PANEL: Exotic relations: camels and the articulation of Indigenous and settler social and economic forms

Compared to the literature on Muslim cameleers (for example Kenny and Jones 2007, Rajowski 1987) the information on Aboriginal engagements with and around camels is surprisingly scant. Yet from the first contact period until the present, camels have had a pivotal role in the colonisation of desert Australia and the incorporation of Indigenous people into the State. Especially suited to the arid conditions of central Australia, camels were used by European explorers, Muslim contractors, hawkers, pastoralists, missionaries, doggers, mounted police, anthropologists, patrol officers and miners to variously penetrate, transport goods across and expand the settler frontier. Often Aboriginal people had a critical role in these ventures. Cameleers’ interactions with Aboriginal women were often of a sexual nature (see, for example, Hercus 1981), sometimes leading to long-term social engagement, marriage and children. As Simpson has shown in her paper ‘Camels as pidgin-carriers’, Afghan Aboriginal interaction around camels also resulted in ‘the spread of features which became markers of Aboriginal pidgins and creoles’ (2009:3). Not only did Aboriginal people engage with outsiders and the market economy through ‘camel work’ however, they also captured and traded camels for use in the customary economy. As the 1969 film ‘Camels and the Pitjantjara’ (Sandall and Peterson) vividly illustrates, until the early 1970s Aboriginal people caught and broke in camels, which they used as pack animals to travel between missions and government settlements. They also consumed camel meat and utilised the hair and the fat from the hump. In some communities today camels continue to be hunted for pet meat as well as human consumption. Income is derived from market-related camel work such as commercial harvesting, tourism enterprises, and the sale of Indigenous crafts that incorporate camel hair and art depicting the camel image (Vaarzon-Morel 2008). The place of camels in Indigenous art is intriguing, given the role of Albert Namatjira as ‘camel boy’ to the Teague sisters on a camel painting trip to Palm Valley (Williams 2007) and the recent speculation that Emily Kam Ngwarray, perhaps the most celebrated Indigenous artist today, owed something of her unique perspective and physical dexterity to her role as a ‘camel lady’ (McGrath 2008). Since the days when there were but a few thousand domesticated camels in central Australia, the camel population has increased exponentially to an estimated 1 million feral camels, the majority of which are on Aboriginal land (Edwards et. al. 2008). Under a recent Commonwealth Caring for Our Country funded project to manage the negative impacts of feral camels, the involvement of Aboriginal people in ranger program is poised to increase dramatically. Hopefully there will also be new opportunities for market-related camel work. What is clear however, is that over the last hundred or more years camels, at once symbols of mobility and domestication, have figured prominently in Indigenous social, material and economic landscapes. In this session anthropological, linguistic and historical analyses draw on film, photographs, oral history, visual art, language and textual sources to explore the role that Aboriginal engagements with and around camels have played in the intercultural economy.