Muckaty Station

Muckaty Station, also known as Warlmanpa, is a 2,380-square-kilometre Aboriginal freehold landholding in Australia’s Northern Territory. It is traversed by the Stuart Highway, built in the 1940s along the route of the service track for the Australian Overland Telegraph Line. The area comprises semi-arid stony ridges, claypans and a stony plateau, and experiences a sub-tropical climate.

About Muckaty Station in brief

Muckaty Station, also known as Warlmanpa, is a 2,380-square-kilometre Aboriginal freehold landholding in Australia’s Northern Territory. Originally under traditional Indigenous Australian ownership, the area became a pastoral lease in the late 19th century. It is traversed by the Stuart Highway, built in the 1940s along the route of the service track for the Australian Overland Telegraph Line. The area comprises semi-arid stony ridges, claypans and a stony plateau, and experiences a sub-tropical climate, with a wet season between January and March. The fauna is generally typical of Australian desert environments, and includes the red kangaroo, eastern wallaroo, the northern nail-tail wallaby, and the spinifex hopping mouse. In the 1930s, the Australian government was sufficiently concerned about the condition and lack of development of these leases that it held two inquiries between 1932 and 1938. In 1928 for example, 80 per cent of Indigenous people with the part of the workforce were employed on the stations, with many living on and travelling across the pastoral leases. The plan to build a low-level radioactive waste storage and disposal facility at the station was abandoned after a Federal Court of Australia case in 2014.

The station is surrounded by other leases including Powell Creek to the north, Helen Springs Station to the east with Philip Creek and Banka Banka Stations to the south. It was returned to its Indigenous custodians in 1999. The country is known by the Indigenous name Warl manpa, which is also the name of a local language. A record of wards of the state of NSW shows only three Indigenous adults living on Mucky, compared to almost fifty fifty on Banka banka Station, east of the station. This reflects the fact that, by 1940, by the country had been depopulated, by only three Aboriginal adults living in the country, by then the population of the region had been around 10,000. The first pastoral lease was granted in 1872, and by 1911 there were at least 250 such leases covering over 180,000 square miles of the jurisdiction. MuckatY Station is located 110 kilometres north of Tennant Creek, and approximately 800 kilometres south of Darwin. In October 1870 the South Australian government decided to construct an overland telegraph line, from Port Augusta on the continent’s south coast, to the new settlement just established in the tropical north. The line traversed what is now Muck aty Station.

Related posts:

Indigenous peoples Taiwanese indigenous peoples Avenue Range Station massacre Quainton Road railway station