DESERT TAILS
Travel with a caravan of camels into the Simpson Desert to map both the Earth and the sky.
YOU WON’T FIND AUSTRALIAN DESERT Expeditions’ scientific surveys on the Flight Centre specials board next to crazy-good deals to Ubud and the Goldie. Walking 120 kilometres through the Simpson Desert (Munga-Thirri National Park) to examine the “current status of desert flora and fauna” and document its Indigenous history is not your average flop-and-drop jaunt. The logistics of negotiating a few weeks through one of the world’s driest environments without vehicles are perplexing enough, and an impossibility without one element: camels.
But banish fanciful ideas of rides into the sunset, because not a single animal is straddled. The camels are, to put it bluntly, our beasts of burden, humping enough rations to complete the mission, which leaves only boot and toe prints in the Simpson’s red dunes. We’ll not shower (except for using wet wipes to clean our nooks), and we’ll burn and bury our No. 2s like pagans. Those are the hows; here come the whys.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
The ‘Mail Run’ from Brisbane to Birdsville bunny-hops into five tiny airports, including one I’d never heard of before. Before every take-off, the flight attendant repeats the safety spiel to essentially the same folk. ADE owner Andrew Harper greets me at Birdsville’s tin-shed airport; he reckons this teensy frontier town – population 140 – feels a “bit suburban”. Then again, Andrew once walked across the entire breadth of Australia (along the Tropic of Capricorn) for 229 days with just a few camels for company.
Our 16 camels are camped 20 dunes west of Birdsville, near a section of the Rabbit Proof Fence; the grand folly that trapped more sand than bunnies. To get there, our LandCruiser burbles over the ‘Big Red’ sand dune, which marks the symbolic edge of the Simpson Desert, past the highway-length driveway of Adria Downs cattle station; before it fords the meekly flowing Eyre Creek, the last water we’ll see until we recross it.
Survey leader and head cameleer, German expat Andrea Hennings, leads five other cameleers, three volunteer scientists and six jumpy ‘Cobs’,
The camels are our beasts of burden, humping enough rations to complete the mission, which leaves only boot and toe prints in the Simpson’s red dunes.
paying passengers (a reference to Cobb & Co). Initially, the ‘humps’ are tricky to spot; the caramels, chocolates and classic camel colours fuse with the midday-desert-sunlit dunes. They are ‘watered’, restless, and in the throes of “general bum-sniffing”.
The first boot steps away from camp, towards an isolated part of the Simpson that saw a ‘rain event’ recently, feel counterintuitive, the comforting ‘blankie’ of civilisation cast off. Incessant quiet kidnaps my attention, interspersed by the delicate peal of camel bells and the little-red-wagon-wheel-like squeak of a single steel camp mug that swings back and forth, like a metronome, from a backpack. The cricket-pitch-hard clay pan looks like a colossal sun-dried, steam-rolled crocodile hide. Gnarled, leafless trees burst from its periphery like sorceresses casting sadistic curses.
The camels’ funereal gait is mesmerising; the whimsical demands made by their bellies divine our every stop. Most organisms capable of photosynthesis are to their taste, even the seemingly undigestible and fetid gidgee (stinking wattle) and old man saltbush. Flowering wattle is their chocolate cake, but the outback patisserie is bare, as it’s now in ‘the bust’ phase of the ‘boom and bust’ cycle.
I schlepp my tightly wound swag up an appropriate bed-dune (the nearest) while others race for the pick of the shade trees. I gulp in 360-degrees of stain-free horizon, across the world’s largest parallel sand-ridge desert until dusk, when the unrestrained sky hoovers up ambient heat. Thankfully, the fresh and dry single-figure nights drive the evil squadrons of flies back to their secret bases; an effective repellant for mozzies and snakes, too.
THE DAILY ROUTINE
We load up to 235 kilograms onto each sometimes-mutinous camel every single day, which sucks the smiley-morning-person right out of me until I find my rhythm. It’s part ‘hard yakka’, part logistical Tetris, part idiosyncrasy management, of both bipeds and quadrupeds. Gag-reflex control comes in handy, too, because dromedary morning-breath has roots in the Grim Reaper’s small intestine. We also repeat in reverse, unloading the camels at night.
Loading is a personality test for camels like last-minute Christmas shopping is for humans. It goes something like this: ‘unhobble’ roaming camel (they wear leg shackles overnight so they don’t flee) and coax camels into impromptu staging area using orange peels as bribes – mouth to mouth, if you’re brave. Playing camel tug of war is futile. Tether together those who play well and lead them into parallel strings (A and B) in the same order every day: facing the sun, because they like it that way.
‘Hoosh’ them down; brush them down; pop on their stinky old blankets, heave-ho on wooden-framed saddles – just like the Afghan cameleers used. Clip on racks, secure with Kafkaesque rope matrix. Note: call “tail” before securing the back saddle-rope to prevent a camel-wee shower or fractured femur. Load both sides simultaneously with remote-area essentials: jerry cans for water, swags, vintage cool box, defibrillator etc.
Tank-like camel Claude gurgles like an idling outboard motor when I blindside him. Camels hate surprises. “He’s just like a three-year-old child in the supermarket, throwing a tantrum when
Our 16 camels are camped 20 dunes west of Birdsville, near a section of the Rabbit Proof Fence; the grand folly that trapped more sand than bunnies.
he walks past a bush that he likes to eat but can’t,” says Andrea. Tambo is a Christian Bale-like character, an ‘air-biter’. It takes three people to saddle him – one as a decoy. Punjab has a beagle-like curiosity. He’s learned how to unscrew the lid of the port jerry can, though he doesn’t drink much.
Today, I walk with 73-year-old botanist Dr Rosemary Purdie, “semi-retired” by her definition, yet still overrun with a fetishist’s fervour for flora. “I was seeing people who were retiring, been saving up all these things to do, and they would be dead six months later,” she says. “So I stopped working and started doing what I wanted.”
You could say Rosemary wrote the book on this arid zone’s ecology: Land Systems of the Simpson Desert, to be exact. Back in the 1970s, blokes out here assumed she “was a cook or a wife”. It’s no fluke that five out of the six cameleers on this trip are young, smart, unbreakable females. The likes of Rosemary and Robyn Davidson, author of Tracks (which chronicles her 2735-kilometre trek across the desert), have helped make the outback more of a meritocracy.
Rosemary presses and dries the endless specimens she collects each night after a full day’s walking. She beckons me, with an I-found-the-meaning-of-life grin, up a 20-metre-high dune, unclenches her gloved hand to reveal the silver needlewood hakea: “The most spectacular flower you’ll see this trip.”
“It still blows my mind these species can stay here in conditions like this for years. Add water and everything just happens again,” she says. In 2016, this area was knee-high with white and yellow flowers, which they used to decorate the corpulent camels’ halters.
An 8.30pm, beddy-bye time feels natural in nature. I wriggle into threadbare thermals, don my pompommed beanie, worm into my sleeping bag and leave the swag’s cover off so nothing separates me from infiniteness. I play connect the puking dots in the light-pollution-free sky until my eyelids intervene. Sometime in the early morning, fathomless inhuman howls in broad Aussie accents wrench me from intense fresh-air dreams. Head-torches strobe the scrub below eventually focusing on a feral bull camel who has infiltrated our Camelot. The horn• devil seeks a harem. even though ur only 16 dudes (all caught wild themselves). The cameleers continue to shoo away for untold minutes. Eventually head torches go dark before a crack tears the night open. Agun shot. Silence again. Our camels safe and silhouetted in dawn's crisp glow I discover that ! inexplicably slept through a second shot that followed the "warning shot", which found its mark from 50 jet-dark metres. The rogue's corpse lies unceremoniously in the dirt 200 metres from camp. but no one questions motives. There are an estimated one million feral camels out there, these 16 are our lifeline, and never the twain shall meet. (Feral camels are capable of killing the tied-up camels.)
DESERT STORIES
It feels scorching today, even though our technology registers mid-twenties. Why do they measure temperature in the shade in a place where there is little, I ask volunteer Charlie Nicholson, who looks like he wandered out of a bush ballad: long grey swagman’s beard; deep-lined, sun-spotted autobiographical hands.
“I dunno,” he says. I suspect he does though. Charlie cryptically describes himself as an “amateur naturalist in the same way that Charles Darwin was”. He’s out here for five weeks this year to record artefacts of the nomadic Wangkangurru people.
Head-down bum-up, Charlie reads the clay pan with a pre-internet attention-span. Large rocks are “exclamation marks on the landscape”, potentially carried from faraway. Every day, we find “worked
rocks”, which look suspiciously like other rocks, until Charlie schools me in “percussion marks”. We imagine this landscape in boom time. Where would I set up camp? Low points in the land, where water collects and therefore animals gather. Grass tussocks and shade trees are other tells.
We find silcrete that “could” have been used for grinding seeds into damper. A fragment of red baseplate; worked on both sides “perhaps”. A core of weathered sandstone that “might” be a ceremonial cylinder (men’s business). Charlie is most excited about the many potential hearth sites we come across, patches of darkened soil with evidence of baked clay, remnants of ancient Indigenous kitchens.
He makes few definitive claims because Charlie doesn’t speak on behalf of the Wangkangurru. He logs each location in the GPS, snaps a photo in situ, then passes on the data to Indigenous ranger and Wangkangurru Yarluyandi elder Don Rowlands in the hope it might “add to the bigger picture”. Our three super geeks regale us with the day’s scientific highlights by campfire light, debate concepts we don’t understand, as we sip ‘snifters’ of port from sandy pannikins. Yellow-bellied sheath-tailed bats ping from unseen barriers just above us.
Meanwhile the indefatigable cameleers mine their nethermost creative energies to conjure up delicious meals from essentially dry rations. Tonight, satay smoked chicken and noodles, sauced liberally with protein-rich peanut butter, followed by a sublime campfire pear-and-apricot crumble, whipped up by poly-talented Melbourne student Ruby Huzzey, out here for her second season. It somehow topples fellow-cameleer George Lemann’s camp-oven-baked nutmeg, cinnamon and port-soaked-raisin damper from the podium.
Post-wood-smoke wake-up call, as dawn’s purples, apricots and burnt-oranges silhouette the cane-grass, I pick up my cup from the ‘tea line’ and help Dr Boyd Wykes check the catch-and-release pit traps, set every evening to monitor the Simpson’s little critters.
The 65-year-old, who walked a 20-kilometre loop on our ‘rest’ day on a hunch, is perturbed about what hasn’t hopped into the buried PVC pipes yet: sandy inland and spinifex hopping mice. He’s equally confounded by the relative abundance of insectivorous dunnarts that have plopped in (cute like a mouse but closely related to the Tasmanian tiger). Boyd initially thinks the rather portly dunnart we find in the trap today – who I name Gosh (dunnart) – is pregnant. But a quick inspection of the animal’s well-hung undercarriage confirms she is just a he who happened to eat all the flies.
Boyd clips a tiny piece of Gosh’s tail for a genome project and releases him. He waddles away, disorientated, unaware that he’s accidentally part of something bigger than himself. He crosses other tracks in the dunes, ongoing conversations of night-time endeavours: the doodles of sand swimmers; the stalking steps of feral cats, everyone’s favourite foe.
I don’t know when days stop being Tuesdays and Thursdays and turn into a single, surreal billy brew of ritual, circumstance and space. I tune into the camels’ rhythms, moods and eccentricities, my wants and needs not too far removed from theirs. I bond with Eddie, who enjoys my divine head-rubbing skills and, I swear, smiles at me. Or maybe that’s just gidgee gas. I now realise Tambo air bites because he’s got a sore spot under the saddle; and none of us blame Jaffa for kicking a ‘Cob’ through the air like a rodeo clown. It’s a hard lesson about the dangers of complacency around powerful animals that can kick in all directions.