Quotes of the Day
We rolled out our swags beneath the shade of a coolibah tree and watched and waited, ravenous, while the billy boiled. This was a truly Waltzing Matilda moment except for one seemingly un-Australian note—the chime of a camel bell and the sight of its wearer extending a long, furry neck to prune the top of an acacia bush not far from our bedrolls.
In fact, camels have been a part of Australian life since 1840—more than 50 years before Waltzing Matilda was even composed. Strings of the haughty beasts speeded up European exploration of the continent's interior, and helped open it up for ranchers. Shipped over en masse from what is now Pakistan, these dromedaries delivered freight and carried mail, and when superseded by motor vehicles, were turned loose and left to fend for themselves. Ideally suited to the rough desert conditions of Australia's interior, the hardy beasts soon bred themselves into a vast, wild population of at least 200,000—the world's largest.
Rounded up on motorbikes and redomesticated, camels now provide visitors to Australia with everything from stately rides out for dinner to serious re-creations of the desert treks of the past. They're on menus and in museums, and camel racing draws large crowds to tiny towns whose individual populations usually struggle to reach three digits. There's no better way to get close to the outback than on camelback.
But getting to my camel camp of choice run by Explore the Outback (www.austcamel.com.au/explore.htm) turned out to be a trek in itself. I hitched a ride on the twice-weekly mail truck from the South Australian opal-mining town of Coober Pedy to Warriner, a long-abandoned railway depot in the middle of nowhere. "You'll be all right with Phil," the cheerful driver assured me. "He's a bit of a bushie." It wasn't a reference to his foot-long beard. Wearing a check shirt and a tall, rabbit-felt hat, trek leader Phil Gee looked the part of a man more comfortable in the outback than indoors.
In an age when "adventure" and "exploration" make for common tourist-brochure copy, he offers the real thing. Carrying a mental list of abandoned miners' huts and trails waiting to be discovered, Gee takes a Sherlock Holmes approach to exploring this remote corner of the outback, hunting for traces of human passage. Each group of about 12 tourists accompanies him on a slightly different trek—ensuring that his clients get a unique trip, and he a chance to fill in the blank spaces on the map. Gee's guests ride through some of Australia's most austere terrain, participating in the full desert trek experience—much like the original European explorers.
Our first task of the morning was to find and saddle our string of camels. Once yanked away from a tantalizing buffet of acacias, the animals responded to our well rehearsed commands of "Hoosh down," dropping suddenly to their front knees and clumsily concertinaing their back legs under their bellies. Once saddled up we plodded off into the vast, silent emptiness in search of clues to outback history, startling kangaroos and emus accustomed to having the arid landscape to themselves. Was that faint track across a low, stony hill merely made by wild goats? No, over the rise was a roofless, drystone miners' hut, still surrounded by a litter of schnapps bottles as undisturbed as the day they were drained and dropped. We left them there, in their context, for others to rediscover.
But not all encounters with Australian camels involve one-pot dinners cooked on campfires, going unwashed for four days or sleeping under the stars. At the town of Alice Springs the ships of the desert bunk down in the suburbs, where Frontier Camels runs its Take a Camel to Dinner tour, which includes an hour-long ramble to a rustic restaurant and camel museum; click on cameltours.com.au for more info. The menu features excellent kangaroo sausage and bush tomato pesto, along with a selection of camel cuts. Despite my growing affection for the ungainly beasts, I must admit that smoked camel goes down well with a fine Australian Shiraz. 
- Peter Neville-Hadley
- It doesn't get more down under than this