Cowarie Station most commonly known as Cowarie is a

pastoral lease A pastoral lease, sometimes called a pastoral run, is an arrangement used in both Australia and New Zealand where government-owned Crown land is leased out to graziers for the purpose of livestock grazing on rangelands. Australia Pastoral lease ...

that operates as a

cattle station In Australia and New Zealand, a cattle station is a large farm ( station is equivalent to the American ranch), the main activity of which is the rearing of cattle. The owner of a cattle station is called a '' grazier''. The largest cattle stati ...

in north east

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

. The property is located north of Marree and south west of

Birdsville Birdsville is a rural town and locality in the Shire of Diamantina, Queensland, Australia. In the the locality of Birdsville had a population of 110 people. It is a popular tourist destination with many people using it as a starting point acro ...

. The

Diamantina River The Diamantina River is a major river located in Central West Queensland and the far north of South Australia. The river was named by William Landsborough in 1866 for Lady Diamantina Bowen (née Roma), wife of Sir George Bowen, the first Govern ...

merges with the Mulligan River on Cowarie forming the

Warburton River The Warburton River (or Warburton Creek) is a freshwater stream in the far north of South Australia that flows in a south westerly direction and discharges into the eastern side of Lake Eyre. It is one of the state's largest rivers, and is part ...

which continues to flow to the south west and into

Lake Eyre Lake Eyre ( ), officially known as Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre, is an endorheic lake in east-central Far North South Australia, some north of Adelaide. The shallow lake is the depocentre of the vast endorheic Lake Eyre basin, and contains the ...

History

The lease was initially granted for 21 years to William Benjamin Rounsevell starting on the last day of 1875, covering an area of and named Cowarie after a nearby hill. The name is Aboriginal in origin and is the name for

marsupial Marsupials are any members of the mammalian infraclass Marsupialia. All extant marsupials are endemic to Australasia, Wallacea and the Americas. A distinctive characteristic common to most of these species is that the young are carried in a po ...

rat common to the area. Many other leases in the area were also soon taken up leading to much greater traffic along the Birdsville track and a

post office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...

opened at Cowarie in 1877.

Sidney Kidman Sir Sidney Kidman (9 May 18572 September 1935), known as Sid Kidman and popularly named "the Cattle King", was an Australian pastoral farming, pastoralist and entrepreneur who owned or co-owned large areas of land in Australia in his lifetime. ...

in partnership with his brother Sackville acquired Cowarie in 1895, the first property acquired by the Kidmans who went on to build the largest cattle empire seen in Australia. The station was managed by Sharon Oldfield in 1999 and occupied an area of . The same year Oldfield won the commonwealth Bank Ibis award for rural productivity in recognition of her work with wildlife management and conservation on the property. In 2009 the station was running a mixture of

shorthorn The Shorthorn breed of cattle originated in the North East of England in the late eighteenth century. The breed was developed as dual-purpose, suitable for both dairy and beef production; however, certain blood lines within the breed always emp ...

and

Santa Gertrudis cattle The Santa Gertrudis is an American list of cattle breeds, breed of beef cattle. It is a taurine-indicine hybrid breed, descended from both zebu and European cattle. It was bred in the early twentieth century in Texas, and received official recog ...

which benefitted from the floodwaters flowing down the Diamantina River that reached the station that year.

Mirra Mitta Bore

The bore was sunk in 1903 as part of the

governments A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...

plan to sink bores along the Birdsville-Marree stock route in order to provide a permanent water supply. The bore is over deep and is popular stopping place along the

Birdsville Track The Birdsville Track is a notable outback road in Australia. The track runs between Birdsville in south-western Queensland and Marree, a small town in the north-eastern part of South Australia. It traverses three deserts along the route, the St ...

. The bore site consists of a horizontal pipe from a borehead discharging hot

artesian water An artesian aquifer is a confined aquifer containing groundwater under positive pressure. An artesian aquifer has trapped water, surrounded by layers of impermeable rock or clay, which apply positive pressure to the water contained within th ...

in a circular pond about in diameter. The waters then flow along a bore drain.

References

{{Coord, 27.70203, S, 138.33585, E, type:landmark_region:AU-SA, display=title Stations (Australian agriculture) Pastoral leases in South Australia Far North (South Australia) 1875 establishments in Australia

History

Mirra Mitta Bore

See also

References