The Crow Eaters Read online

  Breaking out of my thoughts, I look up to the homestead, now a collection of shearers’ quarters and a refurbished shed. One worker is cutting up a sheep for dinner that night and we trudge up the hill to meet the owner of Beltana Station, Laura Ragless, who owns the property with her husband, Graham. The Ragless family has owned Beltana Station for 17 years, though even before that her husband’s family had lived on the nearby Pupatta Station since the 1870s. We wander through the old shearing shed with Laura, finding harnesses from the first camels, pictures of the cameleers wrapped in white shawls in 1885 outside the yards where we’re staying tonight, and sandstone casts on the ground of the burrows made by 540-million-year-old marine animals – the Ediacara fossils – which are a collection of faint swirls and shells giving evidence of the inland sea which once existed here and the prehistory of the Flinders. I ask Laura about the well we saw on arrival, and she grabs her keys, ‘I don’t think that’s the one they built,’ she says, ushering us outside. We bump down the hill to the flat where she shows us a much smaller square well, ‘There’s rubble all around here. I think this is where the first Afghans used to live,’ she says, before showing us some slate markings on the hill where she also thinks many of the unmarked graves of the original cameleers are.

  At the bottom of the hill I stop to look at the cairn, commemorating the expedition by ‘Ernest Giles, William Tietkens, J. Young, A. Ross, Peter Nicholls, Saleh, Jimmy and Tommy’, which included explorers, Aboriginal guides and Afghan cameleers who all left here on 6 May 1875 and reached Perth on 18 November 1875. Remarkably, they returned to Beltana once again setting out from Perth in January 1876.

  Giles was born in Bristol and he followed his parents out to South Australia in 1850. After an unsuccessful stint as a gold miner he was retrenched from the Victorian post office in 1854. This was his motivation to do something truly daring. As Tim Flannery writes, Giles was one of the most ‘eloquent explorers in the history of the continent’ and it was a game for him to see how far he could push himself. On an expedition in 1874 to open a route to the west, when he was hundreds of miles from safety, dehydrated and exhausted, he proclaimed ‘Oh how ardently I longed for a camel’ to help him reach the distant and unobtainable horizon. His companion, Alfred Gibson, perished in the outback, though Giles was made of harder stuff and after catching and eating a wallaby among the rocky hills, he made it back alone to civilisation. Only a few months later he set out from Beltana again, though he did have camels to help him reach the horizon this time, 4000 kilometres away and across the Great Victoria Desert. He succeeded in crossing from South to Western Australia.

  Before the sun sets, we drive across to the township of Beltana a few kilometres from the station. It is a boarded-up remnant on a lonely hill, which signs declare is ‘Not a ghost town’. It looks remarkably like one in the last light of a winter afternoon, despite a growing population within the town. There is an old hotel, a bakery and homes, which are closed up and thick with dust. As we walk closer to the edge of town there is a strong sulphur smell. I look at Sam with a furrowed brow, though he’s already ahead of me, following a stream through the trees. Despite the dryness and the harsh conditions here, there is life. Further up the rocky creek bed we find a spring bubbling up from underground. The water pools out across our feet and runs downhill – providing one of the most precious resources in the desert conditions here.

  There are Anglo and Afghan graves in the small cemetery, with surnames like Johnson sitting next to those of the Khans and the unmarked plots facing Mecca. The most commanding building in Beltana is the old railway siding. It is now surrounded by dirt and buried tracks, though the old stone building hints at the life that would have existed here once. It dates back to 1878 and is the main reason this place existed in the first place, when the railway passed through here on its original route to Darwin.

  It is a freezing night and we spend the evening under the stars with the Ragless clan, a bunch of tourists and Aboriginal stockmen, all pressed up close to the fire pit. The next morning we continue on in the bitter cold before the sun rises above the ranges, while Graham is out prepping for a day of drone farming across his empire – it turns out to be one of his last on the property, as they would sell Beltana to South Australian pastoralist Andrew Doman straight after our visit. We drive north, though we’re still on Beltana land for kilometres before we pass the sterile ex-mining town of Leigh Creek. Further along, we pass the muddy roadhouse of Lyndhurst; there’s a right turn here for the 500 kilometre track to Innamincka, the place where Burke and Wills perished and close to where their infamous ‘Dig Tree’ is located. I will visit on another journey.

  There’s no warning, though 80 kilometres before Marree the bitumen stops. The landscape is yellow and scaly, populated with more emus and low saltbush. We bump along the soft road, nothing but scrub and big sky for company. Further ahead a sign for Farina draws us to the left. On a rutted red track we see the remnants of a railway-era town and, unsurprisingly, more hordes of grey nomads. Recently volunteers have excavated and begun operating the old underground wood-fired bakery that dates back to 1893.

  Farina was created in the 1870s as a northern railhead of the Great Northern Railway for the towns that dared to grow wheat on the gibber plains this far north. The Farina siding opened in 1882 and by 1885 it had two hotels, a brewery, town hall, police station and ‘a couple of dance halls’. There were Afghan camel strings in town often transferring goods up to Innamincka, Lyndhurst, Marree and up the Strzelecki Track. There was a ‘Ghantown’ where the Afghans lived, close to their camels out of town and next to their domed mosque. This was also the home of Gool Mahomet, a prosperous camel driver who worked across South and Western Australia and later became the Imam of Adelaide’s mosque. In 1933 Ernestine Hill wrote of seeing Farina:

  Within the high tin walls of the Afghan camps in all towns of the north line, white women are living, the only ones in Australia who have blended to any extent with the alien in our midst. Renouncing the association of the women of their own race, they have forsaken their own religion for the teachings of the Prophet and the life of the cities for the desert trail. Several of these have made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  There are very few fences up here, just cattle grids separating the stations, though one fence we do pass has four dead dingoes strung up on the gates with their distended faces trailing in the dust, as if a harsh reminder of the conditions out here and a welcome to the outback. Dingoes and wild dogs are strung up on fence posts and from tree limbs in outback Australia as a way for hunters and farmers to keep a tally of pests and to let other farmers know if a certain dog they’re hunting has been caught.

  We arrive in Marree after nearly 700 kilometres on the road. I expect something grander, like the vista you get coming down the Nevada Plains into view of the pulsing lights and casinos of Las Vegas, though in reality this is a town of 150 or so people, an old railway and a pub. Even though punctuality seems like a pretty fluid thing up here, we can hear the racket over at the race track so we head over to where the clouds of dust rise and the cooking fires puff into the still winter air.

  It seems like a regular country race day: farmers in their best shirts, big hats, old men with Afghan features wearing Akubras, British tourists with unscuffed hiking shoes and Aboriginal families lining up to give their kids a go of the solitary ride here – ‘Malcolm the Turnbull’, an automated bull which unceremoniously ejects passengers into a colourful plastic pit filled with inflatable balls. We’ve missed a few of the early camel race heats, and a call goes out from the PA for ‘any donkey handlers in the crowd’ to help out with the upcoming donkey races. It’s the 25th Camel Cup today, though apart from the races along the rocky dirt track where the jockeys hold onto the back of their camels as if they are trying to escape into the desert, there isn’t any mention of how the camels even came here in the first place. I step over the wooden seats with a XXXX in hand, as seems to be the custom here, even if it is before 11 am
, to get a view of the first trophy race. I find it a bit strange that there’s no mention or acknowledgment of the Afghans for the prize event either, especially considering why we’re here. I watch the stoic Robert Khan in the crowd, dark skin, arms crossed and his ten-gallon hat pulled low over his eyes as the camels race past and the crowd roars.

  The place of the camels in Central Australia more than 150 years after they were first unloaded off the docks in Port Augusta is an interesting one to consider. As Pamela Rajkowski writes, ‘From the 1910s on, the number of idle camels was in fact becoming a serious problem in several outback areas.’ The camel men were finding it harder to pick up work and to feed their camels and there was significant anti-Afghan and anti-Asian sentiment spreading across Australia. The men were unable to pay for pasture for their camels and there were said to be up to 2000 wild camels around Marree alone by the 1920s. In 1925 the Camel Destruction Act was passed in South Australia, allowing landowners to shoot nuisance camels. The Afghan community protested, though without the ability to pay for feed they were put in an impossible situation. Cars replaced camels in many places and grazing stock changed from sheep to cattle, which were found to be more suited to the land. With things looking desperate for the cameleers, they couldn’t shoot their companions and the only property they had in Australia, so many let them go, to run off into the red desert of Central Australia, alive. It is thought that from these acts of compassion Australia’s feral camel population is now more than one million.

  Sam and I leave the races in the afternoon as things become rowdier. On a dirt road next to the racetrack we follow the rusted sign to Hergott Springs. This was the original name of the town here, named in honour of a German botanist travelling with John McDouall Stuart in 1860. The name was changed to Marree – after the cliffs north of the spring – in 1918 when anti-German sentiment prompted name changes throughout the state.

  In the middle of the cracked earth we disturb two enormous grey brolgas that flap away across the desert. We walk further through chest-high shrubs to discover what was drawing them here – it is a rippling pool of water, the original spring which brought settlement to the bald outback plains south of the largest salt lake in Australia.

  Despite the importance of Marree as the place of first Muslim settlement in Australia, it was not the first arrival of Muslims in Australia. As far back as the 1500s, according to a BBC report, men in Indonesian fishing boats from the trading city of Makassar would sail across to Arnhem Land in the north to trade for sea cucumbers, which were a valuable commodity in Chinese medicine and cuisine. This early international trade continued until 1906, when heavy taxation and a ‘government policy that restricted non-white commerce’ put a stop to their interactions.

  Marree is busy as we arrive back in town. It is the meeting point of the Oodnadatta Track – etched across an Aboriginal trading route thousands of years old – heading west towards Coober Pedy and Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre), and the Birdsville Track heading north-east towards the stock routes of Queensland. Marree was originally established for wheat farmers and pastoralists who intruded on this remote Aboriginal land in the 1870s. The railway from Farina extended here in 1883 and by 1886 Marree had a population of more than 500. By the 1920s when most of the camel work had dried up, it was the Ghan railway, which passed through here on the way to Alice Springs and Darwin, that sustained the town until the 1980s.

  It seems like a cliché of the American south, though the railway track still segregates the communities here. On the eastern side behind the petrol station and general store, the streets stretch back to abandoned buses, simple corrugated-iron shacks and the vacant paddocks behind. This is ‘Ghantown’ where the Afghan and Aboriginal people have lived since the 1880s. The old camel yards are here and looking at an old map in the pub I see where the homes of the Dadleh, Moosha, Dervish, Zada and Khan families were, along with Syed’s fruit shop and the old shearing shed. Many of the original Afghan families still live here, though from the outside it is hard to tell. Further behind the Afghan houses are the Aboriginal homes, closer to the edges of the desert. On the other side of the track, there’s not a notable difference now, though the school, police station, the site of an old church, the caravan park, the imposing stone pub and the better-tended homes are located.

  While we walk through the vacant lots of Ghantown I think about the space here. There is so much of it: empty grasslands, gentle hills stretching to the horizon and a distinct sense of the absence of things. In an era when space is so sought after, from Sydney real estate, the minimalism of Japanese bubble hotels, to the crowded expanses of a place like Bangladesh where there are 1131 people per square kilometre, the quiet and the openness here is nearly beyond comprehension. In the latest census there were only 2600 people in this whole outback region stretching across South Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

  On Sunday, Sam and I venture across the tracks once again. There is something slightly unsettling about the pub and the segregation of the past it represents, even if it is arbitrary these days. On one of the corner blocks we hear country and western music blaring from a caravan while two Muslim men with flowing robes, long beards and taqiyah head caps talk in the long grass. I’m nervous when we approach. I’m not sure why. I think it is because I realise that I’ve travelled a long way to see what remains of the Muslim story of Marree and here it is before me.

  After the strangeness of the encounters with grey nomads and the transitory feeling of the pub, we’re welcomed straight away. A man with curly brown hair and wrap-around sunglasses stretches his hand out and introduces himself. Mathew Zada is a great-grandson of Zada Khan, who came from Afghanistan around 1891 and delivered the mail in western New South Wales around Broken Hill, before settling here with his Aboriginal wife. They are part Afghan and part Aboriginal from the Wilcannia mob.

  We’re on the sandy block where the old camel yards used to be. They have a fire pit going and benches, chairs and tables are dragged across the ground in a square in preparation for a reunion tonight which started as an extension of the Afghan ‘charities’ of sharing food and gifts with the community after traditional funerals. This spot is also where Dean Dadleh’s place used to be, the infamous spot where sessions of drinking, two-up and outback raucousness would occur in the old days. ‘They used to call this Deano’s Casino!’ Mathew says. There would be kegs lined up against the wall and they’d party for days on end. Mathew tells me that the local policeman helped put a light up next to the casino, despite the behaviour that happened here.

  ‘He figured it would be easier to keep things under control,’ Mathew adds, ‘if they were all contained in the one spot.’

  Mathew introduces Sam and me to his cousins Corina and Donna and another relative, Abdul Sultan, an old, portly man from Whyalla. They all grew up in Ghantown and they use the Camel Cup weekend as an excuse to catch up with their extended Afghan family. Donna tells me she did their family tree a few years ago.

  ‘It’s metres long,’ Mathew says, pointing from where we are sitting to the other side of the fire. ‘It’s more like a family forest,’ he adds.

  ‘Apparently I’m also 19 per cent Irish, whatever that means,’ Donna adds, though her daughter’s bright red hair, despite both her parents having black hair, is further evidence of this, she thinks.

  ‘We’re a good mix,’ Mathew smiles. It is a sentiment shared by everyone here it seems. As the sun begins to dip below the flat plain to the west, the crowd builds. There is a familiarity with most of the people here. Their families have lived around Ghantown for generations and, despite the fact that Sam and I only arrived the day before, we’re welcomed as if our own families have lived in Ghantown since the 1880s as well. Mathew says that while there are strong family links here, there are still many things they don’t know about their ancestors. ‘A while ago the Maritime Museum in Sydney rang me, and I thought great, they can help us answer a few questions, but it was the opposite, they were
hoping we could tell them how our ancestors arrived,’ he says.

  ‘We don’t know about their voyage, they’re not on the passenger lists: were they listed as cargo, or livestock? We don’t know where they came from.’ Mathew also says that many of their ancestors’ origins are put down as Balochistan, Karachi or Kabul, but often this was just the closest port or region they left from. ‘We don’t know,’ he says. Donna brings out coffee for us and we chat by the fire, drawn to the smoking coals despite the heat of the day still lingering.

  Continuing to unpack their family story for us, Corina shows us photos on her phone of the plaques commemorating her great-grandfather in Broken Hill, recounting the day in 1900 when Zada Khan, ‘astride a big bull camel’, delivered the mail from Broken Hill to Wilcannia – a distance of 200 kilometres. The next photo on her phone is of the letter in 1921 informing Zada that his application for naturalisation had been rejected. ‘My other cameleer great-grandfather [Dadleh Balooch, from Balochistan in present-day Pakistan] was allowed to stay because he married a white girl,’ she explains.

  Mathew and Corina watch the grey nomads pull in to refuel across the lot while we talk. ‘See that,’ he says of a wagon towing an over-packed caravan towards the Birdsville Track. ‘Way too high for the speeds that they want to drive at. As soon as they hit the sand it’ll become unstable.’ It goes for the next caravan too apparently. And the next.