Wellshot began in 1872, when Alexander Buchanan took up a million acres of country here. To develop it, he turned to Scottish and New Zealand money, the New Zealand and Australian Land Company, based in Scotland, and the run took its name from a major shareholder's estate near Glasgow. By 1876 the property sprawled across roughly 1,821 square miles, running west to the Thomson River. The challenge was never grass; it was water. Neither the river nor the creeks ran reliably, and average rainfall was a meagre 22 inches that fell at unpredictable times. So the station managers went to war with the climate, excavating 48 reservoirs and sinking bores as deep as 3,500 feet until they had a dependable 1.3 million gallons a day.

In 1886, trouble came at shearing time. The shearers refused the conditions their employer offered and walked off. Word spread fast across the surrounding runs, and the men marched on Blackall by way of Portland Downs, Isis Downs and Thornleigh, gathering numbers until more than six hundred had joined. Out of that walkout grew the shearers' union, one of the seeds of the Australian labour movement. It is worth remembering what these men were actually demanding: fair pay and tolerable conditions for brutally hard, back-bending work done in heat that could be murderous. The flashpoint was a sheep station in the middle of nowhere, but the consequences reached all the way to the founding of a national political movement.

The scale of Wellshot in its prime is hard to grasp now. In 1897 the property carried 387,000 merino sheep and produced 5,801 bales of wool in a single clip. When drought bit in the 1890s, the Tibbett brothers performed one of the legendary droves of the era, walking 30,000 ewes from Wellshot to Roma, more than 700 kilometres, in search of grass. The sheep were shorn at Roma, and as relieving rains finally fell back home, lambing began. The brothers brought the flock back with an extra 3,000 lambs. Picture it: a slow river of wool and dust stretching to the horizon, shepherded across half of Queensland by a handful of men on horseback.

A station this size was a small world. James Inglis managed it from 1906 to 1925, and his son Eric, who later served with the 11th Light Horse in the First World War, recalled a workforce of jackaroos, an overseer, a bookkeeper, a blacksmith, an engineer, a horse boy, and musterers, with a married couple to cook and keep house. The country took its toll. In 1935 a station hand named Reuben Hunt was bitten by a caterpillar that fell into his shirt at lunch; he broke out in a violent rash, began vomiting, and died on the way to the Longreach hospital. That December the station recorded 122°F. The lease expired in 1948, the land was cut up for closer settlement, and the sheep, some 30,000, were trucked away. Today the Wellshot Centre in Ilfracombe keeps the memory of the giant run alive.