Long before any lease was drawn on a map, this was Karuwali country, and it had been for tens of thousands of years. The Karuwali built their shelters from arched branches woven over with grass, leaves and soil, lived off the wild rice that grew along the watercourses, and read the floods as a calendar. When someone died, they raised a mound and laid heavy logs across the grave. In mourning, they coated their bodies in a soft white clay they called copi. These were not a people merely passing through a hard land. They had learned to live with the Channel Country's extremes, to follow the water and wait out the dry, knowledge accumulated across a span of time that dwarfs the brief pastoral history that followed.

The pastoralist John Costello took up the lease in the late 1860s or early 1870s, and the station passed quickly through colonial hands. William Barker bought it in 1876, complete with a thousand head of cattle, from the Collins brothers. A journalist who rode south along the Diamantina in 1881 captured the paradox of the place in a single line, calling it "splendid country with hardly any grass on it simply to want for sufficient rainfall." That phrase still describes Morney Plains. The fertile clay soils need only water to erupt into some of the richest cattle-fattening pasture on Earth, drawing fortunes up from the dirt. The catch is that the water comes from rain that falls hundreds of kilometres away, and it comes when it pleases.

The land here punishes those who underestimate it. In 1887 the heaviest flooding anyone could remember washed the homestead clean away. Ernest Castine bought the property at auction in 1927 for 27,500 pounds, by then covering some 908 square miles watered by artesian bores. By 1949, Morney Plains was one of the legendary stations strung along the outback mail and supply run — a lifeline that had connected the Channel Country to the outside world since Qantas began flying the remote routes in the 1920s. The harshest chapter belongs to Craig Lasker and Nikki Smith, who took over in 2000. Drought slashed their herd from 13,000 head to 3,000. Then in 2003, the homestead burned, and the fire took the couple's two children. They stayed. They were still managing Morney Plains in 2012, a measure of the kind of resolve this country demands and, sometimes, breaks.

Today the station belongs to S. Kidman & Co., the pastoral empire founded by the legendary "Cattle King" Sidney Kidman, and it can carry up to 14,000 head. But the fundamental bargain has not changed since the Karuwali first read these channels. Everything depends on the flood. When the Cooper and Diamantina systems run, the floodplain transforms into natural irrigation, fattening cattle on clay soils that hold moisture for months. When they do not, the dams crack and the bores run thin, as they did again in 2013, when water had to be piped from a bore just to keep the homestead alive. Morney Plains is not a place you conquer. It is a place you learn to ride, drought into flood and back again, for as long as you can hold on.