South Galway stretches across 4,876 square kilometres along Cooper Creek, about 64 kilometres southwest of Windorah and some 275 kilometres east of Birdsville. Its geography is split almost in two. Roughly half the property is flooded river country, threaded by the shallow braided channels that define the Channel Country. About a quarter is rolling downs, and the remaining quarter is a harder mix of spinifex, red sand, mulga scrub and stony hills. This division is the whole story of the place. The river country is what makes South Galway valuable, fattening as many as 13,000 head on flood-fed pasture among the best of its kind anywhere, and it is also what makes it dangerous, capable of trapping a herd or cutting the homestead off from the world for weeks when the Cooper runs high. To work here is to keep one eye always on water that may be falling as rain a thousand kilometres upstream.

South Galway was among the earliest runs taken up in this remote corner of Queensland, established in 1873 by Patrick and Michael Durack alongside John Costello, names that recur across the pioneering history of the Channel Country. Once known as Galway Downs, it changed hands repeatedly in its first decades. The Duracks put it up for sale in 1878, when it ran about 3,000 head over some 500 square miles. It sold around 1884 to the Queensland Cooperative Pastoral Company, which went into liquidation in 1886, dragging South Galway onto the market again alongside properties like Thylungra and Buckingham Downs. Then came the long drought of 1887 to 1901, fourteen punishing years that tested everyone who tried to hold this country.

The year of the aerial muster was a brutal one all round. The same biplane heroics that saved the herd were followed, later in 1951, by bushfires that tore through more than a thousand square miles of the station. Stockmen from South Galway stood at the fire front for five days trying to bring the blaze under control. Flood one season, fire the next, all within a single year, is the violent oscillation the Channel Country imposes on those who work it. Out here, drought, flood and fire are not separate disasters but a single cycle, and a station is judged by how well its people can ride out all three.

Today South Galway is owned by the Australian Agricultural Company, one of the oldest pastoral companies in the country, and it remains a working cattle station running flood-fed herds on Cooper Creek country. The fundamentals have not changed since the Duracks rode in. When the Cooper floods, the river country erupts into some of the most productive fattening pasture on the continent, natural irrigation spread across fertile clay. When it does not, the station endures the dry and waits. The biplane is gone, but the bargain it flew into is exactly the same: live with the water, and learn to move fast when it comes.