Day two of our trip up to Darwin did, as our guides had warned, contain a lot of time sitting in the bus watching the landscape slowly change from dry scrub into green tropical vegetation. Our first stop came mid morning when we arrived at Newcastle Waters, a huge but now deserted cattle station that used to be an important meeting point for drovers crossing the outback during the early settlement days. In the 1800 and early 1900s, farmers in Australia employed cattle drovers to take animals over vast distances to sell at market, deliver them to new owners or simply find better sources of food and water during droughts. These drovers would move hundreds, sometimes thousands of cows or sheep huge distances and Newcastle Waters, being fairly central, happened to be a convenient place for
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