The station begins with a view. In 1875 the explorer Frank Wittenoom climbed a hill to survey the surrounding country, and a decade later the name of that hill, Mileura, was given to the run laid out beneath it. The Victorian brothers Henry and Frederick Walsh established the station in 1885, buying about half of Wittenoom's Nookawarra Station, 700,000 acres, for ten thousand pounds, sheep and cattle included. A stone homestead rose in 1890, followed by fences, watering points, and an eight-stand shearing shed. The Walsh family would hold Mileura for well over a century, through to 1967 when Matcham Walsh became sole owner, running as many as 18,000 merinos in the good years.

What set Mileura apart was that its owners invited science in. Through Matcham Walsh's long tenure, the station became a living laboratory for studying the mulga rangelands. The work was led by Dr Stephen Davies, head of CSIRO Wildlife Research in Western Australia through the 1970s and early 1980s and later an associate professor at Curtin University. For decades researchers tracked how this harsh, arid ecosystem actually functioned, how its plants and animals survived the long droughts and rare floods. A working sheep station became a place where the desert was watched not for what it could carry, but for how it worked, a rare and patient collaboration between graziers and biologists out where almost no one else was looking.

Then the astronomers came, drawn by the silence. In 1999 Mileura was chosen as a candidate site for the Square Kilometre Array, the most ambitious radio telescope ever conceived, because its emptiness promised the radio quiet that such an instrument demands. From 2000 to 2005, teams ran extensive tests across the station, measuring just how dark its radio sky really was. In the end Mileura fell short, its radio quietness compromised, and in 2006 the search moved southwest to Boolardy Station, which would grow into today's Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. Mileura did not win the array, but it helped prove the Murchison was the right country for it, the first rung on the ladder that led to one of the largest scientific facilities on the planet.

The deepest discovery here reached back four and a half billion years. Working in the Mileura district, Professor John Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Professor Simon Wilde of Curtin University led teams that located and dated zircon crystals about 4.4 billion years old, among the oldest fragments of Earth ever found. Their chemistry suggested something startling: that conditions for life may have existed as much as 800 million years before the oldest known microfossil. A sheep run in the Murchison thus carried evidence of the planet's earliest chapter. The same ground that struggled to hold a radio telescope held, in its ancient stone, a hint of how soon the young Earth might have grown habitable.

Long before any of this, the country was lived in. In the 1950s Stephen Davies and Matcham Walsh arranged radiocarbon dating of a hearth in a cave in the Ejah Breakaway, about 18 kilometres southwest of the homestead, and the results placed people there as far back as around 1100 CE. The cave sat well, beside a waterhole, with a panoramic view across the plains, and was likely a resting or ceremonial place; scratch markings on its ceiling may even read as maps of the surrounding country. Mileura lies within the Wajarri Yamatji native title area, a reminder that the deep history of this place is not only geological. People have known and named this land for a very long time, the oldest story of all the ones it keeps.