Tanbar is a pastoral lease in the Channel Country of south-western Queensland, set along the channels of Cooper Creek about 87 kilometres south-west of Windorah, and its entire fortune rises and falls with water that arrives from somewhere far over the horizon. It is a property measured not in paddocks but in thousands of square kilometres.

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Tanbar Station: A Long Line of Owners

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Tanbar's history is a procession of pastoralists chasing good seasons. The run was taken up some time before 1884 by John Costello, who sold it almost at once to the partnership of Armitage and Gillately. In 1886 the country enjoyed a fine year, six inches of rain falling in unde...

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Tanbar Station: A Speck on the Cooper

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Place Tanbar on a map and the scale of the isolation comes into focus. It lies in the Shire of Barcoo, about 87 kilometres south-west of Windorah, the nearest town of any size, and some 240 kilometres north-east of Innamincka, away across the South Australian line. Cooper Creek d...

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Tanbar Station: Living by the Flood

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. On the Cooper, a station's stocking rate is a wager on rain that may not fall for years. In a good year the floodplains green up and the country fattens cattle as well as anywhere in Australia. In a poor one, the herd has to be cut back hard. In 2002, deep in drought, Tanbar carr...

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Tanbar Station: An Operation at Continental Scale

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Today Tanbar is vast even by outback standards, a holding of about 8,300 square kilometres, or roughly 1.02 million hectares, strung along the Cooper Creek channels. For years it belonged to the Western Grazing Company, which had acquired it from the Stanbroke Pastoral Company in...

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Image: Public domain