TheBanyanTree: The riding of camels

[Peter Macinnis]

The first thing you notice about camels is their immense height and their
apparent restiveness.  The restiveness is not unsurprising, given that many
of them have been maltreated -- I have had two pre-battered dogs in my
life, and the attitude is similar, and allayed by gentleness.  There is a
smell, true, but it is not an unpleasant smell, and there is a majesty in
the way they hoosh down into the kneeling position and settle their feet
under them.

We had five camels for three people -- we were lucky that it was a light
week (Phil leaves on another light week tomorrow, and then the rest of his
season is filled) so there were no assistants, just two paying customers
who pulled their weight, learning the basics of working with four very
experienced camels (one of them was a rather famous racer in her day,
called Wally) and a "young punk", Wahabi, who has still to discover the joy
of eating carrot and orange peel. The others were mature cows (I am fairly
sure they were all cows, but was neither assiduously avoiding or studying
their under-areas - I assume a bull has at least a visible scrotum.)

Before I left Adelaide by painful coach (even moire painful on my
saddle-sore return), I spent some time in the Mortlock Library researching
John Horrocks, the man who was shot by his camel in 1846, and I had a bit
of an off-list chat with a friend who has camels of her own.  I am now as
satisfied as I can be that nobody on that trip had any sympathy with
animals -- or with Harry the Camel in particular (the others included S. T.
Gill, whose journal I now have, and a jinx of a man called Theakston, a
tent-keeper/cook called Garlick, plus Kilroy and Jimmy Moorehouse).  The
shooting was an accident, but Horrocks had some compassion for the camel.
As he lay dying of gangrene, he ordered that the camel be shot, not from
revenge, as I had suspected, but from a concern that camels might all be
judged by Harry.

So I had already put down mishandling as a likely explanation for the
problems Horrocks' party faced, but all my friends and acquaintances
assured me that I would be kicked, bitten and spat at.  This did not accord
with my experience of making a zoo camel take a squashed fly biscuit in two
halves at the age of four, much to the distress of certain adults.  I
approached the camels with an open mind, knowing that insurance premiums
with biting camels would be horrendous.  I was not kicked (Wally bumped me
with her foot once when I got in the way -- it was like being bumped with a
felt slipper), nor was I spat at or bitten, but I was nuzzled from time to
time.  We were riding camels in a string, not controlling our animals, and
Wobbleguts who followed my camel, Goobs, enjoyed surging up and laying her
head on my thigh or snuffling over my shoulder, or nudging me in the back
or upper arm.  I think he liked the smell of my sun block.

The area we went into was in the Denison Range, south of Oodnadatta, near
the Peake Overland Telegraph Line repeater station where telegraphists once
sweltered as they transcribed messages to and from Europe and then sent
them on. This is where Stuart passed through as he headed north, travelling
from mound spring to mound spring (artesian springs that slowly build up a
mound of minerals around the point where water comes out of the ground), a
path that Aboriginal people had walked long before -- the signs are there
in stone flakes scattered on the ground and more. Later carts and drays
hauled by bullocks and parched horses pushed through that way, then came
the telegraph line and the Ghan, a train line that pushed up into the dry
country.  The camels were there before the Ghan, and even afterwards,
camels carried railway families from place to place, and carried goods away
from the rail line. Some camels even drew carts, and they flourished in an
area where cattle and horses could not.

(By a grand coincidence, the rail line to Darwin that the Ghan was always
going to be in the 19th century was completed - today . . .)

Most of the rocks there are metamorphic tantalisers, and there is copper in
places, enough to bring Cornish hardrock miners up from Moonta, and the
hills are dotted with small scrabble holes showing the colour of copper,
and on an old wagon trail, you can sometimes see a bit of ore that fell to
one side, and here and there you will see horseshoes that tell us there
were those unable or unwilling to use camels. Small traces tell the story,
and everything picked up went back in its place, to preserve the story for
the next reader, in much the way that we leave the words on a page as we
found them.

Sadly, not everybody did so in the past: the OTL posts, every 80 paces or
so, were cut down so the wire could be retrieved, and now there are just
stumps over the hills, a scattering of broken porcelain insulators, and a
faint camel pad that was established by those who maintained the wire, and
kept going ever after by the wild donkeys. The ground is hard, and stones
are sharp, so all of the animals get from place to place along pads, faint
paths that show up in the distance, angling up and down the hills, joining
and splitting, showing the way forward. Time has cleared the pads of stones
that might hurt, and in soft ground, the pads have compacted and offer a
firmer footing that is filled in. In places, pads have failed to fill, and
have even been enough to divert the waters in times of rain, but animals
have always made pads and always will. Even the kangaroos and euros move
along pads, leaving enough tektite-like droppings to show ownership.

(My interest here is that it is my contention, based on reliable evidence,
that "explorers" followed such pads, and in particular, what they called
"native paths" -- I was working on this trip, not just goofing off.)

Having met our camels, we learned to saddle them.  The saddle has two
"seat" positions, but only one set of stirrups, placed for the rear
position -- a swag or other gear generally goes on the front one.  There is
a saddle make who builds these with steel and leather, snug caps that fit
over the hump, secured by two girths and a neck strap. Hooshed down, the
camel's back is easy enough to reach, but when the girth strap is slipped
under, it picks up rocks and sand that need to be cleared off.  There is
also the need to "deprickle" the camels, removing twigs from trees rubbed
against, burrs picked up while rolling in the sand, before blankets are
laid down. For all but the last camel, there is an after-rope that holds in
the neck rope of the camel behind

Once the saddle is fitted and tested, saddle bags carrying water, food and
equipment are fitted.  These bags are all laid out either side of a
corridor that the camels are led into, and each camel has four such bags.
The camels usually slept a little way off, tied up for the night after
having a feed, but they were allowed off, in hobbles, in the morning to
feed.  When we brought them back into the corridor, they entered in order
and so were correctly lined up with their gear. We carried everything,
though Phil did have a sat phone and GPS equipment that we knew enough
about to use if a need arose.

In no time, you find yourself stepping through the camel line, brushing
past huge heads filled with grinding teeth, where guts rumble as cud is
drawn up to be worked over. The massive feet are safely tucked under the
camel in front, but the camel behind is likely to itch its nose on you as
you go by, or rest its chin on you while exhaling cuddy breath. Each can
carry 200 kilos or more and cross hundreds of kilometres without water
other than that generated from the food - if Eyre had camels rather than
horses, he would have lost far less time, because he was forever
back-tracking to get water for the horses. After Horrocks, there were few
camels until 1865, when Sir Thomas Elder brought in 125 and established a
camel stud, but by 1876, they were the standard animal, transport and food
in one package - Warburton notes that camel's foot was a delicacy, but the
man also enjoyed eating cockatoo, and prescribed kite's gizzard for scurvy.

Sleeping gear was a standard jackeroo's swag, which has enough padding for
ground cleared of gross rockery -- which made our meeting with a dingo
interesting -- the other paying customer was American, and had a degree of
fear about dingoes.  When she called in the middle of the night that there
was a dingo, I assumed she was dreaming, but the dingo wandered off and had
a chew at the leather covering of an axe before being shooed, and then
wandered round for a look at me. Sadly, I failed to think clearly and use
the camera, but I filled many cards with digital images, still to be
processed -- I took most at 4 megapixels and will need to sort and clean up
before cropping.

If you are technically concerned - my friend Julia was - the older camels
tend to have nose pegs, Wally's being on the left, while Goobs and Pedy had
them on the right (I think -- it will be in the pictures).  I am not sure
why Phil avoids it now -- I think he said it wasn't cruel, but it certainly
looks unpleasant.

Why have I gone into such detail?  Well, in part because I am still unable
to find the ground with my feet, but perhaps more because of what I saw:
and here comes the science.

We were on Kidman land the whole time, but we crossed from stocked land
where there is permanent water (pumped up by windmills into troughs) into
unstocked land. I have enough training to be able to see the difference,
but it is hard to miss.  Now if a pastoral company wanted to clear land,
they would need all sorts of permits, but putting in 60 km of polypipe and
troughs, and turning stock onto the land is acceptable -- yet it is exactly
the same as clearance.  I listened to the matter being discussed on ABC
radio in Coober Pedy just before I left, and I think it may be the next big
battle. It deserves to be.

Permanent water means more than stock trampling the fragile ground. It
means cats, foxes, brumbies, more rabbits, more dingoes, more threats to
the fragile wildlife of the area. It is uncontrolled clearance that has the
potential to smash ecosystems.  While we saw a scorpion and a redback, we
saw no snakes, though there were two perenties and a few smaller lizards.
Most of the mound springs harbour species all of their own -- in fact,
there is one fig tree up past Alice Springs that is the ONLY known habitat
of a snail species, and there are many, many more that just haven't been
seen yet.  Like rivets in a bridge, you can dispense with quite a few
species, and nobody can predict when the bridge will fall: would YOU stand
in mid-bridge and test the strength of it?

You cannot be sure of keeping cattle out of those fragile areas, not if
camels come through, though camels on their own simply will not do the same
harm. You cannot justify experiments that may result in the loss of a species.

However you look at it, extinction is demeaning of life.


  _--|\    Peter Macinnis                  macinnis at ozemail.com.au
 /     \   Theoretical chair in Iatrogenic Epistemology (note: the 
 \.--._*   Practical Chair in this School was taken during a brief 
      v    lull in the music)  http://www.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis