TheBanyanTree: The Camels are Coming

[Peter Macinnis]

The camel has a hare-lip,
And a back that is bimodal
And it has a nasty temper
Because it cannot yodel.
It should not be confused with
The one-hump dromedary
Whose Australian distribution
Is from Broome to Bomaderry

With that mnemonic to aid us, we should be able to recall that the camel in
Australia is _Camelus dromedarius_, the dromedary. Only about twenty of the
two-humped Bactrian camels of the colder deserts were ever brought to
Australia, and the present stock of about half a million are all
dromedaries. Now they are a feral pest, but in the past, they served
Australian exploration remarkably well. Ernest Giles, one of the best of
the desert explorers in Australia, wrote:

"My first and second expeditions were conducted entirely with horses; in
all my after journeys I had the services of camels, those wonderful ships
of the desert, without whose aid the travels and adventures which are
subsequently recorded could not possibly have been achieved, nor should I
now be alive, as Byron says, to write so poor a tale, this lowly lay of mine."
                              - Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed.

Giles made his five journeys in the period 1872 to 1876, and it is worth
keeping 1876 in mind for a moment. In 1922, Bessie Threadgill, Tinline
Scholar at the University of Adelaide, wrote a fine history of land
exploration in South Australia in the period 1856 to 1880. Like most
professional historians, she wrote mainly from written sources, but she
must have had access either to some of the old explorers, or to those who
had known them. That being so, her asides are a good indication of the
realities of mapping a parched landscape. At the end of chapter VI, she
writes "In 1870 camels for Australian exploration were exotics, worth
travelling many miles to see, and not always recognized when seen. In 1876,
they were more indispensable than damper, bully beef or blackfellow."

Perhaps we can allow that non-PC term to stand for now. At least it reveals
an important truth about explorers that we will come back to later. For
now, the key issue is that camels counted for more than experienced guides
or food, because they could travel long distances without water, and carry
tremendous loads, but Threadgill seems to have brushed past the earliest
and rather ill-fated instances of camel exploration in Australia.

The first camels reached Australia in 1840, but of the nine that set out
from the Canary Islands, only one, a camel called Harry, was still alive in
1846, by which time he was in the possession of John Ainsworth Horrocks, an
Englishman who had come to seek his fortune in Australia as a squatter,
somebody who moved out into the wilderness, took the best land, and hoped
to keep it when civilisation and land allocation caught up.

John Horrocks, his brother Eustace, and their butler, John Green, reached
South Australia in March 1839. They were accompanied by other family
servants, four merino rams and some sheepdogs, stores and equipment, and
they landed at Holdfast Bay on John's 21st birthday.

The boys came of a wealthy cotton-mill-owning family, and their father had
paid for them to acquire 1000 acres of land, but the land surveys were in a
mess and Edward John Eyre had reported excellent land near the Hutt River
(where the town of Clare stands today). So John Horrocks and Green went,
looked, and decided to take a chance. Horrocks remained behind, sheltering
in a hollow tree while Green went and fetched his brother, stores and
stock, and servants.

They established Hope Farm and a village called Penwortham, after the
ancestral home in Lancashire, and by 1842, there were 24 people, 3200
sheep, 26 cattle and four horses there, but no camels as yet. Soon,
Horrocks began ranging further afield, seeking yet greener pastures.

Writing in 1914, a historian quotes an unnamed source who described
Horrocks as "a young man of splendid physique". Tall, handsome in a dashing
Byronic manner, Horrocks named his favourite greyhound Gulnare after a
Byronic hound, and he also favoured a plain that he passed with the same
name, in commemoration of his hound's faithful efforts in that vicinity in
catching and killing emus for him to eat in 1841.

He kept an open house, feeding all those who called in for a supper,
lodging and breakfast, and acquiring staff from odd sources. One of them,
an indigent sculptor called Theakston, he acquired from a debtors' prison,
but Horrocks remained slightly aloof, eating at a barrel specially set up
for him each night with a clean cloth and a silver fork and spoon.

This was the man who set off in late July of 1846, with Theakston as his
second-in-command, a cook called Garlick, and a 'black boy' (an Aborigine)
named Jimmy Moorehouse. They were accompanied by the soon-to-be-famous
artist, S. T. Gill, who came along at no salary, to record the expedition,
in the hope of being able to sell some of his works on his return. There
was also a camel driver named Kilroy, and, of course, a camel, in this case
named Harry, the only survivor of nine camels imported from Tenerife by
Henry Phillips. Horrocks paid Phillips six cows, to the value of 90 pounds.
It was not a good bargain, for Harry was not the best-natured of animals.

While John Horrocks modelled himself on Lord Byron in some respects, he was
a deeply religious man, and perhaps Harry heard his master citing Isaiah
40:6 and took it too literally, but whatever the reason, Harry bit people
and other animals. No sooner had the expedition set out than Harry bit the
cook on the head, badly enough to need dressing and sticking plaster. In
his journal, Horrocks notes that the camel " . . . had in the morning taken
one of the goats in his mouth across the loins, and would have broken his
back if Jimmy had not run to its rescue."

The goats themselves were something of a problem. The explorers had taken
goats as a source of meat in preference to sheep, because goats would be
harder to steal, as Horrocks explains in his journal: " . . . as they give
tongue immediately they are caught, so the natives could not take any beast
without being heard." All the same, on the night of July 31, the goats fled
the camp, apparently having scented a wild dog, but once they learned to
tether the leading goat, the flock stayed with the camp.

But to return to our camels, the party pushed on into dry country, leaving
their horses behind, but accompanied by the surly camel, carrying 356
pounds weight. Horrocks, Kilroy and Gill were on foot near a Lake that
Horrocks had named Lake Gill (it is now Lake Dutton) when misfortune
struck. The account that follows was dictated by Horrocks:

". . . Bernard Kilroy, who was walking ahead of the party, stopped, saying
he saw a beautiful bird, which he recommended me to shoot to add to the
collection.

"My gun was loaded with slugs in one barrel and ball in the other, I
stopped the camel to get at the shot belt, which I could not get without
his laying down.

"Whilst Mr. Gill was unfastening it I was screwing the ramrod into the
wadding over the slugs close alongside of the camel. At this moment the
camel gave a lurch to one side, and caught his pack in the cock of my gun,
which discharged the barrel I was unloading, the contents of which first
took off the middle fingers of my  right hand between the second and third
joints, and entered my left cheek by my lower jaw, knocking out a row of
teeth from my upper jaw."

They were, he goes on to say, 65 miles from the depot where the horses
were, and they had just five gallons of water. Kilroy headed back to
Theakston and the horses, a trip that took four days. Loading Horrocks on
the horse, they got him back to Penwortham, where Green dressed his wounds,
but gangrene had set in, and Horrocks died, even after an operation on the
gangrenous finger.

It was agreed that Harry the camel must die for his part in the death of
his master, but when the first bullet did not kill him, Harry turned and
bit the head of Jimmy Moorehouse who was holding him, but the second bullet
settled his fate, and Australia was free of camels for a few more years.

peter


  _--|\    Peter Macinnis             macinnis at ozemail.com.au
 /     \   Feral wordsmith on the right side of Oz at Manly
 \.--._* <-NSW, where they also surf who only stand and wade
      v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm