Mount Elvire Station
Mount Elvire Station was a pastoral lease and sheep station located approximately 177 kilometres (110 mi) south west of Leonora in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia.
The explorer John Forrest passed through the area in 1869. Travelling in the area to the north of Mount Elvire, which he named after his wife, he named the nearby Lake Barlee after the Colonial Secretary of Western Australia. The station encompasses a large peninsula of Lake Barlee at its northern boundary.
The first persons to take up the lease were two German brothers named Reimal, c. 1920. They effected much of the primary fencing and sunk several wells, stocking some 2,000 sheep. They were cricket lovers, and returning from Bullfinch (the nearest town), found all the stock had perished when the main well had become too salty for sheep to drink.[citation needed]
Malcolm Campbell Ross, of Menzies, took up the lease on the station in 1966 but it was never fully stocked or developed.[1] The owners from 1973-77 were the McLaughlin family, who ran 3,500 head of sheep on the lease.[2]
In 1989, an inspector from the Department of Agriculture stumbled across a large cannabis crop at Kalli Station, another sheep station in the Mid West near Cue. Following a police investigation, Operation Cerberus, another crop was found at Gingin and another was planned to be planted at Mount Elvire by the L'Onorata syndicate.[3] As a result, ten men were arrested, including the ringleaders Rocco Versace and Sebastino Pizzata. The head of the operation Bruno "The Fox" Romeo was arrested years later.
The pastoral lease was acquired by the Department of Environment and Conservation in 1991 and is now used as a tourist destination, offering overnight stays on the site.[4]
In 2006, the Department of Environment and Conservation proposed that the 1,543-square-kilometre (596 sq mi) station be converted to the Mount Elvire Conservation Park as past of the larger Mount Manning Nature Reserve.[5][6]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ "4WD trip to the Kalgoorlie Goldfields area". 2009. Retrieved 23 June 2011.
- ^ "Exploroz - Mount Elvire Station". 2009. Retrieved 23 June 2011.
- ^ "Three headed dog sets out on Fox hunt". The West Australian. Yahoo7. 2009. Retrieved 23 June 2011.
- ^ "DEC Station stays in the goldfields region". Department of Environment and Conservation. 2009. Retrieved 23 June 2011.
- ^ "Advice on areas of the highest conservation value in the proposed extensions to Mount Manning Nature Reserve" (PDF). Environmental Protection Authority. 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on 29 September 2011. Retrieved 23 June 2011.
- ^ "News Archive". Department of Mines and Petroleum. 11 September 2011. Retrieved 2 December 2013.
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