The first European pastoralists paid in blood. T. O'Grady, his brother Robert, and two other men opened the country, throwing up a rough hut and shearing shed a few miles from where the homestead stands today. In their very first year fever swept the party. A shepherd loaded the sickest man into a cart and set out for Geraldton, far to the southwest, but one of the men died on that long journey across the scrub. The survivors came back and built the homestead anyway. By 1879 a Victorian named James Aitkin, arriving with capital and ambition, had taken the place in hand and set Milly Milly properly on its feet, the beginning of a chain of owners that reads like a frontier ledger of luck and misfortune.

The river that fed the station could also destroy it. In 1884 floods washed the homestead clean away, so its replacement was raised about five miles off, built to last from sandstone and limestone quarried on the spot, framed with local salmon gum, its floors poured in cement so the termites could not eat them. Wide verandahs wrapped a big kitchen and roomy bedrooms against the heat. The country itself was generous when the rain came: mulga, saltbush, and grass thick enough to cut for hay, with 25 tons stacked in 1910 alone. But the rainfall ledger tells the harder truth, often only six or seven inches a year, the difference between a fat clip and a ruined season hanging on a few storms.

At its height Milly Milly was a serious wool machine. In 1886 the shearers cut more than 20,000 sheep, and by 1910 the run carried 27,000 merinos yielding 480 bales a year, alongside thousands of shorthorn cattle and hundreds of horses, watered by dozens of windmills sunk across the property. The owners chased quality even in their bloodstock. In 1925 the trustees of the late Daniel Mulcahy bought the thoroughbred stallion Star Comedy, a foal of Comedy King, who had won the Melbourne Cup. Star Comedy was their third attempt at a sire: the first died soon after he arrived, the second had to be put down with a broken leg. On a station this remote, even ambition came with attrition.

Twice, violence at Milly Milly ended in a trial and an acquittal. In 1893 an Aboriginal woman was killed as she walked toward Nookawarra Station alongside a station worker, Peter John Keeshan, who was heading off to catch the mail coach. She was a real person whose name the record does not preserve, and whose death went unpunished: Keeshan was charged, tried, and found not guilty. Nineteen years later, in November 1912, the station accountant Percy Tompkiss died after drinking whiskey laced with arsenic, the same poison used in sheep dip. The cook, Jimmy Carlo, was arrested and committed for trial, then acquitted for lack of evidence. Both cases closed without answers, two of the many stories the river country keeps to itself.

The land never stopped testing the people on it. Floods returned again and again, most recently when the remains of Cyclone Emma drenched the Murchison in 2006 and left the homestead sitting like a small island in a sheet of brown water. Drought returned just as reliably; in 2010 the manager was hand-feeding lupins and hay, separating calves from their mothers to keep them alive on milk-replacement pills near the homestead. Through it all the station kept working, its lease passing into the hands of the Milly Milly Pastoral company. The cycle that has defined this country for more than a century, flood and drought, boom clip and bust, simply continues, written and rewritten along the same stretch of the Murchison.