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Wollogorang Station is a pastoral lease that operates as a cattle station straddling the border the Northern Territory and Queensland.
Contents
Location
The property is situated approximately 124 kilometres (77 mi) north west of Doomadgee and 180 kilometres (112 mi) west of Burketown. The homestead overlooks Settlement Creek. It has approximately 50 miles (80 km) of frontage onto the Gulf of Carpentaria.
The property is bordered by the Pungalina-Seven Emu Sanctuary and Calvert Hills Station to the west, the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north, the Queensland border to the east and the Waanyi-Garawa Aboriginal Land Trust to the south.
Description
Several watercourses flow through the property including Branch Creek, Settlement Creek, Gold Creek and Running Creek.
Wollogorang occupies an area of 7,057 square kilometres (2,725 sq mi). and is able to carry more than 40,000 head of cattle.
History
The name Wollogorang in the local Indigenous Australian peoples language means Happy running waters, the name comes from Settlement Creek which runs through the property.
The first Europeans to visit the area was the Ludwig Leichhardt expedition from Queensland to Port Essington in 1845. The lease for the landholding was established in 1881 by the Chisholm family who had come from Wollogorang house near Goulburn. Initially established and stocked in 1883 the property boasts the longest continuous occupation of any property in the Northern Territory as, unlike others, it has never been abandoned since it was first settled. The Anning family purchased the property in 1895 for £3000 after the station manager, Harry Shadforth, had been speared by Aborigines.
Copper was discovered on the property in 1899.
The Annings sold the property in about 1906.
In 2007 a Filipino worker, Pablo Balading, arrived in Australia on a 457 visa to commence work on Amungee Mungee Station. Instead he was taken to Wollogorang where he worked as a farm hand. Balading was harassed by his Australian workmates until he was killed when he fell from a vehicle speeding down a dirt road on the property. He died shortly afterward and his family was left without any compensation or information on to what had caused his death.
The owner in 2006 was Paul Zlotkowskis who had placed it on the market for A$40 million in 2008.