{"id":19835,"date":"2024-12-13T15:13:50","date_gmt":"2024-12-13T04:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/?p=19835"},"modified":"2025-02-14T12:18:02","modified_gmt":"2025-02-14T01:18:02","slug":"by-a-billabong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/country-business\/by-a-billabong\/","title":{"rendered":"By a Billabong: The Rutledge Family’s Moble Station in Queensland’s Channel Country"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Discover how the Rutledge family has transformed Moble Station near Quilpie into a haven of hospitality, blending rich history with authentic outback experiences<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For a family who\u2019s kept a station diary every day for the past 100 years, it\u2019s a bit surprising that there\u2019s some contention over the installation of billabong that gives the homestead at Moble station its \u2018sea\u2019 breezes and water views. In Meg Rutledge\u2019s version of events, it was a wedding gift from her grandfather for her parents, Brian and Kylie, when they married in 1985. Brian\u2019s recollection is more pragmatic: yes, the diversion of Moble Creek was created at that time, but not so much as a gift, more as a sign of his father\u2019s constant attention to water supply on the 120,000-acre (48,562ha) property in the Quilpie district of south-western Queensland. \u201cWater is a precious resource out here,\u201d Brian says. \u201cWe\u2019ve always been very careful how we manage it.\u201d As Meg\u2019s husband, Lachlan \u2018Lachie\u2019 Dean explains, Moble Station is on \u201cmarginal grazing land\u201d in the bioregion known as the Channel Country on the edge of the more arid land bordering the Corner Country of north-western NSW, far western Queensland South Australia\u2019s far north east. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Rutledge family has traditionally raised Merino sheep and Shorthorn\/Santa Gertrudis cross cattle, but more recently they\u2019ve added rangeland goats to their portfolio as goats browse on the mulga trees and don\u2019t compete with the other livestock for grass. Meg and Lachie\u2019s children, Frank, who is almost two, and his little brother, who will be born at the end of 2024, represent the fifth generation of Rutledges to live on Moble Station. Meg\u2019s great-great grandfather, Frank bought Wambin, the place next door in 1914, just as he waved his three sons off to the First World War. Tragically, the middle son didn\u2019t make it home, as he was killed in the Middle East. In an intriguing footnote to this part of history, alongside the family diaries, the Rutledges have a framed Reuters telegram announcing the armistice and a room key that their forebears souvenired from the hotel where they were staying in Cairo, Egypt. Moble\u2019s non Indigenous history goes back to the early European settlement of the region as American surveyor Thomas Underwood, who had come to Australia after the Civil War, travelled through in 1867 naming Moble Creek for Mobile in Alabama. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This was just six years after explorers Burke and Wills made their ill fated journey crossing Australia from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria and perished in the desert on their return journey in 1861. Two years after Underwood, pioneering pastoralist Patrick Durack and his in laws, the Costellos camped on Moble Creek for nine months, while they sent a team down the Strzelecki Track to Adelaide to sell spare horses. They established Thylungra and Kyabra stations as well as properties around Adavale, Thargomindah, Windorah and Roma before before heading 4,800 kilometres north-west in the 1880s to establish their \u2018grass castles\u2019 in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. When the Rutledges bought Moble station in 1923, Brian\u2019s grandfather (also Brian) moved there with his bride, Mary Borthwick, who grew up on the adjacent Whynot station. They lived in the homestead where Meg, Lachie and Frank now live, while Brian grew up in a homestead on the other side of the billabong, where he and Kylie now live. Until the early 2000s date ???, the Rutledges were in the fortunate position of having relatives as neighbours on either side. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kylie, who grew up in Brisbane, came to the district as a governess to Brian\u2019s cousin\u2019s family on Wambin. \u201cIt was meant to be six months off before I went to uni to do ag science,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I met Brian and never made it back to Brisbane.\u201d Instead, Brian and Kylie raised four daughters and Kylie and the occasional governess, sometimes assisted by visiting VICE (Voluntary Isolated Children\u2019s Education) teachers, supervised their primary school education until they went to boarding school. Clearly it was a good start in life for the Rutledge sisters as Felicity is a vet living in London, Sarah, who now lives in Toowoomba after five years in the US, works for JBS Foods, marketing Australian meat to America, and Betsy is a solicitor in Brisbane. Meg, who holds a Bachelor of Business and Agriculture, worked in the NT after school, and for AACo, which owns and operates Australia\u2019s largest beef herd, after graduation, and became the pastoral giant\u2019s livestock manager, before she headed overseas for two years. \u201cI worked for Hello Fresh in London during its start-up period,\u201d she says. \u201cOur whole family is keen on cooking, so it was a great fit. In between work I was able to backpack around Europe, which was also great experience. For I while I lived with a family in southern Spain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They hosted guests, which gave me the idea of doing something similar at Moble Station when I came home.\u201d Meg moved back to the bush in 2017 to help on the station. She met Lachie, who was working on Herbertvale in Queensland\u2019s remote Gulf country at a race meeting in Longreach. They conducted a long-distance relationship until he moved down to Quilpie three years ago and they were married. Lachie has a strong creative bent and there\u2019s evidence of his handiwork in the kitchen stools he made with seats fashioned from cross-sections of repurposed cattle-yard timber as well as other functional and decorative pieces throughout the house and garden. \u201cWe\u2019re a family of entertainers and we always had guests,\u201d Meg says. \u201cIt just made sense to extend that hospitality to paying visitors. Wool was traditionally our income mainstay [a ribbon for fleece of the highest commercial value from the recent Quilpie show proves their sheep can still hold their own in this arena] but we needed to diversify into something that\u2019s less dependent on the seasons.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Rutledges have converted an outbuilding that had served as the children\u2019s schoolroom and a two-bedroom cottage that once was jackaroo quarters for guest accommodation. Kylie also built a strawbale guestroom in the homestead\u2019s beautiful gardens to add another bedroom, and all three options have rustic outdoor bathing facilities. The entire family pools their skills to offer guest entertainment, which often includes bushwalks lead by Kylie on trails that showcase the natural environment<\/a>. Guests might finish a walk by collecting wildflowers to make an arrangement or tussie mussie for the bedside table. Another offering is an en plein air painting workshop conducted by local artist Lyn Barnes. Brian also has considerable metalwork skills and shares his knowledge with vistors who book in for regular two-day workshops where they learn to weld and bend metal to build their own works ranging from gates and fences to furniture and sculpture. \u201cQuilpie<\/a> has an amazing artistic community,\u201d Kylie says. \u201cI think there\u2019s something about the isolation that everyone feels they can explore their creativity without being judged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s wonderful how painting the landscape opens people\u2019s eyes to what\u2019s around them. That\u2019s also why I always guide our guests on the walks. By pointing out features and sharing our story, I feel I\u2019m helping to bring the landscape alive.\u201d Camping is another way of introducing guests to the Rutledges\u2019 world and they have established a permanent site with a hot shower and a flushing toilet, so visitors can experience sleeping under the stars in swags in style. \u201cWe\u2019ve always been a family of campers,\u201d Meg says. \u201cDad would literally take the kitchen sink and Mum always packed a tablecloth, so our style of camping is not without creature comfort.\u201d With soon-to-be two little ones to care for, Meg has currently scaled down their hospitality offerings, though they plan to be back in full swing for the tourist season \u2013 Easter to October \u2013 of 2026. \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful to see how much people gain from station visits,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can drive past and think there\u2019s not much to see, but if you just slow down and take in the landscape, it reveals itself in remarkable ways. We\u2019re lucky enough to enjoy those experiences every day, so we love sharing them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Discover how the Rutledge family has transformed Moble Station near Quilpie into a haven of hospitality, blending rich history with authentic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":19839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[161,336],"tags":[71,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19835"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19910,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19835\/revisions\/19910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}