Bexley began under hard conditions. Edward Goddard Blume took up the property some time before 1890, and almost at once the country tested him: the paddocks burned out that same year, destroying most of the feed and some of the fencing before the station had properly found its feet. Fire is the oldest hazard of these plains, where a dry season turns the Mitchell grass to tinder and a single careless spark can run for miles. He stocked it with sheep anyway, and the wool began to flow in modest quantities, 68 bales in 1892 and 71 the following year. Those small early clips are the signature of a station finding its footing, where success was counted not in dramatic harvests but in steady, hard-won returns season after season, each bale hauled out across the long flat country toward the railhead at Longreach and the markets beyond.

Blume held Bexley for nearly half a century. When he finally sold in 1939, the transaction itself told a story of how these vast leases were carved and kept: he passed roughly 39,800 acres, completely unstocked, to T. Scanlan, while holding back the 44,215-acre Yanburra portion for himself. Ownership moved on through the decades, the Allen family running the place in the early 1950s, and eventually the McPherson family. Each change of hands marked another generation taking on the same gamble, betting their labour against drought, fire, and flood on a property roughly 29 kilometres north of Longreach and 70 south of Muttaburra.

On the outback plains the weather is not background; it is the main character. The 1950 flood and its plague of snakes were one chapter, the brown waters pushing every living thing toward the high ground of the house. Another came in November 2001, when a single storm dumped 200 millimetres of rain across the property in nearly twenty-four hours, the sort of deluge that can isolate a homestead for days and reshape a season in an afternoon. Between such events lie the long dry stretches that define this country far more often than the floods do, when the plains crack and the feed thins and survival is a matter of patience. Through all of it the station endured.

What makes Bexley remarkable is precisely that it is not remarkable, that it simply kept going. There is no grand homestead in the heritage registers here, no famous owner, only the unbroken thread of a pastoral lease worked through fire, flood, and drought for more than a century. Still owned by Ross and Michelle McPherson as of 2011, Bexley remains what it has always been since Blume first put sheep on the burnt paddocks: a working sheep run on the plains north of Longreach, its long quiet story punctuated now and then by the dramatic days the land insists on writing for it.