My Kingdom for a Sheep

Of all the tall tales you might hear while holidaying in Australia—a land whose residents famously love to regale visitors with made-up stories—perhaps the tallest of all will be the one you hear in Murchison Station House, a 200,000-hectare sheep farm in the Western Australian outback. There you will be told that everything you see once belonged to Mukarram Jah, the eighth Nizam of Hyderabad, and that it was all seized when he failed to pay his debts. You may be inclined to laugh when you hear this. How could Jah, the grandest of Indian kings, inheritor of possibly the world's...