Anna Creek Station: A Property Larger Than Some Countries
On the route between William Creek and Coober Pedy, our tours pass alongside Anna Creek Station — a working cattle property that holds the title of the largest station in the world. The numbers involved are difficult to properly comprehend from inside a vehicle, but they’re worth understanding before you get there.
Just How Big Is It?
Anna Creek Station covers approximately 23,677 square kilometres. For context, that’s larger than Israel. Larger than Slovenia. Roughly the size of Wales. It’s a single pastoral lease, run as one working cattle operation, in one of the driest and least hospitable landscapes suitable for grazing anywhere on Earth.
The scale exists because the country can only support cattle at extremely low density — you need a vast area of marginal grazing land to run a commercially viable herd, which is precisely why properties out here grew to sizes that would be unthinkable in better-watered farming country.
How the Station Operates
Cattle at Anna Creek graze across enormous distances, moving between bores and natural water sources as conditions and season dictate. Mustering — gathering cattle for movement, health checks, or sale — happens partly by helicopter and light aircraft, because covering this kind of ground on horseback or by vehicle alone would simply take too long.
The station has operated as a pastoral lease since the 1870s, adapting over generations to the realities of running livestock in genuinely marginal country. Water management is the central challenge — bores tap into the Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest underground water reservoirs in the world, which underlies much of this region and makes any grazing here possible at all.
The Artesian Basin Connection
The Great Artesian Basin is one of the more remarkable features of the Australian landscape — an enormous underground aquifer system covering roughly 1.7 million square kilometres beneath Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, and the Northern Territory. Water from ancient rainfall, filtered through porous rock over long periods, sits underground and can be accessed through bores, sometimes flowing under natural pressure without pumping.
Without this water source, Anna Creek Station — and much of the pastoral industry across outback South Australia — simply couldn’t exist. The mound springs you see near Lyndhurst and along parts of the Oodnadatta Track are natural surface expressions of this same aquifer system, and they’ve been critical water sources for both Aboriginal people and pastoralists for a very long time.
What You’ll See Passing Through
Driving through Anna Creek’s boundary, there’s little visible infrastructure — no fences in the conventional sense across most of it, occasional bore-driven windmills, wide flat plains stretching to the horizon. It doesn’t look like a working agricultural property in any familiar sense. That’s exactly the point — this is pastoralism at a scale and in a landscape that doesn’t resemble farming anywhere else.
On Our Tours
Our guides point out the Anna Creek boundary and talk through its scale and history as we pass — it’s one of those details that genuinely changes how you see the surrounding country once you understand what you’re looking at. Get in touch if you’d like to know more about what we cover on the journey between William Creek and Coober Pedy.
