Qualla: Old Laura Homestead

Old Laura Homestead: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Everything here was cut from the country it stands on. The stumps under the house are local ironwood; the yard posts are Cooktown ironwood, toggled and keyed so a single rail could be pulled and replaced in seconds. The Old Laura Homestead is a study in making a cattle station out of whatever the land would give: timber, corrugated iron, bush saplings, and the labour of Aboriginal people whose ancestors had lived on this stretch of the Laura River for tens of thousands of years. Today it sits inside Rinyirru, the Lakefield National Park, two-room timber house and its weathered outbuildings standing intact in the long grass, a frontier homestead preserved whole, with the whole of its history attached.

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Old Laura Homestead: A Run on the Laura

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethel Aardvark (talk), CC BY 3.0. In October 1879, two Irish cousins, Peter McDermott and Fergus O'Beirne, applied for a license to occupy a new run on the lower Laura River. They had travelled overland from Rockhampton to Cooktown and set up as butchers before reaching for land of their own, and they were lateco...

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Image: Ethel Aardvark (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Old Laura Homestead: The People Who Built It

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethel Aardvark (talk), CC BY 3.0. Laura's success was not the cousins' alone, and the heritage record is unusually frank about this. The station ran on Aboriginal labour. Aboriginal stockmen worked the cattle, broke the horses, and held the place together; through the 1940s and 1950s a building near the stockmen'...

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Image: Ethel Aardvark (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Old Laura Homestead: Timber, Iron, and Ingenuity

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethel Aardvark (talk), CC BY 3.0. The main house is plain and clever at once: two high-set bedrooms ringed by enclosed verandahs, the real living done in the shaded space underneath, where kitchen, dining, and bathroom were tucked behind walls of corrugated iron and pit-sawn board. The floor of the stockmen's qua...

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Image: Ethel Aardvark (talk) | CC BY 3.0

Old Laura Homestead: Graves and Quinkan Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethel Aardvark (talk), CC BY 3.0. The dead of Laura lie scattered across the homestead ground. A white stockman, Mick O'Keefe, killed in a fall from a horse in the early 1940s, is marked by a few displaced timber stumps and a bent star picket. An unknown Aboriginal stockman lies near the branding yard, his grave ...

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Image: Ethel Aardvark (talk) | CC BY 3.0