The De Grey-Mullewa Stock Route No. 9701, is a 1,500-kilometre stock route from Mullewa, near Geraldton to just east of the De Grey River, near Port Hedland. It is the first complete stock route and the longest place to be listed on the State Register of Heritage places.
The Stock Route has cultural heritage significance as it played an important role in opening up and sustaining the development of the northern districts for pastoralism from the late 1860s and demonstrates the great number and importance of stock being driven to Mullewa, the Perth metropolitan region, and the Eastern Goldfields.
The route directly facilitated the development of settlement, pastoralism and disrupted the lives of local Aboriginal people who had occupied the land and were faced with a new level of conflict over use and access of their land which they had never known before.
The route also demonstrates government responses to the needs of pastoralists by gazetting common land for the movement of stock and the construction of 55 wells to water the stock along the route. The wells used innovative boring technology to sink them at a greater speed and lower cost than had previously been achievable.
The route is a physical reminder of the incredible difficulties encountered in droving stock through uncleared land over long distances through arid regions in the nineteenth century.
The De Grey – Mullewa Stock Route provides insight into the lives and activities of the drovers and stockmen, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who lived and worked on the stock route. It is representative of the many stock routes established throughout Western Australia in the mid to late 1880s and early 1900s and is valued as a route linking people today to past movements of stock, and the romantic notions of the drover.
