Chris McLennan, ACM's national property writer, discusses the sale of Australia's largest sheep station in the Nullarbor Plain. Founded in the 1950s, this vast property is attracting global interest.
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00:00Hi, welcome to Agricast. Well, the largest sheep station in outback Australia is on the
00:12market and to tell us about that is Chris McClellan. He's the National Property Writer
00:17for ACM. Tell me about this property.
00:20We always talk about the biggest and the best, and this is probably not the best, but the
00:26biggest always captures the imagination and there's a lot of adventure and romance and
00:31all that sort of stuff attached to this property. It was only founded in the 1950s, so it's
00:36a relatively new property. It's one of the last pastoral properties in Australia, I suppose,
00:42because no one really thought about farming the Nullarbor Plain. Not a mecca for high
00:47production agriculture normally, but one of the McLaughlins from Dumbuck Pastoral, which
00:53is a very old and very large pastoral company based in Adelaide, was travelling on the
00:59Indian Pacific and went through Royal Inner. It's a stop on the side there and he saw something
01:05that no one else had ever done and saw potential for a farm. And that's how it all began.
01:12And it's attracting global interest, or at least the real estate agents think it will?
01:17Yes, they absolutely believe it will. When you've got a million hectares or a couple of million
01:23acres of country on offer, it's hard not to attract interest like that. It's not the dirt
01:29that is attracting the attention so much as all the work that the McLaughlins have put into the
01:35property. So that's why the agents are very confident that overseas buyers will be interested.
01:42And have the McLaughlin family been there the entire time?
01:45They have. They're not getting out of the pastoral game by any stretch. Dumbuck's still a very big
01:50operator in the national cattle and sheep market. But Royal Inner, for whatever reason,
01:57is surplus to requirements and someone else has been offered the chance to have a crack at it.
02:04What does the sale actually include and how's it being run?
02:08Elders are taking it up and they've got some of their biggest names across
02:12South Australian NWA running the SAR, which closes midway through this month
02:19for an expressions of interest campaign. From there it will go on. So there's been talk about
02:26a price of around $20 million. It's not just the price that captures the imagination, it's just the
02:32sheer audacity of forming a sheep station in the middle of the desert.
02:37Fantastic. Chris, thank you so much for giving us that update.