Qualla: Toorale Station

Toorale Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a century and a half the measure of this land was wool. Toorale Station, sprawling across the junction of the Warrego and Darling rivers, was a place counted in bales and fleeces - 265,000 sheep shorn in a single season, 81,000 pushed over the boards by two dozen shearers in a nine-week marathon. Then in 2008 the counting changed. Governments bought the station not to work it but to undo it, demolishing century-old dams so the water it had hoarded could run back into a dying river. Toorale is now a place measured in megalitres returned and in something far older than any pastoral lease: more than fifty thousand years of human presence on this Country.

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Toorale Station: Where Two Rivers Meet

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Toorale lies about 65 kilometres southwest of Bourke, in the dry heart of far western New South Wales, wrapped around the spot where the Warrego River empties into the Darling. This is Kurnu-Baakandji Country, and it has been for an immensely long time. Archaeological work has lo...

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Toorale Station: The Wool Empire

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pastoral story began in 1857, and the bones of it still stand: a shearing shed raised in 1873, where generations of shearers bent over the same boards. By 1880 the station belonged to Sir Samuel Wilson, and later to Samuel McCaughey, a giant of the wool industry who held it u...

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Toorale Station: Australia's Biggest Birdbath

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 2008 the Darling was in trouble, and Toorale held water the river needed. When the federal and New South Wales governments paid 24 million dollars for the station and its water licences - more than 25,000 megalitres of them - some critics scoffed, calling it a waste of money a...

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Toorale Station: Letting the Water Go

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Toorale National Park was declared in 2010, with a larger conservation area alongside it, and the slow work of dismantling a century of engineering began. Old dams have been modified or removed to push more water past, down the Warrego and into the Darling, reviving floodplains t...

Read more: Toorale Station on Qualla