In February 1890, a shepherd named Templeton walked out into the Murchison heat and did not come back. He was found 80 kilometres west of the Wooleen homestead, dead of thirst alongside about 1,100 sheep, a note beside his body describing the predicament that killed him. The district got good rain a few days later, too late for any of them. That cruelty is the founding truth of this country: a land of mulga scrub and red dirt that gives perhaps 210 millimetres of rain in a year, and not reliably even that. More than a century later, on the same hard ground, two people would gamble everything on a very different way of living with it.
Wooleen Station was established in 1886, first selected the following year by James Sharpe and David McWhinney, in the Murchison region roughly 680 kilometres north of Perth. It is enormous and lonely. The lease covers around 152,000 hectares of mulga and chenopod shrubland, threaded by the Murchison and Roderick Rivers and holding Lake Wooleen within its boundaries. For decades it ran on the logic of wool: a twelve-stand shearing shed went up in 1922, and in 1924 more than 28,000 sheep were shorn here. By 1954 the property spread across some 460,000 acres and carried a flock of 30,000. The heritage-listed homestead, with its wide colonial verandahs, billiard room, and library, speaks of an era when sheep were king.
That century of hard grazing came at a price the land could not keep paying. Across the southern rangelands, generations of sheep, and later feral goats and swelling kangaroo numbers, stripped the country faster than it could recover. The perennial grasses thinned. Topsoil blew and washed away. Along the rivers, trees that should line the banks had all but vanished. The Pollock family took over Wooleen in 1990, and Helen and Brett began shifting the business toward farm-stay tourism to stay afloat, welcoming their first paying guests in 1993. But the deeper problem, the slow unravelling of the land itself, was waiting for the next generation to confront head-on.
In 2007, David Pollock and his partner Frances Jones took the reins, and made a decision that startled the district: they destocked the land entirely. For about four years they ran no commercial livestock at all, even switching off windmills and watering points to discourage the feral goats and kangaroos that drank from them. Counter-intuitively, they let the dingoes come back. For over a century dingoes had been hunted off Wooleen, but as they returned, feral goat and kangaroo numbers fell sharply, easing the relentless grazing pressure on recovering plants. The aim was patient and ecological, working with the Mulloon Institute to mend water flow and soil, betting that rest, not stock, was the path to a living again.
Slowly, the land replied. Perennial grasses and shrubs unseen for years began to return, and along the rivers, species like river red gum and swamp she-oak started to regenerate where almost nothing had grown for a century. David Pollock told the story in his 2019 book, The Wooleen Way, after the couple's struggle had already reached the nation through the ABC's Australian Story. Wooleen now blends a working future with its repair: cattle grazed carefully and lightly, a station-stay tourism business helping fund the healing, and a sweep of restored riverine country. Just to the east lies Boolardy Station, home to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory and part of the Square Kilometre Array, the world's largest radio telescope project, watching the universe across the same silence that once killed a thirsty shepherd.
Wooleen Station lies near 27.09 degrees south, 116.16 degrees east, in the Murchison outback of Western Australia, about 680 km north of Perth. From the air the lease is a vast tan-and-red mosaic of mulga woodland, cut by the pale braided channels of the Murchison and Roderick Rivers and the flat sheen of Lake Wooleen after rain; regenerating green along the watercourses marks the restoration work. Meekatharra Airport (YMEK) is the nearest sizeable field, to the northeast; the radio-quiet zone around the nearby Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory and Square Kilometre Array sits just to the east, so be aware of transmission sensitivities. Skies are typically clear with vast visibility, ideal for taking in the scale of the rangeland. Recommended cruising altitude 6,000 to 10,000 feet to read the river systems and the contrast between grazed and recovering country.