The great enemy of a Nullarbor grazier is the wild dog. Dingoes and feral dogs hunt sheep across this open country, and Rawlinna's answer is a fence on a scale to match the station: a three-metre dog-proof barrier, 370 kilometres long, with marsupial netting buried at its base to stop animals digging under. A separate 900-square-kilometre block is sealed off again behind a solar-powered electric fence. Inside, the flock is spread through 87 main paddocks and watered by 37 bores, some sunk 140 metres into the limestone, every one of them driven by a windmill turning slowly in the dry wind. The whole property is a single enormous machine for keeping sheep alive and predators out.

Long before any lease was pegged, this was the country of the Ngalea and Wangai peoples, who have lived across this region for more than ten thousand years, reading a landscape that newcomers found baffling and bleak. When the explorer Edward John Eyre crossed the Nullarbor in 1841 with his Aboriginal companion Wylie, whose knowledge helped him survive, Eyre dismissed the plain as "a blot on the face of nature." It is a telling line. To a struggling outsider the country looked like nothing; to the people who had thrived here for millennia, it was home, sustaining and legible in ways Eyre had no means to see. The plain was never empty. It was only unfamiliar.

Rawlinna is an amalgamation of three older holdings, the Pondana, Rawlinna and Vanesk leases, fused into one giant under the long stewardship of the Jumbuck Pastoral Company. The numbers of the work are staggering in their own right: in 2001 the station shore 78,417 sheep for 2,177 bales of wool, a harvest gathered from across that vast acreage in a single season. Continuity came from its managers. When Ross Wood retired in 2007 he was only the third person to run the station since 1967, following David Seaton and Murray McQuie. On a property this size, a manager is less an employee than the custodian of a small, remote world.

Even Australia's biggest sheep station feels the pull of larger forces. In 2023 the mining and energy company Fortescue announced plans to buy Rawlinna and turn its endless sun-struck flats into renewable energy generation, before withdrawing in 2024 amid delays in the ministerial approval process. The station went back on the market, and in 2025 the UK-based, Hands family-backed Consolidated Pastoral Company struck a deal to acquire it, with the sale approved that September. CPC kept the station on sheep, signalling plans to grow the flock and possibly add cattle. The Nullarbor has watched empires of wool, of rail, and of renewable ambition all pass across its surface, and it has outlasted every one of them.