Qualla: Wellshot Station

Wellshot Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. By 1892, no station anywhere in the world ran more sheep than Wellshot. Not by area, though it had that too, but by sheer animal numbers: nearly half a million head spread across the dry plains south of Ilfracombe. The town itself was originally called Wellshot, because for a time the station simply was the district. To stand where the homestead block once spread is to stand at the centre of one of the great pastoral empires of inland Queensland, a place where water was hunted underground at 3,500 feet, where shearers walked off the job and changed Australian history, and where a flock of thirty thousand ewes once set off on foot for a town seven hundred kilometres away.

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Image: Public domain

Wellshot Station: A Million Acres and a Scottish Name

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Wellshot began in 1872, when Alexander Buchanan took up a million acres of country here. To develop it, he turned to Scottish and New Zealand money, the New Zealand and Australian Land Company, based in Scotland, and the run took its name from a major shareholder's estate near Gl...

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Image: Public domain

Wellshot Station: Where a Union Was Born

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unidentified, Public domain. In 1886, trouble came at shearing time. The shearers refused the conditions their employer offered and walked off. Word spread fast across the surrounding runs, and the men marched on Blackall by way of Portland Downs, Isis Downs and Thornleigh, gathering numbers until more than ...

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Image: Unidentified | Public domain

Wellshot Station: The Great Drove and the Numbers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unidentified, Public domain. The scale of Wellshot in its prime is hard to grasp now. In 1897 the property carried 387,000 merino sheep and produced 5,801 bales of wool in a single clip. When drought bit in the 1890s, the Tibbett brothers performed one of the legendary droves of the era, walking 30,000 ewes ...

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Image: Unidentified | Public domain

Wellshot Station: Life, Death and the Long Decline

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. A station this size was a small world. James Inglis managed it from 1906 to 1925, and his son Eric, who later served with the 11th Light Horse in the First World War, recalled a workforce of jackaroos, an overseer, a bookkeeper, a blacksmith, an engineer, a horse boy, and mustere...

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Image: Public domain