Speaker 1 00:02
This is a Vision Australia radio podcast.
Speaker 2 00:19
On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper, and our guest today is Pamela Rajkowski, OAM. Pamela is the author of three books based on her extensive community research.
Speaker 2 00:36
We spoke last week about her book, Beltana and Beyond, History of Beltana Town and the Pastoral Far Northern Flinders Ranges. As a result of her research and community service, Pamela was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2009.
Speaker 2 00:54
In this week's program, we'll be talking about Pamela's study of the lives of Afghan camellias, titled In the Tracks of the Camelmen. At this point, we want to advise our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners that today's conversation will include reference to people who have died.
Speaker 2 01:14
Welcome to the program, Pamela. You began your research into the lives of Afghan camellias in the 1980s and published the first edition of your book in 1987. You dedicate the book to the families and descendants of the Afghan and Indian communities who welcomed you into their homes and gave you assistance in your research.
Speaker 2 01:36
In 2021, you published a revised and expanded edition. This edition was the result of the interest shown in your research from a range of sources, including historical societies, Australian and overseas academics, the South Australian Museum, ABC and BBC radio presenters, filmmakers and even a British television food presenter.
Speaker 2 02:02
You've also had interest from descendants of the camellias who live in Pakistan and England and from the previous Afghan government's embassy here in Australia. We have a lot to talk about. Let's start with the story of how the camellias first came to Australia in the 1800s.
Speaker 2 02:21
That to me.
Speaker 3 02:22
is a very interesting story. At the time in Victoria in the 1850s, the gold rushes were on and that colony was very prosperous, but the companies back in London wanted the continent explored. The Victorian government took action here.
Speaker 3 02:40
They had a man called George Landers living in Melbourne. He had retired from being a horse trader in British India. He knew about camels. He corresponded with the Victorian government and offered to go to India on a commission and to purchase camels for the Victorian government so they could form an expedition that would go from Melbourne to the top of the Gulf of Carpentaria and back.
Speaker 3 03:06
That meant crossing a massive arid interior and at that stage they only had horses and horses could not survive such an expedition. George Landers did go to Peshwa. Peshwa was a British based and his connection with the British Indian Army officers who knew where the markets were meant that he could choose appropriate dramedries, one -humped camels, appropriate men to work with those camels, travel on the ships from Karachi to Melbourne, offload them there and then travel on the expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria and back.
Speaker 3 03:38
There were 23 camels and five camel handlers and they commenced this expedition up to the Gulf of Carpentaria when they came back. The expedition wasn't entirely successful. In the end there was only four of the cameliers because one had gone back home and only a few camels were left.
Speaker 3 03:58
The interesting connection with South Australia, Kate, is that one of those camels was wandering across the properties near Cooper Creek which was owned by a man called Thomas Elder in South Australia.
Speaker 2 04:09
So that was going to be my next question. Would you tell us about how the camels first came to be used in South Australia and in fact the role of Thomas Elder and also Samuel J Stuckey in this?
Speaker 3 04:22
But South Australia did not follow Victoria's lead and the government take the opportunity to import camels. Thomas Elder was reading in the newspapers at the time about how other people were commenting on how South Australia's arid north needed camels for its transport infrastructure.
Speaker 3 04:39
They were facing droughts and finally Thomas Elder and Samuel Stuckey or Samuel Stuckey came together and talked about a plan to import not 20 camels as Samuel had originally suggested. But Thomas Elder had great investments in wool production and copper mining in the far north and he wanted 120 camels that would set up a reliable transport infrastructure for the far north of South Australia.
Speaker 3 05:06
That meant prosperity for the colony as well as his company. So Thomas Elder commissioned Samuel Stuckey to go to British Northwest India, select the camels and he put them on a ship at Karachi, contracted camel handlers and together they arrived in Port Augusta in 1866.
Speaker 2 05:26
Pamela, in your chapter on the camel men's origins, you note that although they were all referred to as Afghans, they were not all from Afghanistan. And you make the point that even within Afghanistan, there were and still are different cultural and language groups.
Speaker 2 05:42
You go into fascinating detail in the book about the camel ears, where they actually were from, and the languages they spoke. Would you tell us about what you learned about their origins and their languages?
Speaker 3 05:57
from one colony to another within the British Empire, you had to be in a colony. So the men that were first contracted to come to South Australia, a land that they did know nothing about, had to be in living in British Northwest India.
Speaker 3 06:14
So a lot of the Camelias were not Indian ethnically, they also were Afghan traders travelling with caravans coming down from the mountains of Afghanistan and coming to markets in Northwest India with their camels and then swapping products and going back to Afghanistan.
Speaker 3 06:31
So some of them were Afghani tribes, some came from Kabul, Kandahar and Herat and some of the Camelias also came from places like the Sindh province behind the port of Karachi and Keta which is now in Pakistan.
Speaker 3 06:47
Keta was in Balochistan, so some of the Camelias were Baloch in their origin and so around Maari there's quite a few Baloch families. But the languages that they recorded speaking were Farsi because some of the Camelias had travelled into Persia which was a Farsi speaking country and is now called Iran.
Speaker 3 07:07
They spoke Dari, Pushtu, Hindustani and these were the languages of some of the people who lived with camels in Northwest India. So they were of diverse language groups, diverse ethnic groups and when the ships travelled from Karachi they would pull into ports to get fresh water and food.
Speaker 3 07:27
They poured into the port of Ceylon which is now in Sri Lanka, Colombo in Sri Lanka and more camel handlers hopped onto the ship there thus some of them were Indian or Sinhalese speaking as well. Some of the Camelias crossed the Middle East and were from Turkey and boarded the ships to work with camels in South Australia.
Speaker 2 07:49
And you mentioned in last week's program that the children of some of the camellias spoke multiple languages and that would have been the same for the camellias themselves.
Speaker 3 08:01
Yes, so when the Camelias worked together, a common language amongst them would have been Arabic because most Camelias were Mohammedans at that time, now called Muslims, and they spoke the Arabic language because they learnt the language of the Qur 'an.
Speaker 3 08:16
But the languages that they spoke were the languages of the origins that they came from. Languages that are still spoken in Afghanistan and northwest India and Pakistan today.
Speaker 2 08:27
you also spoke last week about the relationship between the Afghan Kamalirs and Aboriginal peoples of the areas where they worked and we'll talk about that a little bit more later on. Part of that too is the sharing of languages.
Speaker 3 08:43
Yeah, look, that was fascinating. When I interviewed the Kamaliya descendants, they could remember the Moslem prayer for when you kill an animal, the halalwe, when you bury an Afghan Kamaliya. They spoke some Aboriginal words, but it's interesting to note that nowadays, the language they use most commonly across all the Kamaliya families, of course, is English, because they never went back home or brought relatives to this country to maintain their languages, and so they disappeared over time.
Speaker 3 09:13
But some of the women who were Afghan Kamaliya daughters learnt to speak Aboriginal languages because the camel strings would cross several Aboriginal countries, trekking, for example, from Unidata to Tennant Creek or Unidata to Alice Springs and back.
Speaker 3 09:28
So they could speak more than one Aboriginal language, which I thought was a sign of a very rich culture. For sure.
Speaker 2 09:35
Pamela, your book includes some wonderful photographs from the 1880s and 90s and beyond along with maps of some of the routes that the camel strings took. You have a comprehensive chapter about the camelmen in South Australia from Beltana to Mari and Oodnadatta.
Speaker 2 09:53
We spoke last week about Beltana so would you tell us today about why Mari and Udnadatta were also important stops on the camelmen's routes?
Speaker 3 10:04
As more settlers arrived in South Australia, and past releases were released for people to occupy, more and more cattle and sheep properties were taken up in North East of South Australia. So that's east of Lake Eyre.
Speaker 3 10:18
So people settled along the Birdsville track and to the east of South Australia along the Streslecki track. Then the copper mines opened up in the Flinders Ranges and gold was discovered in Tennant Creek.
Speaker 3 10:30
So this meant that the Camellias based at Beltana Station now had to make a new camel string depot closer to those regions and they camped at Herget Springs, which is now at Lake Eyre. Herget Springs developed into a town called Maaree.
Speaker 3 10:47
And further on, as the more cattle properties opened up in the Northern Territory and the repeater stations needed to be serviced in the Northern Territory, the Camellias then set up camel strings in Unidata, especially after Unidata became the next new rail terminus.
Speaker 3 11:04
And so there were many families living at Unidata and the Maaree Camellias moved over to Unidata to follow where the demand was for camel carrying.
Speaker 2 11:14
And of course the impact of rail transport on the longer -term viability of the camel strings you write about too in your book. Would you tell us about that?
Speaker 3 11:27
The irony is that as the railway line was extended from Port Augusta, then to Hawker, then to Lindhurst, Maury, Unidata, and finally to Alice Springs by 1929, even though the camel ears were hired to carry the railway sleepers, the metal nails, parts of the engines of the trains that arrived at Port Augusta, eventually that railway line meant the end of the demand for camels as essential economic carriers of goods in South Australia.
Speaker 3 12:01
While the railway line was being extended, camel ears had to cut out of the railway yards and take stores to mining settlements and pastoral properties. And in the end, the camel ears would come with back loading of copper and wool to the rail heads.
Speaker 3 12:16
So there was a very active partnership between the camel ears and the railway line. But ultimately, as the trains became more frequent, the need for camel ear transport became endless demand. Eventually motor vehicles were introduced to properties and station properties and mining settlements.
Speaker 3 12:35
So they also didn't need the strings to come and collect their resources that were sent back to England, the mother country of the British empire. So eventually there came a time when the camel ears had to let go of their camels.
Speaker 2 12:51
And you also write in your book that the camellias had other occupations as well. We spoke last week about how you bring individual stories into the histories. And I'd like to ask you about one of the many people you write about in your book, Australia's first date palm farmer, Sheikh Abdul Kader.
Speaker 3 13:13
He was a fascinating man. Most of the Kamalirs were hard -working men that needed leaders of their communities to take care of their mosque, to take care of their physical needs. Sheikh Abdul Khadir came to Australia in 1895.
Speaker 3 13:30
He was a fascinating man because he grew up as a Zoroastrian which was a fire worshiper. He had Persian ancestry so his early years were as a well -educated Persian. He eventually converted to Muhammadism before he came to Australia.
Speaker 3 13:47
When he came to Australia he was a multilingual person and that meant he made an effective interpreter for Kamalirs in police courts, in magistrate courts where Kamalirs could not speak much English.
Speaker 3 14:00
He also looked after the Kamalirs in the outbacks so in Maori he used his knowledge to connect the supply of water from the town's bore water over to the mosque and supplied water for the ablution for the Kamalirs.
Speaker 3 14:15
But because they travel long distances with minimum food supply he established a date palm plantation in the Gantown of Maori because Kamalirs came from a culture where when you walked long distances with camels you put dates in your pockets as a source of nourishment while you travel.
Speaker 3 14:35
They traveled with other food too but dates were an essential nutritious source of food for the Kamalirs so he set up the first commercial date palm plantation in Maori. In fact the government was so impressed with it that the government set up nearby at Lake Harry their own commercial date palm plantation to see if they could also make a commercial go of it.
Speaker 2 14:59
That's fascinating and Sheikh Abdul Queda was also a merchant and a trader. You mentioned before about a shop that he had here in Adelaide.
Speaker 3 15:09
He was a man of diverse initiatives and talents. He was a trader and that meant over the years that he lived in Australia he went backwards and forwards between India or Karachi or towns that he knew and he would bring merchandise to sell in Australia.
Speaker 3 15:24
He set up shops in Adelaide, one being in Pill Street off Curry Street which is now a very well -known bar drinking area, but he had imported oriental ware to sell to Australian people. He also had a shop in the main street of Port Pirie and so he kept those shops going for quite some time.
Speaker 3 15:45
Eventually he moved over to Victoria where he also represented Cameliers as a community leader through writing letters to the editor to support the Cameliers in being treated very well like getting sufficient pay and over in Melbourne.
Speaker 3 16:01
In the later years his reputation was so widespread in Australia that one of the rotary clubs of Melbourne asked him to be a guest speaker.
Speaker 2 16:09
It sounds like a person of extraordinary energy and also of extraordinary vision and initiative.
Speaker 3 16:17
Yeah, he was a man that, I guess you would say, had a few rods in the fire because he was multi -talented. He was educated spiritually highly because his name, Sheik, indicates a lot of education on a religious basis.
Speaker 3 16:31
He could be a merchant. He could be a court interpreter. He could represent the camel ears. He also ran his own camel strings in Maori and with his two sons, which he did take to India at one stage, unfortunately, one drowned in the Ganges River, but the other son, with his father together, ran camel strings out of Maori, up towards Unidata, up along the Birdsville track.
Speaker 3 16:55
Together, they would come down to the Adelaide Mosque, where the Sheik Abdukadah was a very influential person amongst the camel ears who sought rest and charity at that mosque. He was a very diverse man, but when he did die, it was very quiet.
Speaker 3 17:11
He wasn't with his own family. He was in Melbourne, and when he died, he bequeathed what he had left of his enormous estate to a friend. It's a very strange circumstances under which he died, but he was such a talented leader and merchant and court interpreter.
Speaker 3 17:29
He's left a great story behind him.
Speaker 2 17:35
On Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is Pamela Rykowski, OAM, author of three books, Beltana and Beyond, History of Beltana Town and the Past or Far Northern Flinders Ranges, Linden Girl, A Story of Outlawed Lives, and In the Tracks of the Camelmen.
Speaker 2 17:59
Pamela, to go back to your methodology which we talked about in last week's program, you would have found secondary sources about Sheikh Abdul Queda and did you also learn from primary sources, from speaking to his descendants in your research?
Speaker 3 18:17
The secondary resources collected on Sheikh Abdul Qadeer were very fractured. I did find in Commonwealth records lent to me by the Ex -Minister of Immigration the name of him arriving in South Australia and leaving, but there was no family history.
Speaker 3 18:34
In my research for family descendants, I found his granddaughter called Jane, and she herself, in her own private collection, which to me are so important, when you meet descendants, they have private collections, she could fill in a lot of gaps about his life, his beliefs, the types of work that he did, and I could marry that with few newspaper articles, few biographies written by the State Library on him, and put together such a rich profile on his man.
Speaker 3 19:04
But she had photographs that were not located in archives. She had family stories about him and his son Leonard, who together worked with camels for a while in the outback. So again, the primary resources in my research are so essential to building up truthful, comprehensive stories of individual camels.
Speaker 2 19:24
And really essential to reconstructing and understanding what life was really like. As we spoke about last week as well with your research into Beltana, that importance of the oral histories from descendants of the Kamele communities, of the people of Beltana and also of First Nations peoples.
Speaker 2 19:45
We mentioned before that your book covers all of the states of Australia and you write about the cultural and personal interconnections between the Afghan Kameleers and Australia's First Nations peoples.
Speaker 2 19:58
From your research you observed that the Afghan Kameleers and Aboriginal peoples coexisted with mutual respect and help, sharing knowledge of camping and surviving in the bush. Would you talk to us about that and how you were affected on a personal level, learning so much of those important aspects of our state's history?
Speaker 3 20:25
When I was working with the descendants, I was aware that there were Aboriginal connections that the Afghan Kamalis, they were the two main desert travellers of Australia's early colonial history, but there had to be levels of compatibility for them to work so well together and to share cultural knowledge.
Speaker 3 20:44
So I remember asking some of the male descendants, one of the men in Alice Springs called Sally Muhammad, who's famous for the camel races when they started in Alice Springs, said to me that the women were vital because it was the Aboriginal women who would travel with the Afghan Kamalis in a nomadic lifestyle.
Speaker 3 21:03
They were used to camping at night near creeks, collecting firewood for campfires, finding a way to find the food and cooking the food, bringing together bits of twigs and that to make a comfortable bed for the Kamalis.
Speaker 3 21:15
They were used to living on the fringe of settlements, just like the Kamalis did because the Kamalis had camels, they had to live on the fringes of settlements. The young Aboriginal males were very important because some of the Kamalis were getting older and could not ever buy a ticket to return to their home country.
Speaker 3 21:33
So young Aboriginal males work with the sons of Kamalis as the sons grew up in actually allowing the camels to graze at night. They would have to hobble the camels, take the saddles off first, hobble the camels, let them graze at night and then get up really early in the morning to bring all those camels back and put them into a circle form and connect them together tail to nose of the camel behind.
Speaker 3 21:56
It was the young males that would help to lift all those loads back onto the camels in the morning and take all those loads off at night. So in the end, the Aboriginal people and the Afghan Kamalis became very familiar with each other and co -existed.
Speaker 3 22:11
Some of the Kamalis were also herbalists in Adelaide eventually when they got too old to work with camels. And many of the plants that the Kamalis knew about, they learnt about the healing plants of their ancient cultures back in Afghanistan and Persia.
Speaker 3 22:26
But in the bush, they learnt from Aboriginal people, some of the plants that actually could also do a similar effect in the healing of a person.
Speaker 2 22:36
you've shared with us there shows how much history there is within people, within memories, history that families carry from generation to generation, stories that are told within families and communities that haven't been written down and your research has contributed to capturing those stories and helping us to understand far more deeply what life has been like.
Speaker 3 23:05
Yes, I think that did tell me a lot. I didn't know a lot of this information, but because of my passion in wanting to show respect back to these people for sharing what they knew personally, where the relationships in amongst their own groups of Aboriginal people, what the relationships were between Aboriginal people and Himalayas, meant that I had to listen a lot and then to fill in gaps, I'd have to come back.
Speaker 3 23:31
I had to build up a trust. And I think one of the protocols I learned as a community researcher is to listen and show respect and to take on what people are willing to share with you. Now, Himalayas and Aboriginal people have got their own histories of trauma, and sometimes they may eventually open up and start to share those as well.
Speaker 3 23:54
I just wanted to be respectful back and represent what they were willing to share because that way you get to learn the truth telling of our history and you get to learn of what was their true experiences of these desert people as no longer a marginalised group of Australian history, but I wanted them to have an integral place in the narration of stories about Australia's history.
Speaker 2 24:18
Thank you so much, Pamela, for reminding us of the importance of truth -telling people's stories and of recognising and respecting people's histories. You spoke before about the interest that you have from descendants around the world, from academics, you've done interviews before this, and you also mentioned a British television food presenter.
Speaker 2 24:45
Would you tell us that?
Speaker 3 24:47
story. Often I have people coming to me, either academics or the South Australian Museum or filmmakers, wanting to learn more about the history of the Himalayas. In 2014 the South Australian Tourism Commission approached me because a British cook and TV presenter called Jimmy Doherty had come to Australia.
Speaker 3 25:08
He wanted to do a series called The Great Australian Food Adventure and go from state to state and learn about the unique Australian foods that we cook and prepare. For example in the Northern Territory he ate crocodile.
Speaker 3 25:22
When he came to South Australia I found out he wanted to try Afghan camellia food and so I was the person who would set up and arrange an opportunity for him to experience Afghan camellia food. I was so fortunate that in the years before that I had interviewed the daughters of Afghan camellias who learned to cook from their fathers Afghan food.
Speaker 3 25:45
So they had learnt about halal meats, they had learnt to do goat curries, they had learnt about cooking rice, making the halwa dessert and I had been given those recipes and told the types of food that camellias who were Muslim or who were Sikh even were allowed to eat as part of their dietary requirements.
Speaker 3 26:07
So for Jimmy Doherty I was able to set up a tarpaulin on the ground because camellias when they came back from their long trek sat on tarpaulins in community groups. The men on the ground, the women in the kitchen separated having cooked the meal for the men and I was able to set a tarpaulin up on the ground, communal dishes of different types of curries, a plate of dates, a plate of chapati bread which the women told me that the camellias prefer to cook.
Speaker 3 26:35
We had finger bowls because they ate with their fingers and then as we sat together I could share the stories of the camellias about diets, customs of eating, who did the cooking, who taught, who in the family to prepare mainly Muslim types of food.
Speaker 3 26:51
There was less of an impact of Aboriginal preferences because really it was in the camellias camps that the families came together and ate Afghan and Indian type food. So I was able to repeat that because I had been given the recipes by women who were Afghan Aboriginal and Afghan European.
Speaker 2 27:09
Before we conclude our conversation, Pamela, would you tell us what you're working on at the moment?
Speaker 3 27:16
I keep every year, it seems to be an ongoing thing. There's two things I'm working on at the moment. I am constantly asked to give talks. Different organizations, Adelaide -based and rural -based ask me to give talks on the Kamalis.
Speaker 3 27:30
Because I negotiate with each different organization what their members want me to talk about, my topics vary. So it's not just only about the pioneering Afghan Kamalis, which is a massive topic in itself, but eventually I developed topics around in the steps of Elder Bar -Smith and Waite.
Speaker 3 27:48
I developed topics around the lifestyle of those men. The relationship between the Afghan Kamalis and the first Gantrain of South Australia, feral camels, it diversifies. The other thing I'm working on is every year I submit applications to present events during the History Festival of the South Australia, the biggest history festival in the Southern Hemisphere, and registrations make you very sharp about working out what it is that you want to present.
Speaker 3 28:16
So I'm presenting two different events in the South Australian History Festival. And one is on work that's original to me again. It's about the Afghan Kamali herbalist of Southwest Adelaide, which involves a guided tour through very quaint streets to the mosque down to the Afghan section at the cemetery.
Speaker 3 28:35
And this year I'm actually collaborating with an Afghan immigrant who knows a lot about the traditional herbal treatments in Afghanistan, which the Kamalis knew back in the 1880s to the 1930s, but which are still practised in Afghanistan today.
Speaker 3 28:52
And to me that suggests that the Kamalis that came here were men of rich cultures, not just men who were illiterate and just worked very hard until they became old. They came with rich culture. So both of those still keep me motivated and passionate about my subject.
Speaker 2 29:10
And History Month is in May, so we encourage our listeners to check the program of History Month so that you too can participate in Pamela's guided tour. Thank you so much, Pamela, it's been brilliant to speak with you.
Speaker 2 29:23
Our guest on Emerging Writers today was Pamela Rajkowski, OAM, author of three books based on her extensive community research, Beltana and Beyond, History of Beltana Town and the Pastoral Far Northern Flinders Ranges, Linden Girl, A Story of Outlawed Lives and In the Tracks of the Camel Men.
Speaker 2 29:45
This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio Digital, online at varadio .org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts where you can catch up on earlier episodes.
Speaker 1 30:13
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Speaker 2 30:24
On Vision Australia radio – blindness, low vision, opportunity.
