The Speewah's boundaries have never been defined because they cannot be. The station is as large as the story requires. Closing the front gate demanded a week's rations for the journey. A jackeroo sent to bring the cows in from the horse paddock was gone for six months, not because he was incompetent, for there are no incompetent workers on the Speewah, but because the paddock was that large. When the cook fried bacon and eggs for the men, he needed a motorbike to get around the frying pan. The dust storms were so thick that rabbits dug their warrens in them. Boundary riders had to change their watches for each separate time zone. The tales pile up like the Speewah's own improbable topography, each one building on the last, each one daring the listener to call the teller a liar.

Every mythical land needs its hero, and the Speewah has Crooked Mick. Australia's answer to Paul Bunyan, Crooked Mick is a giant of a man who appears only in stories set on the Speewah, as though the two are bound together. He could shear more sheep in an hour than most men managed in a day. He baked pies so light that a gust of wind carried them off. He kicked crocodiles to the moon and moved mountains when they were in his way. The "Crooked" in his name was always a physical feature, but which feature depended on who was telling the story. Some said it was an eye higher than the other. Others blamed a twisted nose from a crocodile attack, or misshapen teeth from biting sheepskin. Most commonly, it was a limp, acquired from being ringbarked as a teenager or from an incident with a water trough. Even his death varied by storyteller, with each version contradicting the last until the teller arrived at the "real" explanation.

The Speewah stories are not just entertainment. They belong to a tradition of workplace storytelling where exaggeration served a psychological purpose. Bushmen facing brutal labor, isolation, and the indifference of the Australian landscape used tales of the Speewah to make their own hardships seem smaller by comparison. If the Speewah's dust storms buried entire townships, then a man's own drought was manageable. If Crooked Mick could shear a thousand sheep before lunch, then a shearer's aching back was just the cost of being mortal. The stories also functioned as a kind of credential. Talking about the Speewah was a way of signaling that you belonged, that you knew the code, that your bush skills were legitimate enough to joke about the place where skills were measured on a superhuman scale.

A real property called The Speewah exists southwest of Wyndham in Western Australia's Kimberley region, settled by Jim Dillon in the early twentieth century. It still appears on maps, and whether it inspired the legend or was named after it has been debated without resolution. A town called Speewah sits about 10 kilometers west of Cairns on the Kennedy Highway in Far North Queensland. A "Speewa" straddles the Victoria-New South Wales border near the Murray River, connected by the Speewa Ferry. Each real place feeds back into the myth, giving the Speewah just enough geographic specificity to survive as a punchline. From Cape York to the Otways, from Brisbane to Broome, the Speewah is wherever you need it to be, a land that grows larger the further you are from home and the harder the work in front of you.