Long before the mansion, Jimbour was simply the farthest outpost of settlement on the Downs, the last station before the map ran out. That is why, on 1 October 1844, the Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt assembled his small party here and rode north into country no European had crossed. His goal was Port Essington, a remote military outpost near the top of the continent, nearly 5,000 kilometres away. For fifteen months he and his men were gone, given up for dead by many in the colony. Then, in December 1845, the survivors stumbled into Port Essington, gaunt and triumphant. Jimbour's claim to history was sealed before its grandest building existed: it was the threshold from which one of Australia's great inland journeys began.

The house that stands today belongs to Joshua Peter Bell, a grazier who became one of Queensland's most important politicians and businessmen, and who wanted a home equal to his standing. Around 1873 he commissioned the fashionable Brisbane architects Richard Suter and Annesley Voysey to design something handsome and ambitious. Work began in late 1874 and was complete by early 1877. With the single exception of the Welsh slate on the roof, everything was sourced locally; the honey-coloured sandstone came from quarries at Bunjinnie, a few miles off. Inside, a wide hall runs the building's length on both floors, each with a fireplace set into the wall like the winter galleries of an English country house. One upstairs bedroom still carries hunting-scene frescoes painted directly onto the plaster and dated 16 November 1879. Under Bell, the property earned a grand and slightly absurd nickname: 'The Mecca of Civilization on the Darling Downs.'

Jimbour was never a single building but a small world. A timber chapel, finished in 1868, sits west of the main drive; for a time it doubled as the Jimbour school and even gained a film-projection room above its porch. Nearby, a four-storey timber water tower leans inward as it rises, its top room decorated with naive paintings made between 1924 and 1956 by a station hand who clearly had time and a brush. A great sandstone store, designed by the architect Benjamin Backhouse, still shows the barred windows of its strongroom days and a mail hatch from when it served as the post office. Among the people who made the place run were Aboriginal stockmen of the surrounding country, including the Wakka Wakka, whose labour and knowledge of the land underpinned the pastoral life the grand house celebrated.

The Bells eventually faced the squeeze that broke many pastoral fortunes. In 1877, 40,000 acres were resumed from the run for closer settlement, and in 1881 a shortage of capital pushed the brothers to fold their interests into the Darling Downs and Western Land Company alongside Premier Thomas McIlwraith. A simple obelisk near the water tower, the Bell Memorial, marks Sir Joshua Peter Bell, who died in 1881, and his son. Today Jimbour is a working property still, producing beef and grain, but it has also become a stage. Its garden amphitheatre can hold crowds in the thousands and has hosted major music festivals, and the house has played a film set, standing in for old-money grandeur in the 1983 television series Return to Eden. The frontier outpost where Leichhardt rode into legend now greets visitors with manicured gardens and the quiet authority of stone.