There is a place in the South Australian outback so large that, after Anna Creek down the road, no cattle station on the planet is bigger. Clifton Hills sprawls across roughly 16,500 square kilometres of the Channel Country, the largest single holding on the entire Birdsville Track. It is bigger than some countries, and yet for most of the year it is a place of dust, gibber, and silence, waiting, like everything in this country, for the water to come down from the north.
Clifton Hills lies about 132 kilometres south of Birdsville and 200 kilometres northwest of Innamincka, taking in part of the Sturt Stony Desert. On its edge sits Goyder Lagoon, one of the great inland sinks of Australia, where the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek finally exhaust themselves and the Warburton River begins. Rivers that gather rain across Queensland and beyond spread out here into a maze of channels, and in a big year a vast flood area, around 1,500 square kilometres of the property, comes alive with water and feed. The rest is gibber plain laced with creeks and soft sandhill country, a balance of drought and flood that defines the entire region.
The station was established in 1876, and its history reads as a ledger of vast herds and bigger weather. In 1881, 1,000 cattle were overlanded in from Aramac Station in Queensland; by 1891 the run carried 14,000 head across 4,000 square miles. Floods punctuate the record like exclamation marks. In 1904 the manager reported the Georgina and Diamantina rivers spilling across some 2,000 square miles of the property; in 1930 came the worst flooding since 1917. For decades, from 1912 onward, Clifton Hills was held by the Brooks family, who at one point combined it with neighbouring Kanowna to run around 20,000 shorthorn cattle across some seven million acres.
In 1960, under owner Hector Brooks, Clifton Hills made a small piece of transport history. Brooks was the first to send cattle to the Gepps Cross market in Adelaide using the new "beef roads" idea, loading a consignment of 53 bullocks onto a truck and driving them down the Birdsville Track to the railhead at Marree. It was the first time road transport had been used along the Track, a quiet revolution that would eventually end the great cattle drives. The drovers and their dust-caked herds, who for nearly a century had defined the road, were about to give way to the road train. The Birdsville Track has carried trucks ever since.
When Clifton Hills came up for sale in 2018, reportedly for the first time in 60 years, it was described as the second-largest cattle station on Earth: 16,510 square kilometres, an estimated 18,000 head of organically certified cattle, and a licence for up to 21,500. Late that year it was bought by a partnership including Viv Oldfield, who already held the adjoining Pandie Pandie Station, building a cattle enterprise that runs roughly 50,000 head across a constellation of outback properties. This is country with a long and not always gentle human history, including the Aboriginal people who lived and worked on the station through the pastoral era, photographed here as early as 1921. The Birdsville Track threads straight through the middle of it all, the same red road that drovers, truckers and travellers have followed for nearly 150 years.
Clifton Hills Station centres on approximately 27.02°S, 138.89°E in the Channel Country of far north-eastern South Australia, straddling the Birdsville Track and extending into south-western Queensland. The dominant aerial feature is Goyder Lagoon on the property's edge, a sprawling terminal floodplain where the Diamantina River and Eyre Creek dissipate into the Warburton, an immense braided maze of channels that turns brilliant green after rain and shines with water in flood years, set against red gibber and sandhill country. The Birdsville Track runs through the property. Nearest airstrips are Birdsville (ICAO YBDV) about 132 km to the north and Marree (ICAO YMRE) to the south; both serve outback and Lake Eyre scenic aviation. The sheer scale rewards high-altitude viewing to grasp the flood network; lower passes reveal the channel detail. Visibility is generally excellent, with dust haze likely in hot, windy conditions.