Long before any lease was drawn on a colonial map, this land belonged to the Arabana people, and in law it belongs to them still. The country around the great salt lake the Arabana have always known, the lake settlers later called Lake Eyre, carries their stories and their water knowledge. In 2012 the Federal Court formally recognised Arabana native title over more than 68,000 square kilometres, an area taking in Anna Creek and the lake itself. The determination affirmed Arabana rights to use the natural waters of the determination area and to share and exchange traditional resources across it. The pastoral lease and that native title now sit over the same ground, two systems of belonging laid one atop the other, the older one reaching back tens of thousands of years.

The European story began in January 1863, when Julius Jeffreys, John Warren, and William Bakewell took up the lease from the colonial government and built their first homestead at Strangways Springs. They tried sheep. The land had other ideas. A brutal drought gripped the property between 1864 and 1866, and dingoes harried the flocks relentlessly until the owners gave up on wool and turned to cattle instead. That decision shaped everything that followed. Cattle could range across the saltbush plains and gibber flats in a way sheep never could, and the station settled into the rhythm it keeps to this day, its herd swelling and collapsing with the desert's violent cycles of flood and drought.

For most of its history Anna Creek was part of the cattle empire of S. Kidman & Co. When that empire came up for sale in 2016, Anna Creek became briefly famous for reasons that had nothing to do with cattle. A Chinese-led consortium moved to buy the Kidman holdings, but Anna Creek lies inside the Woomera weapons-testing range, and Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison blocked the foreign sale in the national interest. The standoff was resolved in December 2016 when the South Australian family firm Williams Cattle Company bought Anna Creek for an estimated sixteen million dollars, while the rest of the Kidman empire passed to a consortium led by mining magnate Gina Rinehart. With one purchase the Williams family doubled the area they held under pastoral lease.

Running cattle across a property this size demands a different kind of work. In the old days a large crew of stockmen rode the boundaries on horseback, weeks at a time in the saddle, gathering scattered cattle across distances most farms could never imagine. Today the muster is done from the air and the saddle of a motorbike: light aircraft spot the mobs from above and ringers on trail bikes push them in, a far smaller workforce covering far more ground. The herd itself rises and falls dramatically with the seasons. In the drought-stricken 2000s the station carried as few as 1,500 head; after the floods of 2010 refilled the country it climbed past 10,000, and in good seasons it can run upward of 16,500 head across its endless paddocks. Scattered through that immensity stand reminders of an earlier age, the heritage-listed ruins of the Strangways Springs and Peake telegraph stations, relics of the line that once carried messages across the continent's red heart.