Qualla: Wooleen Station

Wooleen Station: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In February 1890, a shepherd named Templeton walked out into the Murchison heat and did not come back. He was found 80 kilometres west of the Wooleen homestead, dead of thirst alongside about 1,100 sheep, a note beside his body describing the predicament that killed him. The district got good rain a few days later, too late for any of them. That cruelty is the founding truth of this country: a land of mulga scrub and red dirt that gives perhaps 210 millimetres of rain in a year, and not reliably even that. More than a century later, on the same hard ground, two people would gamble everything on a very different way of living with it.

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Wooleen Station: A Lease the Size of a Small Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wooleen Station was established in 1886, first selected the following year by James Sharpe and David McWhinney, in the Murchison region roughly 680 kilometres north of Perth. It is enormous and lonely. The lease covers around 152,000 hectares of mulga and chenopod shrubland, thre...

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Wooleen Station: The Cost of a Century of Grazing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

That century of hard grazing came at a price the land could not keep paying. Across the southern rangelands, generations of sheep, and later feral goats and swelling kangaroo numbers, stripped the country faster than it could recover. The perennial grasses thinned. Topsoil blew a...

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Wooleen Station: Taking the Stock Off

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2007, David Pollock and his partner Frances Jones took the reins, and made a decision that startled the district: they destocked the land entirely. For about four years they ran no commercial livestock at all, even switching off windmills and watering points to discourage the ...

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Wooleen Station: The Country Answers Back

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Slowly, the land replied. Perennial grasses and shrubs unseen for years began to return, and along the rivers, species like river red gum and swamp she-oak started to regenerate where almost nothing had grown for a century. David Pollock told the story in his 2019 book, The Woole...

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