Wollogorang Station

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Wollogorang Station is a large cattle property on the border between the Northern Territory and Queensland in Australia. It sits about 124 kilometres northwest of Doomadgee and 180 kilometres west of Burketown. Settlement Creek runs through the homestead, and the station has about 50 miles of frontage on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is surrounded by the Pungalina-Seven Emu Sanctuary, Calvert Hills Station, the Gulf, the Queensland border and the Waanyi-Garawa Aboriginal Land Trust. Several creeks flow through the property, including Branch Creek, Settlement Creek, Gold Creek and Running Creek. The area covers 7,057 square kilometres and can carry more than 40,000 cattle. Wollogorang also contains an Important Bird Area. The name means “Happy running waters” in the local Indigenous language, a reference to Settlement Creek.

The first Europeans to visit the area were part of Ludwig Leichhardt’s expedition in 1845. The land was leased in 1881 by the Chisholm family, who had links to Wollongorang House near Goulburn. The station was stocked in 1883 and is said to have the longest continuous occupation of any property in the Northern Territory, having never been abandoned. The Anning family bought Wollogorang in 1895 after the station manager was speared. Copper was discovered in 1899, and the Annings sold the property about 1906.

In 1966 an American, A. L. Standberry, bought the station, followed by Paul Zlotkowski in the late 1960s and then Bela Csidei a few years later. After Csidei was arrested on drug charges in 1978, Zlotkowski bought the property back from its liquidator. In 2007 a Filipino worker, Pablo Balading, arrived to work at Wollogorang but died in an accident on the property; three years later the company was fined for a unsafe workplace. Zlotkowski was still the owner in 2006 and tried to sell the station for about A$40 million in 2008. It finally sold in 2015 to Chinese businessman Xingfa Ma, and in 2020 the McMillan family of Cloncurry became the owners.