Annandale was the first station established in this stretch of far western Queensland, and others followed quickly - Kaliduwarry, Glengyle, the scattered leases of the lower Diamantina and Georgina country. Drinan held it only briefly. He sold to the Collins brothers within a year, and in 1881 they passed it to Edward Wienholt, a prominent pastoralist whose holdings included Katandra, Warenda and Saltern Creek. Each new owner was betting that the Channel Country's floods would come often enough to fatten cattle on its floodplain grasses. It is fertile when the water arrives - the inland rivers spread across plains tens of kilometres wide - but the arrival is never guaranteed, and the gaps between floods can be merciless.

The 'tribal lands' noted in the record belong to the Wanggamala people, whose name is also written Wangkamadla and in older sources as Wongkamala. Their country reached across the eastern margins of the Simpson Desert, around the lower Field and Hay rivers and north toward the Plenty - a homeland they sustained through generations of careful knowledge of where water lingered in a dry land. That connection did not end when the surveyors and graziers arrived. In July 2021 the Wanggamala people won recognition of native title over more than three million hectares west and southwest of Boulia, a legal acknowledgement of an unbroken bond to this country that long predates, and outlasts, any cattle run drawn upon it.

In 1896 Annandale was bought by Sidney Kidman - the man newspapers called the Cattle King - and it holds the distinction of being the first property he ever acquired in Queensland. Kidman built an empire by chaining stations together along the inland stock routes, moving cattle from drought toward water across a private domain that spanned the heart of the continent. But the Channel Country humbled even him. Between 1914 and 1916 a savage drought gripped the region, and around ten thousand cattle died on Annandale alone. Across his properties - Diamantina Lakes, Durham Downs, Innamincka, Sandringham and more - Kidman lost over 75,000 head. Strained financially, he sold Annandale in 1918, when the lease covered some 2,574 square miles.

The numbers tell the story of life on the desert's edge. In the first seven months of 1911, Annandale recorded just 0.18 inches of rain - a figure that reads less like weather than like a drought sentence. Here, cattle are not raised against a steady backdrop of pasture but against the gamble of the inland rivers, which can flood the plains one year and vanish the next. To run stock in this country is to plan for the dry years and live for the wet ones. The station sits roughly 350 kilometres south of Boulia, a measure of just how far it lies from anywhere. Annandale endures as a remote working lease, one of the foundation runs of the Birdsville district, still measuring its fortunes by the rise and fall of water across an enormous, patient land.