When Sharon Oldfield's husband Grant died, she was left with a cattle station on one of the loneliest roads in Australia and three children aged eight, five and two. A former Sydney nurse who had once come to the outback chasing a backpacker's daydream of being a cowgirl, she stayed, learned the country, and ran Cowarie so well that in 1999 she won a national award for it. She was carrying on a tradition older than she knew: at Cowarie, it is often the women who hold the reins.
Cowarie sits in the far northeast of South Australia, 216 kilometres north of Marree and 225 kilometres southwest of Birdsville, strung along the legendary Birdsville Track. It occupies a remarkable piece of hydrology. Here the Diamantina River meets the Mulligan, and out of that junction the Warburton River is born, flowing on to the southwest and eventually into Lake Eyre. For a property in such an arid place, water is everything, and Cowarie's grazier of nearly two decades, Sharon Oldfield, has described the arrival of floodwaters in unforgettable terms: as veins bringing the dead-looking country back to life.
The lease was first granted on the very last day of 1875, a 21-year term taken up by William Benjamin Rounsevell over an area of around 400 square miles. The name comes from a nearby hill, an Aboriginal word for a marsupial rat once common in the area. Cowarie was among the first runs to be taken up on this stretch of country, and others soon followed, swelling traffic along the Birdsville Track until a post office opened at Cowarie in 1877. It was the era when the Track became the great droving route of inland Australia, and Cowarie sat squarely on the line that cattle and camel teams travelled south.
The Oldfield family has held Cowarie since 1940, when Claude and Dora Oldfield bought the lease, and five generations have worked it since. Sharon, the third generation to run it, took the reins under the hardest circumstances and made conservation central to the operation; her 1999 Commonwealth Bank Ibis award recognised exactly that blend of cattle work and care for the land. The line continues through her daughter Ashlee, the fourth generation, and Ashlee's young son, the fifth. That a station this remote has stayed in one family for over eighty years is rare enough. That it has so often been steered by its women, against drought, flood, and grief, is rarer still.
Not far from the homestead lies Mirra Mitta Bore, sunk in 1903 as part of a government scheme to space watering points along the Birdsville-Marree stock route so droving herds could survive the crossing. The bore reaches more than 1,000 metres into the Great Artesian Basin, and a horizontal pipe at its head pours out hot artesian water into a circular pond about five metres across before it spills away down a bore drain. It is one of the small, steaming wonders of the Track, a place where ancient water, pressurised deep underground and heated by the Earth itself, rises into the dust of one of the driest landscapes on the planet.
Cowarie Station lies at approximately 27.71°S, 138.33°E in the Channel Country of far north-eastern South Australia, on the Birdsville Track. From the air the standout feature is the braided river system where the Diamantina and Mulligan converge to form the Warburton, a tangle of pale, anabranching channels that flush green after rain and gleam with water after major floods, all trending southwest toward Lake Eyre. The thin red line of the Birdsville Track runs through the property. The nearest airstrips are Birdsville (ICAO YBDV) about 225 km to the northeast and Marree (ICAO YMRE) about 216 km to the south; both serve outback and Lake Eyre scenic aviation. Fly higher to read the full river network; lower passes show the contrast between flood-channel greenery and surrounding gibber. Visibility is usually excellent, with dust haze likely in hot, windy weather.