The station was founded in 1858 by Charles von Bibra, who set out to supply meat and wheat to the lead miners at nearby Galena, beef to a growing Perth, and remount horses for the British army in India. The first homestead, still known as von Bibra's cottage, was raised by convict labourers out of whatever the land offered: mud bricks and blocks of the local Tumblagooda sandstone, the same banded rock that the Murchison River carves into gorges a little upstream. It is a building made of the country it stands on - the deep geological past of the region quarried straight into the walls of a colonial cottage.

On 5 December 1921, the station witnessed a grim first. Sir Norman Brearley's West Australian Airways had just begun the country's first regular airmail run, and on one of those early flights a Bristol Tourer biplane got into trouble over the property. The pilot, Bob Fawcett, and his mechanic, Edward Broad, were both killed when the aircraft came down - Western Australia's first civil aviation fatalities. The inquest into the crash was held at the station itself. The two airmen were buried here, and they lie alongside Andrew James Ogilvie, an earlier owner who had died in 1906 - a small graveyard binding together the pioneers of pastoral life and the pioneers of flight.

Mukarram Jah's chapter reads like a fable about the limits of inherited fortune. He had lost his royal titles and privileges in 1971 when India amended its constitution, and the following year he sank himself into station life on the far side of the Indian Ocean, more at home tinkering with machinery than presiding over a court. But while he was away, his vast holdings in India were drained, mismanaged and misappropriated. In 1996 the Murchison House Station was placed in liquidation. Jah eventually left Australia and settled quietly in Turkey - a man who had owned palaces ending up, for a time, as a cattleman on a remote Australian lease.

The station never stopped being a working property. Earlier in its life it ran on a grand pastoral scale - around twenty thousand sheep and a hundred and fifty horses by the mid-1930s - before the long shift away from wool. The shearing shed, derelict by the late twentieth century, was patched up in the 1990s and turned over to tourist accommodation. By 2018 the run carried a couple of hundred shorthorn-cross cattle and some seven thousand rangeland goats across its paddocks. It also keeps surrendering surprises. In 2017 a group of schoolchildren clambering over a rock formation on the property opened a metal box stashed in a cave and found a roughly century-old Browning machine gun lying beside a far younger shotgun - a cache no one has fully explained, waiting in the dark of a Murchison cave for a curious child to find. The land here holds its history close, and it does not give it up all at once.