Auvergne sits roughly 50 kilometres west of Timber Creek and 137 kilometres east of Kununurra, straddling the boundary between the Northern Territory and Western Australia with casual indifference. The Victoria River forms its northern boundary; the Bullo River, the Baines River, its tributaries, and scattered billabongs thread through 4,142 square kilometres of country that is part open Mitchell and Flinders grass plains, part dense forest, and part red loam river flats that flood each wet season into something resembling a shallow inland sea. The Victoria Highway bisects the property east to west, one of the few concessions to the modern world in landscape that is otherwise very much on its own terms. In a productive year, the station carries 32,000 head of cattle and ships 10,000 head to Asian markets through the port of Wyndham.

The first cattle arrived at Auvergne in 1886 — 2,000 head overlanded to the property, with another 8,000 reportedly on the road behind them. The station attracted a particular kind of man: hardened, difficult, often notorious. After Croker's shooting, the "notorious" Jack Watson took over management, but lasted only a year before resigning in 1894. By 1896, the property had passed to Francis Connor and Denis Doherty, covering 2,000 square miles with frontage on the Victoria River, stocked with 7,000 cattle and 300 horses. Michael Durack, of the famous pastoral dynasty, became a part-owner by 1897. By 1905, the herd had grown to roughly 20,000 shorthorn cattle described at the time as being "in splendid condition" — the rivers were running, the billabongs full, the country doing what good country does in a good season. By 1923, Auvergne had grown to approximately 5,900 square miles, making it one of the larger runs in the Territory, though still less than half the size of its enormous neighbour, Victoria River Downs.

The frontier history of Auvergne is not easily softened. The conflicts between settlers and Aboriginal people left a record of violence on both sides. In 1918, stockman Alexander McDonald was found with a spear in his back, killed by Aboriginal people whose presence in the country long predated the station. The colonial record tends to document these events as crimes against settlers while leaving the far larger context — dispossession, brutality on the stations, and a world turned violently upside down — largely unspoken. In 1953, Auvergne faced a different kind of trouble: more than 5,000 unbranded scrub bulls, thought to have wandered from the underdeveloped Victoria River Downs next door, had to be shot. The station itself had about 18,000 head at the time, and the scrub bulls posed a threat to both herd quality and property safety.

In 2010, station manager Stuart McKechnie was riding along a riverbank when he noticed something unusual protruding from the eroding earth: bones. Large bones. He kept the discovery to himself for two years before contacting palaeontologists from the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, who arrived in 2012 to excavate what turned out to be a nearly complete skeleton of a diprotodon — the largest marsupial to have ever lived, an ancient wombat-like creature the size of a hippopotamus that roamed Australia until roughly 46,000 years ago. Missing only its tail and head, the skeleton was otherwise intact, preserved in the riverbank clay through tens of thousands of years of Northern Territory wet seasons. It was a reminder that the drama playing out on this land across the last 140 years of European settlement is a footnote against the deeper arc of time.