Australia holds the world's only wild herds of one-humped camels
The world's only dromedary camels living truly wild are not in Arabia but in the Australian outback. Brought in during the 1800s to haul goods across the desert, they were turned loose when trucks arrived. By 2008 estimates put their number above one million, able to double every 8 to 10 years.
The first camel landed at Port Adelaide in 1840, the sole survivor of a shipment from the Canary Islands. Named Harry, he joined John Horrocks's 1846 expedition near Lake Torrens and shifted while his owner was reloading a gun, which went off and wounded him. Horrocks died weeks later, remembered as the man shot by his own camel. The Burke and Wills expedition of 1860 then became the first major inland journey to rely on camels, with cameleers brought from Karachi because officials judged the animals nearly useless without their handlers.
Between 1870 and 1900 at least 15,000 camels arrived with their mostly Muslim handlers, lumped together as Afghans or Ghans though many were Pashtuns, Baluchis, Punjabis and Sindhis from British India. A bull camel could carry up to 600 kilograms, and strings covered more than 40 kilometres a day, hauling wool, supplies and pipe for the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme. The cameleers traded with Aboriginal groups, carrying red ochre along old routes like the Birdsville Track, bringing tea, sugar and metal tools, and learning where desert water lay; some partnerships ended in marriage. The White Australia policy of 1901 made entry harder, and motor transport in the 1920s and 1930s ended the trade, so many camels were simply released.
The descendants thrive on plants other animals refuse, eating more than 80 per cent of available species, and damage the land once they exceed two per square kilometre. They foul waterholes, trample sites of cultural importance to Aboriginal people, and can smell water up to five kilometres away, wrecking taps, pumps and even air conditioners to reach it. A $19 million control programme removed 160,000 animals between 2009 and 2013, after which a fresh analysis suggested the original count had been closer to 600,000.
Not everyone sees them only as pests. Some researchers argue they fill niches left by extinct giant marsupials such as Diprotodon, help reduce wildfires and suppress introduced weeds, and the Australian herd is notable for being free of disease.
Source: Australian feral camel
