Mileura Station

With financial assistance from their father, Frederick Walsh (1831-1905) of Hawthorn, Victoria the brothers purchased about half (700,000 acres) of Nookawarra Station from the then owner, explorer Frank Wittenoom.

This was led by Dr Stephen Davies, head of CSIRO Wildlife Research in Western Australia 1969-1983 and an associate professor of Environmental Biology at Curtin University from 1989.

Other scientists to lead research based at Mileura included Professor John Valley of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Professor Simon Wilde of Curtin University, who with their teams located and dated the 4.4 billion year old zircons that showed that life might have existed on Earth as much as 800 million years before the oldest known micro-fossil.

In the 1950s Stephen Davies and Matcham Walsh arranged radio carbon-dating of a hearth in a cave in the Ejah Breakaway, about 18 km south/west of the homestead.

It seems likely that the cave, well positioned near a water hole and having a panoramic view over the surrounding plains, was once an Aboriginal resting place, or perhaps a ceremonial site.