Over a dried-up creek where river red gum trees cluster, we come to a halt in the dusty yard of a remote farm. Here, the heavy silence of the outback is broken by an enormous Chewbacca-like groan, and a great smiling creature cranes its sea-monster neck over a wooden fence.
Australia has its share of animals that look pretty weird to European eyes but it is still a shock to see a camel in the heart of the Flinders Ranges, in South Australia, where kangaroos hop and emus stride under the fierce sun. Camels are not native but have traversed this vast country for more than 150 years, ever since mid-19th century explorers used them to open up its inhospitable desert interior to trains, mining and sheep farming. Like many animals introduced to the continent from Europe, including foxes and rabbits, wild camels are now a pest, and a million of these indomitable beasts now roam free in central Australia.
Below a mountain called Devil’s Peak lives a man who is doing something about it. Graham Cannard, a fourth-generation cameleer, has set up home here with his young family and 15 camels, which he caught from the wild and trained to carry visitors into the outback. A lean, wiry man in ripped jeans, eyes shaded by an Akubra bush hat, Cannard is a quintessential bushman — a great storyteller with a psychic connection to camels.
Camels are saddled with a reputation as aggressive, grumpy beasts who smell bad and spit. Cannard is keen to change this. “Don’t go on your cover. Open your book, read a few pages,” he says. They are not aggressive if treated well. “I treat my camels like I do my boys, with a lot of love and affection,” he says. “Camels are very misunderstood animals.”
Cannard was born among camels — if he cried as a baby, he was placed in a basket on a camel until he fell asleep — and if Australia has a better camel whisperer, I’d like to meet him. Cannard’s great grandfather, Hezekiah, an immigrant from Germany, fled internment in Australia during the World War I by heading into the outback. In Australia anyone who looked after camels was known as an “Afghan.” Hezekiah became an Afghan — he bought several camels.
Cannard’s dad, Lofty, a wild-horse catcher and champion rodeo rider, continued the family love affair with camels and founded a traveling rodeo show. The youngest of nine boys in Lofty’s eccentric, itinerant menagerie, which included two lioness cubs and a chimp called Tarzan, Cannard skipped school and devoted his life to animals, competing on the professional rodeo circuit and racing camels. (His much-loved camel Camanchi, descended from his great-grandfather’s first camels, once ran 400m in 28 seconds — significantly faster than Usain Bolt.) Such was his talent for breaking in wild camels that he was asked to train elephants in Indonesia.
“Marry him, marry his camels,” says his wife, Jannene, before we disappear on our camel trek. When they first met, Cannard phoned Jannene, a “city girl,” and, in a stately, old-fashioned way, asked her if he could “come courting.” He told her he would bring a gift; excited, Jannene imagined jewelry. Instead, Cannard turned up with a baby bull camel.
We drive in Cannard’s battered truck, with five camels in the back, deeper into the Flinders. You may think you’ve understood the size of the Australian outback from looking at a map but the scale of it is still a shock once you get there. The pleasantly rolling Flinders Ranges are far less bleak than much of the bush, but hardly anyone lives here.
On a barbed wire fence hang the bodies of 15 foxes — a sign that the landowner doesn’t like non-indigenous animals. A heat haze shimmers and a sleepy shingleback lizard shuffles off the dirt road. We pull up at an abandoned farm. Giant crickets leap from the dry grass. “Cheek cheek,” call noisy flocks of pink-and-gray galahs, as Cannard unloads our camels and starts saddling up.
And they’re off
Our train, or string, of camels begins with Rex at the front, followed by Bonnie, Crystal, Myrtle and Feral. “Hoosh down,” says Cannard and in three clunky movements, the camels obediently drop to their knees so we can climb on. Cannard is so at ease with his camels I imagine he could lead a string of 100 but he prefers small groups and usually takes out just six people, 12 at the most. I ride Myrtle; ominously Graeme Robertson, the Guardian’s photographer, gets the beast called Feral.
We ride into a valley that is empty, except for the wildlife. Kangaroos lying up in the shade of trees hop away looking, to our eyes, every bit as weird as prehistoric creatures. Out of nowhere, the wind gets up and a mini tornado, called a whirly-whirly, dances through the dusty landscape.
“She’ll take you through trees,” warns Cannard as I settle into Myrtle’s comfortable saddle, just behind her hump. Deliberately walking new riders under low branches is a camel’s favorite joke. As Myrtle places her front feet down, they bounce and spring like a new pair of trainers. A camel takes 90 percent of its weight on its front feet; they look like an enormous and very comfy pair of slippers. But despite my tentative patting, Myrtle is fairly contemptuous of her new rider: she drags me against a dead tree and then swerves the wrong way around a wattle tree so its branches whip me. I am being tested.
The sun beats down and the air smells of eucalyptus under the big gums in the bottom of a dry creek. We stop for a picnic lunch in the shade of a dead tree that has shed its bark like a snake might its skin. Storytelling is a great outback tradition and Cannard spins so many fine yarns your sense of reality gets tangled. If there is anything you don’t believe in this story, blame him. His dad taught him how to fall from a bucking horse and land on his feet; his worst injury from rodeo was a broken thumb (and that because he was showing off to several Sheilas); but breaking in camels has proved far more hazardous.
“If you’re gonna work with big wild animals, you’re gonna get hurt,” he shrugs. “Anyone who tells you any different is a liar.”
My favorite “is-he-having-me-on?” story is that you can put your ear to the trunk of a eucalyptus tree and listen to it drinking.
After lunch, Myrtle seems more accepting of me, particularly when I gaze into her limpid eyes and give her a cuddle. The back of a camel makes a perfect — and safe — vantage point from which to admire wild Australia. The camels tread carefully up a dried riverbed. There are lethal brown snakes here but Cannard has never heard of a camel being bitten. Whenever we stop for a break, I order Myrtle to sit but I am as inconsequential as a fly on her delicate, expressive ears. She makes it very clear that the only authority she respects is Cannard’s. Only he can get her to “hoosh down.”
It is a delight to watch him work with his animals. When we climb out of the valley, he gruffly shouts orders at Rex, who groans just like Chewie and shows off his blue-gray tongue and missing teeth. At other times, he croons softly to them. Camels, he explains, as a wedge-tailed eagle swoops overhead, are formidable working animals. They live to about 45 and can carry up to a tonne — more than their own body weight — making them proportionally stronger beasts of burden than elephants.
As the light softens, we return to camp at the abandoned farm. I am tired after a day riding Myrtle but not uncomfortable; Robertson the photographer, however, claims he can hardly walk after a day bouncing around on Feral. I suspect he’s just a whining Scot.
Out of nowhere, like a mirage, a chef strolls up in immaculate whites and tall hat. Bart Brooks sets up a barbecue in the concrete-floored sheep-shearing shed (in summer they never have open fires because of the fire risk, but on winter treks Cannard will often deem it safe). Sitting around a makeshift table in the shade, we tuck into yabbies for starters. These large freshwater prawns were caught in a nearby lake by Cannard and have a subtle, slightly muddy flavor, and are gloriously fresh. The steak that follows is so tender you don’t need a steak knife, and is served with sweet potatoes (which Cannard tries to claim are local yams; I’m starting to wise up to his tall stories) and a native pepper relish made by Jannene. Dessert is meringue with crushed wattleseed, which gives the cream a delicate coffee flavor.
Postprandial tales
After dinner we crack open some more cold beers from the cool box and Cannard tells us about the cross-eyed bull rider (when he cried his tears rolled down his back) and the time his dad went out on the booze, returned home and was attacked by Sheba the lioness when he opened the bedroom door. Sheba couldn’t smell it was him because he’d drunk so much. Lofty apparently said: “They are going tomorrow.” To which his wife replied, “No, you go.” (Lofty stayed, and the lions were given to a wildlife park.)
As a full moon rises behind a gum tree, the silence is dramatically broken by a cackling and hooting that sounds like a troop of monkeys but turns out to be a single kookaburra, that sturdy little Australian bird.
The group prepares to bed down in the sheep shearing shed, but I’m determined to make like Ray Mears for one night and unfurl my swag — the classic bushman’s bedroll, supplied by Cannard — in the paddock, with the camels, under the stars. I have never slept outdoors without a tent before and it is magical. I fall asleep to the strange music that is camels chewing cud (it sounds like footsteps on gravel). All the chewing leads to a startling regurgitation: you can watch a lump racing down and then back up their long necks as if a mouse was scurrying under their skin.
A wonderfully cooling wind gets up and, by dawn, as the moon dips beyond the other side of the valley, the air is sweet and fresh. I am extremely cozy in a sleeping bag on my swag, although my foolish failure to pack insect repellent has turned me into a tantalizing snack for the mosquitoes.
We start early, to catch the clear light of early morning. A kangaroo crosses our path.
“Hey, Skip, what you doing?” our cameleer calls out, reciting lines from the Australian TV classic, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. “You’re going the wrong way. Sonny’s hurt, Skip. Stop the bank robbers, you mongrel!”
Myrtle’s flanks feel warm against my feet as we head into a dry creek, past two twisted sides of a dead tree trunk. Split apart, they look like a couple dancing. When I “hoosh down” Myrtle, she does not bat an eyelid. I feel our relationship is improving but there is something nobly implacable about these beasts. How intelligent are camels? “Near as smart as a dog,” nods Cannard. “You can show me the smartest horse and I’ll show you the dumbest camel and he will be smarter than the horse.”
We enter Warren Gorge between great pillars of eroded red rock 800 million years old. (David Attenborough filmed the earliest known fossilized life forms nearby for his recent First Life series.) Today, the steep rocky outcrops are home to the elusive yellow-footed rock wallaby. Within seconds Cannard has spotted one with his shrewd bushman’s gaze. We see several more darting up the slope into the morning sunshine.
Swaying on a warm animal with the sun on my back, I wish I could continue camel trekking all week but the pleasures of Adelaide — an Australian city which has kept its old-fashioned charm while adding fashionable restaurants — are calling.
By now Robertson is claiming he can hardly walk whenever we all hoosh down for a little break. Finally I swap Myrtle for Feral and discover that he is not a whining Scot after all. Feral may be Cannard’s favorite “one in a million” camel but riding her is like being on a ship in high seas. Where my Myrtle’s tread was calm and relaxed, she jerks and jolts through the landscape.
Cannard cackles delightedly. “Why do you think she’s called Feral?”
On the Net: pichirichicameltours.com
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