Macumba sprawls across 11,063 square kilometres of the arid Far North of South Australia, about 39 kilometres northeast of Oodnadatta. That makes it the third-largest station in the state, behind only Anna Creek and Innamincka - a single property larger than some European nations, stocked not with crops but with cattle that drift across sandhills, mulga woodland, and watercourses lined with river red gums. For most of the twentieth century it belonged to the empire of Sidney Kidman, the legendary "Cattle King" who acquired it in 1905 and stitched it into a chain of stations spanning the continent's dead heart. When the Kidman company was finally sold in 2016, Macumba passed to Australian Outback Beef - a joint venture two-thirds owned by mining magnate Gina Rinehart, with China's Shanghai CRED holding the rest.

Out here, water is either everything or nothing, and rarely in between. The very first Macumba homestead was abandoned because the floods came too often. In 1903 the Stevenson Creek rose without warning and stranded a party of prospectors for four days. In 1908, heavy rain submerged a tract of land forty miles long and forty miles wide, swallowing parts of Macumba and neighbouring Dalhousie. In 1939 floods tore away the railway and destroyed the crossing at Alberga Creek; in 1950, seven inches of rain in forty-eight hours swelled the creek by the homestead to half a mile across, sweeping livestock downstream. Then the pendulum swings the other way. Drought from 1928 to 1931 left almost no cattle in the district. In 2008, after years without rain, Macumba was destocked entirely. The land empties and fills, empties and fills.

Salvation came from below. In 1909 a bore sunk at the station struck artesian water at a depth of 650 feet, delivering 320,000 imperial gallons a day - water that had travelled underground for thousands of years before surfacing in the desert. By 1917, with a fifth bore planned, Macumba was reckoned one of the best-watered runs in the north. Those bores were the difference between a station that could ride out the dry and one that simply died when the rain stopped. The same Great Artesian Basin that feeds the famous mound springs further north turned this furnace of a landscape, where the summer of 1932 averaged 111 degrees Fahrenheit across fifty days, into country that could carry cattle at all.

The human history of Macumba reads like the ledger of a frontier with no margin for error. In December 1888, acting manager George Bennet and his young son Albert, just fourteen, both died while working cattle in extreme heat, under circumstances never fully explained. Cattle stealing came before the courts in 1891, with two men sentenced to two years' hard labour. R. M. Williams - who would build a bootmaking empire and become an Australian icon - worked here in July 1945, in the final weeks of the Second World War, mustering wild brumbies to buck at the Marrabel Rodeo. These were lives measured against heat, distance, and the country's refusal to be tamed. The station endures still, gazetted in 2013 as a locality in its own name, a place on the map that began as a gamble against the desert and has never stopped being one.