Old Laura Homestead, Heritage listed homestead in Rinyirru National Park, Queensland, Australia

Old Laura Homestead is a heritage-listed station complex in Rinyirru National Park, built from 1902. Its main house is a two-room high-set timber-frame building clad in corrugated galvanised iron, elevated on local ironwood stumps, with enclosed verandahs on three sides. The outbuildings include a workshop and saddle shed with corrugated iron bow roofs, a meat house with a tree-trunk chopping block, and stockyards.

The property began in 1879 when Peter McDermott and Fergus O'Beirne received approval to settle land along the lower Laura River. They established a livestock operation that would influence the district for decades to come.

The name Laura comes from the river the run was taken up on; McDermott and O'Beirne, cousins from Ireland, ran a butcher's business in Cooktown before stocking the lower Laura. The homestead later served as a station hub, and its workshop doubled at times as living quarters. Visitors can still see the meat house with its gauze-walled butchering room and tree-trunk chopping block.

The site sits within a national park surrounded by natural bushland that you can explore on foot. Plan time to walk between the different buildings spread across the property, as pathways may be uneven in places.

The saddle shed doubled as stables for the manager's and owner's racehorses in the 1950s and 1960s, and timber racks for harness and saddles are still keyed into its uprights. At the rear stands a timber rack built to hold 44-imperial-gallon (200 L) drums of molasses and fuel.