Roebuck Plains Station is a pastoral lease that is located close to the township of Broome in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It is one of the closest pastoral leases to Broome.
Roebuck Plains is also the name of a roadhouse on the Great Northern Highway, just east of Broome.
The Plains in the name is associated with wetlands situated adjacent to Roebuck Bay. [1]
The station is located approximately 30 kilometres (19 mi) east of Broome on a rich marine floodplain. It occupies an area of 2,760 square kilometres (1,066 sq mi) and is able to support around 20,000 head of cattle. [2] The property is a mixture of floodplains and sandy pindan country. [3]
The traditional owners of the area are the Yawuru peoples. [2] The property was acquired and developed by the pearlers, Streeter and Company, to supply meat to Broome. A slaughterhouse was also established on the outskirts of town to process the cattle and sheep that were being raised on the property. [4]
The homestead burnt down in 1949; the fire started from a defective kerosene refrigerator. [5]
In 1953 the 2,900-square-kilometre (1,120 sq mi) station was acquired by the Harris family. [6] It was stocked with 10,000 head of cattle at the time. [7] [8]
The Indigenous Land Corporation acquired Roebuck Plains Station in 1999, and in 2006 the Federal Court determined the station was the exclusive possession of the Yawuru under native title. [2] In 2014 the ILC handed the lease over to the Nyamba Buru Yawuru Corporation. Pat Dodson, the chairman of the company, accepted the lease but handed management of the station back to the ILC. The property and the adjacent commercial cattle yards are worth around A$15 million. [9] The plains are also subject to analysis of indigenous perceptions of the landscape.[ clarification needed ] [10]
In 2018, the property was flooded when it received 1,625 millimetres (64 in) of rain through the wet season, with half of it falling in one week in January. The 6,000 head of cattle had to be moved off the floodplains to higher ground. The cyclone that brought the rain also caused extensive damage to the property, with trees blown over, buildings damaged and fences washed away. [3]
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Broome, also known as Rubibi by the Yawuru people, is a coastal pearling and tourist town in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, 2,046 km (1,271 mi) north of Perth. The town recorded a population of 14,660 in the 2021 census. It is the largest town in the Kimberley region.
The Kimberley is the northernmost of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami deserts in the region of the Pilbara, and on the east by the Northern Territory.
Roebuck Bay is a bay on the coast of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Its entrance is bounded in the north by the town of Broome, and in the south by Bush Point and Sandy Point. It is named after HMS Roebuck, the ship captained by William Dampier when he explored the coast of north-western Australia in 1699. The Broome Bird Observatory lies on the northern coast of the bay.
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The Djugun are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
Wallal is the location of a bore in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The bore is located 5 kilometres (3 mi) from the Great Northern Highway between Port Hedland and Broome and has an elevation of 10 metres (33 ft). The nearest town is Marble Bar, 140 kilometres (87 mi) south of the bore.
The Yawuru, also spelt Jawuru, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
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Severe Tropical Cyclone Kelvin was a strong tropical cyclone that impacted Western Australia in February 2018, causing moderate damage. The system was first identified as a weak tropical low on the morning of 11 February over the Northern Territory's Tiwi Islands by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The low moved southwestwards over land and emerged over the Indian Ocean near Broome on 16 February. The storm intensified into a Category 1 tropical cyclone on the following day, becoming the sixth named storm of the 2017–18 Australian region cyclone season. Kelvin subsequently moved slowly eastwards and began to rapidly intensify in the hours prior to landfall. On 18 February, the storm crossed the coast along Eighty Mile Beach as a Category 3 severe tropical cyclone on the Australian scale, and a high-end Category 1 hurricane-equivalent cyclone on the Saffir–Simpson scale. Despite being over land, Kelvin weakened at a slow rate over the next few days, and was downgraded to a tropical low on 19 February. The remnant low of the system drifted over the Outback before being last noted by BoM on 21 February.