Three thousand square kilometres of saltbush and limestone, and at the centre of it a brick homestead with three bedrooms and a couple of cottages for the people who keep the whole thing running. That is Arubiddy Station, a working sheep run flung out across the Nullarbor Plain so far from anywhere that the nearest town of consequence, Norseman, lies 394 kilometres to the west. Out here the scale of the land bends ordinary words. A neighbour is a day's drive. A paddock can be larger than a city. And the day itself starts at a time the rest of the state does not keep.
On the Nullarbor there are no rivers, so everything depends on what can be pulled from underground. Arubiddy is watered by twelve bores feeding 127 kilometres of piping that snakes across the property to keep stock alive in country that can carry up to 21,000 sheep. The plain itself is a slab of porous limestone, and the trick of living here is reaching the water hidden beneath it and moving that water to where the animals graze. Pipe by pipe, bore by bore, a pastoral station like this is really a vast and patient plumbing system stretched over an area larger than many small nations.
Arubiddy was established in 1961, one of a cluster of Nullarbor stations carved out in that era. The Brown family took over in the 1970s and spent decades improving the run. They were also quietly experimental. In 2003 they ran a field trial baling hay from a native grass, the hardy speargrass Austrostipa scabra, grown at neighbouring Kanandah and trucked to Arubiddy to feed wethers. The family found the native feed offered both environmental and economic benefits, a small piece of homegrown science worked out on one of the most remote properties in the country. Knowledge here is earned the hard way, paddock by paddock, season by season.
A station this isolated is not an easy thing to sell. In 2009 Arubiddy went to auction together with a flock of 17,000 sheep, and at A$2.8 million it was passed in, failing to meet its reserve, and lingered on the market afterward. Ownership eventually changed hands all the same. By 2024 the station belonged to Matthew Lewis, part of a wider story in which several enormous Nullarbor sheep runs have moved between owners in recent years as the economics of remote pastoralism shift. Selling a place the size of Arubiddy is less a transaction than a leap of faith into a way of life few people are built for.
Then there is the matter of the clock. Lewis told ABC Great Southern that Arubiddy runs on UTC+09:00, an hour and a quarter ahead of Perth, and even out of step with the unofficial "Eucla Time" of UTC+08:45 kept by the small settlements down on the Eyre Highway. Strung across a band of country where the sun rises noticeably earlier than it does on the west coast, the people of the Nullarbor have long made their own arrangements with time, choosing the hours that match their horizon rather than the ones decreed in distant capitals. On a station this far east, even time is a local decision.
Arubiddy Station lies at 31.81°S, 125.92°E on the Nullarbor Plain in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia, about 394 km east of Norseman. From the air the country is overwhelmingly flat, pale limestone scrub stretching to the horizon; the most useful human references are the thread of the Eyre Highway to the south, the homestead and its outbuildings, and the network of bore lines and tracks fanning across the paddocks. The nearest sealed runway is at Forrest (YFRT) on the Trans-Australian Railway to the north-east; the Caiguna and Cocklebiddy airstrips lie to the south. Expect bone-dry air, vast horizons, and exceptional visibility, with little relief in the terrain to break the monotony except dams, tracks, and the occasional band of mallee.