In October 1879, two Irish cousins, Peter McDermott and Fergus O'Beirne, applied for a license to occupy a new run on the lower Laura River. They had travelled overland from Rockhampton to Cooktown and set up as butchers before reaching for land of their own, and they were latecomers in a sense: the better grazing on the Kennedy River and Breeza Plains had already been taken and stocked. O'Beirne brought his wife Mary and their children; more were born at Cooktown and on the station in the years that followed. The run prospered. By the mid-1890s Laura carried something on the order of eight thousand head of cattle. The surviving timber-and-iron buildings that visitors see today went up in the early twentieth century, but the station itself dates to that 1879 license, one of the earliest pastoral holdings established on Cape York Peninsula.

Laura's success was not the cousins' alone, and the heritage record is unusually frank about this. The station ran on Aboriginal labour. Aboriginal stockmen worked the cattle, broke the horses, and held the place together; through the 1940s and 1950s a building near the stockmen's quarters housed up to six families of Aboriginal stockmen at a time, and three Aboriginal families were still living in the surviving quarters in the 1960s. That dependence ran both ways and at a terrible imbalance. The same heritage listing that praises the station's intactness states plainly that establishing Laura contributed to the dispersal of Aboriginal people from the Laura district, the disruption of their traditional life, and their forced economic dependence on the pastoral industry that had taken their country. The homestead stands on land its workers' families had never ceded, and the buildings they raised and maintained are now the clearest physical record of that arrangement.

The main house is plain and clever at once: two high-set bedrooms ringed by enclosed verandahs, the real living done in the shaded space underneath, where kitchen, dining, and bathroom were tucked behind walls of corrugated iron and pit-sawn board. The floor of the stockmen's quarters was finished with cement haunching around the base of the iron walls, a small detail with an obvious purpose in this country, to keep the snakes out. Around the house stand the working buildings of a self-sufficient station: a workshop and saddle shed roofed in distinctive corrugated-iron bows, a meat house with a tree-trunk chopping block at its heart and a bench for curing salt beef, and an enormous spread of stockyards built mostly from keyed ironwood posts. The oldest surviving structure in the yards is the concrete cattle dip, sunk during the O'Beirnes' time, where beasts were run through to kill the ticks that plagued tropical herds. Because the station ran on soft black-soil and sandy country, the horses never needed shoeing, and there has been no smithy here since the early 1940s.

The dead of Laura lie scattered across the homestead ground. A white stockman, Mick O'Keefe, killed in a fall from a horse in the early 1940s, is marked by a few displaced timber stumps and a bent star picket. An unknown Aboriginal stockman lies near the branding yard, his grave betrayed only by a patch of redder soil. Between the cattle dip and the riverbank are the graves of two Aboriginal women, one of them Polly Seagren, buried in 1954, in ground later fenced into the yards. The wider country holds an older and deeper human record still. This is the edge of Quinkan country around Laura, home to one of the greatest concentrations of rock art on Earth, with Aboriginal occupation of the region dated back tens of thousands of years. The station that European settlers thought of as remote and empty was, in truth, one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes in the world.