Delta Downs was established before 1889 and changed hands the way frontier leases did - by sale and by auction, far from the people whose Country it occupied. In 1895 it was trading cattle under the London Bank of Australia. By 1912 it spanned some 638 square miles and carried 9,000 head of cattle and 400 horses, an aggregation of leases stitched together across the floodplain. The records of the era list stock numbers, paddock fences and the occasional tragedy among its managers, but they are silent on the Kurtijar, who remained on and around this Country through all of it, watching their land worked under other people's brands.

In 1982, Kurtijar elders set out to change that. They formed the Morr Morr Pastoral Company, taking the station's older name as their own, and pressed their claim to run their Country as a working business. The following year, in 1983, the federal government bought Delta Downs for around two million dollars with the express purpose of transferring it to its Traditional Owners. With that, the Kurtijar took on what the station describes as one of the first cattle stations in Australia run by Traditional Owners - not a symbolic handback, but a commercial enterprise on Country, mustering and trading cattle across the Gulf.

Ownership was a beginning, not a guarantee. The Kurtijar had to run Delta Downs as a real station in a hard country, and they did. By 1988 it turned a profit of around 800,000 dollars and was on track to be among the first properties to meet tough new disease-eradication standards - a Gulf station, Aboriginal-run, meeting the industry on the industry's terms. In 2002, ATSIC formally handed the property over to the Kurtijar people, by then valued at roughly twenty million dollars. The numbers tell part of the story; the rest is the simple fact of Kurtijar stockmen and women working their own Country, on their own account, generation after generation.

No Gulf station escapes hard years, and Delta Downs has had its share. By 2013 the company was carrying about a million dollars in debt and had to let nineteen workers go, squeezed by the collapse of the live-export trade, severe drought, and a three-year quarantine after a suspected cattle disease scare froze its herd in place. These were the same shocks that battered cattle operations across northern Australia - but for the Kurtijar, holding on meant more than holding a business together. Today Morr Morr stands as one of the largest Aboriginal-owned pastoral enterprises in Queensland, training young Kurtijar people to work the land their elders fought to reclaim. The cattle and the Country and the community are, here, the same thing.