Westmoreland Station was taken up in 1881 by Thomas and Robert McIntosh, Robert Philp and William Kirk, sprawling across some 640 square miles of Gulf country. Thomas Brassey McIntosh managed the run and built the two-roomed stone house that still stands. He used what the land gave him: hewn sandstone blocks set in mortar made from crushed termite-mound earth, a hipped roof of early corrugated iron lashed to bush-timber rafters with wire twitches, floors of dirt and antbed. It is humble construction - but deliberate. The thick walls, inward-opening doors and scarcity of windows were chosen with conflict in mind, hardening the house against attack while also keeping out the savage Gulf heat.

When Westmoreland was settled in the early 1880s, the Gulf was a war zone. This is Gangalidda and Garawa country, and the Aboriginal people who had lived here for many thousands of years did not cede it quietly. Across the district, conflict between the traditional owners and the incoming pastoralists was open and bloody - a guerrilla resistance met with deadly force. The place names still carry it: Massacre Inlet, Battle Creek, and Hells Gate to the south-east, named for the point where police escorts turned back and left travellers to cross into contested country alone. The defensive walls of Westmoreland were not built against an imagined threat. They were built against people fighting to hold their homeland, and the violence ran in both directions, though rarely on equal terms.

The men who founded Westmoreland were no minor figures. Robert Philp, one of the original 1881 partners, went on to become Premier of Queensland and was a founder of the great trading house Burns, Philp & Company. Later directors included Sir William Charles Angliss, the Melbourne meat baron, and Walter Sidney Palethorpe Kidman, son of the legendary "Cattle King" Sidney Kidman. Westmoreland was run in concert with other properties - Cliffdale and Patterdale in Queensland, and Wollogorang just across the line in the Northern Territory. The little stone house sat at the centre of a web that reached all the way to the halls of colonial power.

The station's fortunes rose and fell hard. Severe drought struck the Gulf in the late 1890s, and in 1897 the Westmoreland lease was forfeited; the run sat empty for about fifteen years. When a new leaseholder took it up in 1912, he found the roof of the stone homestead eaten through by white ants and the kitchen collapsed. The house endured anyway. Today its verandah posts have been replaced where termites took them, its doors swapped, its floor concreted, a newer dwelling built alongside - yet the original two rooms still stand. Listed on the Queensland Heritage Register in 2008, Old Westmoreland is prized as a rare surviving example of vernacular nineteenth-century stone homesteads, and for the antbed mortar, once common across the outback, that almost nowhere else survives.