I’ll be honest. I wasn’t expecting the camel.
The
hours tick by slowly when you’re driving Australia’s Stuart Highway.
Named after the 19th-Century explorer John McDouall Stuart, who was the
first European to successfully traverse the continent from sea to sea
and back again, the road broadly follows the route of his marathon
journey. It’s 2,834km long; a near-endless spool of bitumen stretching
from Port Augusta in the south to Darwin in the north, crossing what is
largely open wilderness. They call it, with some understatement, ‘The
Track’.
I knew to expect occasional wildlife, and sure enough the
emptiness of the plains was sporadically broken up by the presence of
the kind of climate-hardened animals Australia is famous for. There were
kangaroos gazing blankly into the distance and wedge-tailed eagles
hunkered over roadkill. On one occasion a dingo – a sandy-coloured wild
dog – appeared out in the scrub, lean and wiry in the heat. I slept in
the little outback towns that dot the route. Then, three days in, I saw a
camel.
More than 1 million feral camels roam the Australian outback (Credit: Posnov/Getty Images)
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I
looked online that evening to make sure I hadn’t been hallucinating.
Camels, you understand, are about as Australian as polar bears. Or
rather, that used to be true. It turned out I’d just been ill-informed –
and to a colossal degree. The outback was, and is, home to an
extraordinary number of wild camels. The government-supported website Feral Scan,
which monitors invasive species, puts the current number at between 1
and 1.2 million, with this amount reportedly doubling every eight or
nine years. It’s a wonder, frankly, that the highway isn’t one
continuous camel parade. So how on Earth did such a huge number of
non-native animals come to be here?
The answer begins back in the
pioneering days of characters like Stuart. To start with, there’s one
crucial thing that needs to be understood about Australia’s outback.
It’s big, in every direction. Very big. This is a mighty obvious
statement, but it’s the absolute essence of what makes the outback the
outback. The region covers more than 6 million sq km, or an area almost
twice the size of India. Out here, the horizons are just precursors to
more horizons.
The outback covers more than 6 million sq km, making it nearly twice the size of India (Credit: Medford Taylor/Getty Images)
When parts of coastal Australia were settled by
the British from the late 1700s onwards, the colonial thinking of the
day meant that a fuller exploration and understanding of this vast
landmass became seen as a necessity. Indigenous people had lived here
for tens of thousands of years – adapting, surviving, reading the land –
but for newly arrived Europeans, the interior was a sun-scorched,
unknowable expanse.
Inland expeditions began to take place with
regularity, in often punishing conditions. Confusion sometimes reigned –
a map from the early 1800s mistakenly shows a huge inland sea in the
centre of the country – but, explorer by explorer, the continent was
pieced together. Goldfields were discovered, outback settlements were
founded and formative transport routes were established. But covering
such extreme distances required packhorses or bullock teams, which
generally lacked the staying power for long, thirsty days of travel. The
alternative was obvious.
Between 1870 and 1920, as many as 20,000
camels were imported into Australia from the Arabian Peninsula, India
and Afghanistan, together with at least 2,000 handlers, or cameleers,
from the same regions. The animals were mainly dromedaries: half-ton
ungulates with a single hump. They were ideally suited to the climate of
the Australian interior: they could go weeks without water, and they
had the stamina and strength to carry their loads and riders across what
were often highly exposed, fiercely hot landscapes.
In the late 19th
and early 20th Centuries, camels transported goods and people across the
Australian interior (Credit: De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images)
The impact made by these camels – and just as
importantly, their handlers – over the following decades was
considerable. In her co-authored book Australia’s Muslim Cameleers: Pioneers of the Inland, 1860s-1930s,
Anna Kenny says that they have not been adequately acknowledged by
mainstream Australia even though they made significant cultural and
economic contributions to Australian society. “The cameleers opened
lines of supply, transport and communication between isolated
settlements, making the economic development of arid Australia possible.
They also enriched the cultural landscape.”
The cameleers opened lines of supply... making the economic development of arid Australia possible
Laden
camels became a fixture of outback life. They carried wool and water,
telegraph poles and railway sleepers, tea and tobacco. Aboriginals began
to incorporate camel hair into their artefacts. Even today, the luxury
train that runs vertically across the country between Adelaide and
Darwin is named The Ghan, in honour of the cameleers, who came to be
referred to generically as ‘Afghans’.
By the 1930s, however, the
camel industry went belly-up. The arrival of the internal combustion
engine, and motorised transport, meant camels became almost redundant as
pack-carriers. A four-legged mammal was no match for a goods vehicle,
regardless of how stoic it remained in 40C heat. Thousands of camels
were released into the wild, where, naturally, they thrived. Fast
forward nine decades, and their numbers have ballooned.
The feral camel
population has become a nuisance, wreaking havoc on outback communities
and the grazing lands of native wildlife (Credit: The Sydney Morning
Herald/Getty Images)
But all is not well. Australia has had a serious
camel problem for some time. The animals themselves may come across as
gentle, lackadaisical beasts, but good luck telling that to the outback
communities whose fences they routinely destroy, whose pipes they break
and whose waterholes they drink dry. They also have a profound bearing
on native wildlife, stripping their traditional grazing lands bare. In
the words of modern-day explorer Simon Reeve, camels “are almost
uniquely brilliant at surviving the conditions in the outback.
Introducing them was short-term genius and long-term disaster.”
Introducing them was short-term genius and long-term disaster
Drastic measures have been employed to curb the population. It was reported
in late 2013 that the government-funded Australian Feral Camel
Management Project had culled around 160,000 camels in the years since
2009, usually by gunshot. Unsurprisingly, this blunt approach has been
heavily criticised by some, and there have been attempts to turn the
country’s influx of wild camels into a positive.
One such example is Summer Land Camels,
which now grazes more than 550 camels on its 850-acre organic farm in
Queensland. It vaunts the benefits of camel’s milk and camel’s milk
products, which are high in essential unsaturated fatty acids and
vitamin C, and has a range of dairy goods that includes everything from
fromage blanc and marinated Persian feta to salted-caramel gelato – all
made using camel’s milk. Elsewhere in Queensland, meanwhile, the QCamel dairy has announced it will be launching camel’s milk chocolates later this year.
Camel farms like
QCamel dairy (pictured) shine a positive light on the camel population
by promoting the benefits of camel’s milk (Credit: Lisa Maree
Williams/Getty Images)
Where the future lies for the country’s wild
camels is uncertain. It still amazes me that there are quite so many of
them out there. Since that first trip down the Stuart Highway I’ve made
two more trans-continental journeys across Australia, but I haven’t yet
spotted another wild camel. Not so much as a silhouette in the distance.
But that’s the thing about Australia – it’s a place where the map
stretches on forever, where horizons jelly in the heat, and where even
the statistics exist on an unfathomable scale.
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