Around 1,850 kilometres of sand, spinifex and not much else. That is the Canning Stock Route, a track from Halls Creek in the Kimberley down to Wiluna in Western Australia's mid-west, and it is claimed to be the longest historic stock route in the world. It was built for cattle that hardly ever used it. Today it is the yardstick for remote travel in this country.
Our team has never driven it, so this is not a trip report. It is the story as the written record tells it: why the route exists, who surveyed it, what it cost, and why it still makes seasoned travellers go quiet when the name comes up. Some of that story is hard to read, and we have not tried to soften it.
A cattle problem with a desert solution
At the start of the 20th century, east Kimberley cattlemen had a business problem. Their cattle carried ticks infected with a malaria-like disease called babesiosis, so they were banned from southern markets by sea, for fear the ticks would survive the voyage. That handed west Kimberley cattlemen a monopoly on beef supply to Perth and the goldfields, and prices were high.
The Western Australian Government wanted competition to bring those prices down. In 1905 a pastoralist and member of the Legislative Assembly, James Isdell, proposed a stock route straight through the desert. His argument was simple: ticks would not survive the dry climate on the way south. The idea was taken seriously, and once it was determined that ticks could not survive a desert crossing, the government funded a survey.
The country in the way was formidable. The route had to cross the Great Sandy Desert, the Little Sandy Desert and the Gibson Desert. That is three deserts on one track, which is a fair part of why it has the reputation it does.
The surveyor: Alfred Canning
Alfred Canning was born in Campbellfield, Victoria, in 1860, trained as a surveyor in New South Wales, and moved to Western Australia during the gold rush of 1893. By the time the stock route came up he had already surveyed the route of the No. 1 Rabbit Proof Fence, which was the longest line of unbroken fence in the world when it was finished in 1907.
His brief for the stock route was demanding. He had to find water sources a day's walk apart, each good enough for up to 800 head of cattle, plus enough feed along the way to keep that many animals alive on the trip south.
In 1906 he set out with 23 camels, two horses and eight men, and reached Halls Creek in less than six months. On 1 November 1906 he telegraphed Perth that the finished route would "be about the best watered stock route in [the] Colony". An early wet season in the Kimberley then delayed the return leg. The party left Halls Creek in late January 1907 and reached Wiluna in early July. Across the 14-month expedition they had covered about 4,000 kilometres.
Canning had read the accounts of two earlier expeditions through the same country in 1896, the Calvert Expedition led by Lawrence Wells and the Carnegie Expedition led by David Carnegie. Both described the terrain as extremely difficult. Carnegie had concluded the route was "too barren and destitute of vegetation" to work as a stock route. As it turned out, he was not wrong.
Finding water, and what it cost
Here the story turns uncomfortable, and it should. The Canning survey relied on Aboriginal people to find water, and the written record is plain about how. Canning took neck chains and handcuffs supplied by the Wiluna police, and captured Martu men to lead his party to soaks. Many of those soaks were sacred, and the record suggests the Martu may have steered the party away from them, which may be why the finished route winds more than it otherwise needed to.
When the party got back, the expedition's cook, Edward Blake, accused Canning of mistreating Aboriginal people. His complaints reached the newspapers and led to a Royal Commission. Canning admitted using chains. Surveyor Hubert Trotman told the Commission the chains had been padded. After about three weeks of evidence, the Commission accepted the party's actions as "reasonable" and cleared Canning and his men of all charges, although it condemned the use of chains. It also approved building the route to go ahead, and Canning was appointed to lead the construction party.
None of this is a footnote. The route crossed the Country of nine Aboriginal language groups on the survey alone, and more than 15 groups are recorded as having a cultural, family or historical connection to it. For them, the stock route is one chapter of a much older story; archaeologists believe the Western Desert has been occupied for around 30,000 years.
Building the wells
Canning left Perth in March 1908 with 30 men, 70 camels, four wagons, 100 tonnes of food and equipment, and 267 goats for milk and meat. The job was to build well heads and water troughs at the water sources his survey had identified. He was back in Wiluna in April 1910, having finished the last of 48 wells, at a total cost of £22,000. (Sources differ on the final count, with another account putting it at 51.)
The wells were meant to be a day's march apart, around 20 kilometres. That spacing is the whole logic of the route. It is also why the track is a string of small, hard-won destinations rather than a road to anywhere.
The design caused real harm. Thirty-seven of the wells were built on or near existing Aboriginal waters, in the European style, which put many of them out of reach for the people who had used those waters for generations. Hauling the heavy buckets up took the strength of three men or a camel. The record says many Aboriginal people were injured or died trying, by falling in or breaking bones on the windlass handle. In response, buckets were cut off and timber was set alight, and by 1917 about half the wells had been vandalised or dismantled.
Canning also drew a detailed map of the route, showing the wells and his notes on land and water along the way. It has become a symbol of Australia's pioneering history.
The cattle that barely came
The first droving runs, from 1910, were small mobs of horses. The first started with 42 horses, and only nine survived the trip. The first mob of bullocks set out in January 1911, and the three men with it were killed at Well 37. A police expedition later that year was led by Sergeant R.H. Pilmer, and the record notes he acknowledged killing at least 10 Aboriginal people. That is the violence the route was born into, on both sides of the frontier.
On 7 September 1911 it was reported that the first mob of cattle to cover the entire length had reached Wiluna, apparently in better condition than when they left. It was a proof of concept, but not a commercial success. Between 1911 and 1931, only eight mobs of cattle were driven along it. Drovers were wary, and the route was rarely used for almost 20 years.
A 1928 Royal Commission into the price of beef got it reopened. William Snell was sent in 1929 to repair the wells and found that the only wells left undamaged were those Aboriginal people could use. He blamed the destruction on anger and frustration at being locked out of traditional water, and fitted some wells with ladders for easier access. He stopped after Well 35. Canning, then aged 70 by one account, finished the repairs in 1931.
Even then the route was used only around 20 times between 1931 and 1959. The big station owners stayed away, because the track could support only 600 head at a time, 200 fewer than first estimated. Carnegie had been right in 1896: it was impractical for cattle. Counting horse drives, there were just 37 recorded drives between 1910 and the last run in 1959.
From stock route to travellers' benchmark
Once the cattle stopped, something else started. In 1968 surveyors Russell Wenholz and David Chudleigh, and Noel Kealley, drove the whole track for the first time. A 1977 tour was the first commercial trip to complete it. Through the 1980s fuel dumps were set up and adventurous travellers got interested in the history and the challenge.
The record of how people have crossed it reads like a dare. In 1972 three men tried to walk it with homemade trolleys built from bicycle wheels and metal tubing, and the remains of one trolley still lie 19 kilometres north of Well 15. Murray Rankin, one of that trio, came back and finally walked it in 1976, finishing in just under three months. A beach buggy crossed in 1985 with a support crew carrying the fuel. A Citroën 2CV completed it in 1991, with a crew towing it over many of the dunes. In 2005 Jakub Postrzygacz became the first person to cover the whole track without support or food drops, riding a fatbike alone for 33 days and topping up water at the wells.
If you want a sense of how the route compares with other famous dirt, our feature on the Gibb River Road, from cattle track to bucket-list dirt covers another Kimberley route with its own droving past. The Canning sits well beyond it on the difficulty scale.
What the track asks of travellers today
The Canning Stock Route is now considered one of the world's great four-wheel drive adventures. It is not maintained beyond keeping the track open. Some wells have been restored and others are in ruins and unusable. It needs substantial planning and a convoy of well-equipped vehicles, and it is only practical in the cooler months. Fuel drops usually have to be arranged in advance, and fuel is available at Kunawarritji and Parnngurr communities, and at Billiluna near the northern end. The drive typically takes 10 to 20 days, with some accounts putting it at two to three weeks.
Our team reckons that is the real reason it is the benchmark. Plenty of Australian tracks are rough. Few combine that distance, that little support, and that much dependence on your own preparation. Anyone sizing up a rig for serious remote work might start with our listings of off-road caravans for sale, and the guide to what your car can tow is a sensible first stop before any ambition gets ahead of the numbers. Towing, weights and remote driving are matters for the relevant road authorities and experienced operators, and nothing here is a substitute for their advice.
Access matters too. The Kuju Wangka committee of the Yanunijarra Aboriginal Corporation closed the route to tourists in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and reopened it on 14 June 2022. Anyone planning a trip should check current conditions and access arrangements with the custodians before they commit.
A story told from more than one side
For a long time the history was written from the colonial point of view: explorers, drovers, prospectors and police. That is changing. In the words of Clifford Brooks of Wiluna in 2006, "The white man history has been told and it's today in the book. But our history is not there properly. We've got to tell 'em through our paintings."
That is what the Canning Stock Route Project set out to do. In 2006 the Western Australian cultural organisation Form started an arts initiative to explore the route's history through contemporary Aboriginal art, working with nine art centres and communities. A six-week, 1,850-kilometre journey from Wiluna to Billiluna brought artists back to Country, and the work that came out of it was acquired by the National Museum of Australia in 2008. The exhibition Yiwarra Kuju (One Road) ran from July 2010 to January 2011 and drew more than 120,000 visitors, the most successful exhibition in the museum's history up to then.
Researchers from the Australian National University also began work in 2007 on the first management plan for the whole route, aimed at protecting rock art and sites of special significance as visitor numbers grow. For travellers, that is a reminder that the track runs through living Country, not just a famous gap on the map.
If the Canning is on your long list, our roundup of bucket-list caravan trips around Australia, state by state puts it in context. And for a different take on what it takes to build a vehicle for punishing country, have a look at the Unimog expedition camper. Either way, the Canning will still be out there: a line of wells across three deserts, built for cattle that never really came, and still asking the same question of everyone who tries it.
For the full record, see the Wikipedia entry on the Canning Stock Route and the biography of Alfred Canning.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Canning Stock Route, accessed 11 November 2026
- Wikipedia, Alfred Canning, accessed 11 November 2026
