The first Europeans through this country were members of Ludwig Leichhardt's expedition, which passed by in 1845 on its epic overland trek from Queensland to Port Essington on the far northern coast. The pastoral lease came later, established in 1881 by the Chisholm family, who stocked the run in 1883. They brought the name with them: Wollogorang was the Chisholms' family seat, a grand house near Goulburn in New South Wales, and the name had been associated with them since the 1820s, long before they ever saw this Gulf country. They planted a southern name on a northern frontier, and it stuck.

Few stations have a history this colourful. The Annings sold up around 1906. Decades later the property became entangled with the long-time owner Paul Zlotkowski, who first bought it in the late 1960s, sold it to a businessman named Bela Csidei, and then bought it back from the liquidator after Csidei was arrested on drug charges in 1978. Zlotkowski's own account of the place - told to the ABC as a tale of "drugs, death and determination" - captures something of how the outback rewards stubbornness. He held the station across the decades and put it on the market for 40 million dollars in 2008, by which time Wollogorang had become as much a story as a property.

Not every story here is a tall tale, and one of them should never be told lightly. In 2007, Pablo Balading, a Filipino worker, came to Australia on a skilled-worker visa expecting a job at another station. Instead he was brought to Wollogorang to work as a farm hand. He was harassed by his Australian workmates, and he died after falling from a vehicle being driven fast down a station track. His family was left without compensation or even a clear account of how he had died. Three years later the company was fined for failing to provide a safe workplace. Balading travelled across the world for work and did not come home; behind the remote-outback mystique, his death is a reminder that these isolated properties run on the labour of vulnerable people far from help.

Ownership of Wollogorang has lately tracked the globalisation of Australian agriculture. In 2015 the station was bought by the Chinese businessman Xingfa Ma, part of a wave of overseas investment in northern cattle country. Then in 2020 it returned to local hands when the McMillan family of Cloncurry acquired it. To the south lies the Waanyi-Garawa Aboriginal Land Trust, and to the west the Pungalina-Seven Emu Sanctuary, a conservation reserve - so Wollogorang sits at a crossroads of competing visions for this land: commercial grazing, Aboriginal title, and wildlife protection, all meeting along its enormous boundaries.