Long before any lease was pegged, this was Kullilli country. The traditional owners lived along the Bulloo and Wilson rivers for thousands of years, reading a landscape that demands an intimate knowledge of where water hides. Their connection to this land never ended, though it was brutally interrupted: many Kullilli people were forcibly removed from their country between the 1880s and the late 1960s. In 2014 the Federal Court formally recognised their native title across roughly 29,600 square kilometres of the south-west, the end of nearly two decades of legal struggle. The pastoral story that follows unfolded on country that was, and remains, theirs.

When Nockatunga was advertised for sale in 1872, the pitch leaned hard on its waterholes, which were said to be deep enough "to float the largest man-o'-war" even in the severest drought. That August, Herbert Bristow Hughes bought the station at auction for £19,655, beginning a family tenure that would last 120 years. The boasts were not entirely hollow. By 1910 Nockatunga had grown into the second-largest station in all of Queensland, its frontage to the Wilson River its single greatest asset. In a land where the difference between fortune and ruin was a permanent pool of water, Nockatunga had a long, reliable run of it.

The same river that made the station could unmake it. In 1882, after six days of rain, the Wilson rose until Nockatunga stood surrounded by water; mudbrick outbuildings dissolved, mortar washed from between the stones of the main house, and at the flood's peak a horse-drawn wagon was caulked like a boat and used as a raft to ferry supplies to high ground. Then the pendulum swung the other way. The catastrophic drought of 1901 killed an estimated 27,897 head from a herd of around 30,000, leaving the ground bare of grass. Flood, drought, flood again in 1947 the station was cut off entirely, without mail for two months. To run cattle here was to gamble against the sky.

Isolation shaped everything. In 1941 an airstrip was cleared on a gibber plain near the homestead so the Royal Flying Doctor Service could reach the station, and that lifeline mattered: in 1949 a stockman named George Dirkensen, badly burned after falling into a fire, lay stranded across the flooded river overnight before the flying doctors carried him to Broken Hill. The clearing of those stony plains, like much of the station's early labour, depended heavily on Aboriginal workers whose contribution the records of the era rarely credited fairly. Today the township of Noccundra has shrunk to a single building: the Noccundra Hotel, licensed in 1886 and built of sandstone hauled in by camel train. Heritage-listed since 1992, it still serves, when needed, as a clinic for the flying doctors - the last lit window of a once-busier outpost.