The Rise and Fall of the World's Largest Cattle Station: Anna Creek

The Rise and Fall of the World's Largest Cattle Station: Anna Creek On 22 August 1872, the government took a cattle station's house and turned it into a telegraph office. Anna Creek wasn't just a lease, it was a country of its own, the place where 23,677 square kilometres carried seven beasts for every ten. Bigger than Israel. Emptier than anywhere. But on 19 November 2015, Treasurer Scott Morrison blocked the sale of S. Kidman and Company over one sentence: around 50 per cent of Anna Creek sits inside the Woomera Prohibited Area. Eighty-one years of the Kidman empire ended with road trains hauling the herd out the gate. Today the stone walls at Strangways Springs still stand on their mound spring, heritage-listed, roofless. The wire is gone. This is the story of how a line nobody could see took a station off its owner, and what that says about who really holds this country. This is not just the story of Anna Creek. It's the story of what a map can do to a place. #AnnaCreek #AnnaCreekStation #AbandonedFactories #LostFactories #IndustrialDecline #AustralianManufacturing