Glenormiston sits at the top of the Channel Country, where the Toko Range to the west gives way to floodplain in the east, and the Georgina River cuts through the north-eastern corner on its long journey south. Pastoralists pushed out here in 1877, spreading west from the grasslands at the headwaters of the Diamantina. A handful of the great Channel Country runs date from that same year: Marion Downs next door, Headingly, Herbert Downs, Roxburgh Downs. The land they claimed was real cattle country, described in an 1881 auction notice as open rolling downs of saltbush and cotton bush, thickly grassed with Mitchell grass, threaded with gidgee and mulga. But it was not empty. This was Aboriginal land, and the taking of it was not peaceful. In 1881, a cook who had held his job only a couple of days was killed in the area. The early stations were carved out of country that people had lived on, and fought for, long before any cattle arrived.

No station here keeps a steady ledger. James Tyson, who owned Glenormiston by 1890 along with a scatter of other runs across two colonies, had it stocked with 25,000 cattle. Then 1893 brought a drought so brutal that mustering even 10,000 head was considered lucky, with carcasses lying across the property. Drought returned in 1897, and again in 1952. Between the dry years came the floods: in 1885, somewhere between twelve and seventeen inches of rain fell in a month, the Georgina and Diamantina both broke their banks, and nearby Sandringham went under entirely. The cattle that survive this country are the ones bred to its swings. Tyson died in 1898 with roughly 10,000 head and 220 horses still on the run. By 1968 the North Australian Pastoral Company had taken over Glenormiston and Marion Downs together, and the property now runs to a carrying capacity near 7,000 head, set every season by the rain that comes or doesn't.

In 1925 the station manager, F. H. Story, found something on the ground that had not grown there and had not been dropped by any plane. It was a meteorite: 38.5 kilograms of iron and stone, an irregular sub-triangular lump with convex and concave faces, scorched on its long fall through the atmosphere. Story sold it to the University of Queensland in 1926, and it entered the scientific record as the Glenormiston meteorite. There is a fitting symmetry in the find. This is country defined by what falls on it from a clear sky, usually rain that may not come for years and then comes all at once. A meteorite is just the rarest version of that gift, a piece of the solar system delivered to a cattle run in western Queensland, found by a man who spent his days watching the horizon for weather.

The explorers came through this corner of Queensland long before the stations did. In 1860 and 1861, Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills crossed the continent south to north and back, and their route carried them through the Channel Country near present-day Boulia, the Burke River south of the town now bearing the leader's name. They got lost in this maze of braided channels before the Diamantina led them out toward the Georgina system and the Gulf. Most of the party did not survive the return. The land that swallowed Burke's expedition is the same land the pastoralists later fenced and stocked, and it has never stopped testing the people who work it. In 1955 it was a food drop from a TAA aircraft. Today it is satellite forecasts and helicopter musters. The country is unchanged. Only the tools for surviving it have improved.