Everything at Diamantina begins with the river. The Diamantina traverses the country in a braided sprawl of channels, and where it goes the plains can support extensive grasslands and near-permanent waterholes - some naturally deep, fed both by seasonal rains and by the cool, ancient water of the Great Artesian Basin far below. Around the channels the landscape fractures into a gallery of outback forms: sand dunes, claypans, weathered sandstone mesas, and the polished stone deserts called gibber plains, where eroded ranges have left a pavement of iron-hard pebbles glinting in the sun. It is harsh, beautiful country, and the water is the only reason any of it could be grazed at all.

When Kidman bought Diamantina Lakes in 1908, the station already had a pastoral history stretching back to 1876, when John Arthur Macartney and Hugh Louis Heber-Percy first established the run. Kidman acquired it as part of an ambitious play - purchasing it alongside Mount Poole Station and the enormous Innamincka Station in South Australia, and selling off properties in the Northern Territory and Western Australia to finance the deal. The station he took on covered more than two thousand square miles. For a man whose whole strategy depended on linking the inland rivers into one drought-proof network, Diamantina, sitting on its reliable waterholes, was a keystone worth reaching for.

Then the keystone cracked. Between 1914 and 1916 a brutal drought settled over the Channel Country, and Diamantina Lakes - for all its deep waterholes - could not hold. About 10,000 cattle died on the station alone. Across his whole network of inland runs, including Glengyle, Durham Downs, Innamincka and Sandringham, Kidman lost more than 75,000 head. The strategy that was supposed to make him drought-proof had collided with a drought too vast to escape. Suffering financially, the Cattle King sold Diamantina in 1918. It was a hard lesson in the limits of even the cleverest plan: in this country, the rivers gave generously, and then, without warning or mercy, they stopped.

Long before any lease was pegged, this was - and remains - the country of the Maiawali and Karuwali peoples. The watercourses, ranges and plains that the pastoralists prized for stock had supported them for countless generations, and they maintain a close spiritual connection to the land to this day. The waterholes that Kidman counted as assets were, to the traditional owners, something far older and deeper than property - the living heart of a homeland they had read and cared for across millennia. Their connection did not end when the cattle arrived, and it continues now within the park that has taken the station's place.

After Kidman, the run passed through more hands - government ownership in 1927, then private companies - until the Queensland Government bought the property in 1992 and gazetted it the following year as Diamantina National Park. The change was profound. Land that once ran up to 12,000 head of cattle now protects more than 5,000 square kilometers as one of the largest national parks in the state, a refuge recognized by the World Wildlife Fund as among the top reserves of its decade. Over 150 bird species gather at its waterholes - brolgas, Australian bustards, wedge-tailed eagles - and threatened animals like the bilby and the elusive night parrot find sanctuary in its dunes and grasslands. The old stock routes still cross the park, walked now by visitors instead of herds. The river runs on as it always has, indifferent to who claims the land, and the Cattle King's hardest country has found a gentler purpose.