The Crow Eaters Read online

  While Mathew grew up in Ghantown, like many here, he left Marree – when he was nine years old – after the railway was rerouted in 1980 and the town’s population shrank to the level it’s still at today. He takes off his sunglasses to adjust an old sleeper from the Ghan that is smoking on the fire and I notice his eyes: they are a piercing emerald green. There is a lot happening this weekend, though you don’t have to stretch the imagination too far to see how quiet and isolated it would be during the rest of the year.

  ‘What did you used to do here?’ I ask of his childhood.

  He smiles, thinking back for a moment. ‘Lots! We’d look for rabbits, swim in Cooper Creek, have races with these milk tins filled with rocks …’ he trails off, thinking.

  ‘My favourite game, though, was when we’d lie down in the fields and play dead for the wedgies,’ he says. My eyebrows raise and he elaborates. The enormous wedge-tailed eagles that float on the thermals looking for easy prey in the outback would swoop down to investigate the ‘dead’ kids in the paddock he says, before they’d spring up again and throw rocks at the birds. I don’t ask if they were ever successful.

  Later, I ask about the mosque in town. It turns out that it’s a replica of the original from 1883, which was built over by the spring. No-one seems to know exactly where though. ‘Karen Burke, our neighbour, put up the replica in the 1980s,’ I’m told.

  Mathew’s dad was a practising Muslim here when they were growing up, though as the town began to dissipate and the links with their great-grandfathers, the original cameleers, lengthened, it was something that was never pushed on them.

  ‘I do remember some of their superstitions here,’ he says. ‘My grandmother always made us clean up crumbs; we weren’t allowed to look at the moon; and whistling was the work of the devil we were told.’

  Another descendant, Maxie Dadleh, who has a shining bald head and looks to be in his sixties, thinks he remembers where the old mosque was exactly, over near the spring we visited the day before. He is also one of the few who still follow some Muslim customs.

  ‘He still won’t eat pork,’ Mathew says.

  ‘Really?’ one of the other descendants who has moved closer to the fire says, shaking his head. ‘I brought up heaps of bacon for tomorrow morning!’ he adds.

  ‘When they had to give up the camels, that’s when the Muslim life went too, I reckon,’ Maxie says, trying to put a point on the moment things changed here.

  ‘We never went to the mosque as kids’, he says, though the separation and segregation were still evident in Marree between the two sides of town even up until the 1980s Mathew recalls.

  ‘There used to be a turnstile between Ghantown and Marree,’ he says. ‘The locals would grease it with pig fat and because all our parents and grandparents were Muslim, we’d have to walk around the long way.’

  Over by a caravan we meet young Amy, the niece of Butch Bejah, who is the grandson of Dervish Bejah, a sergeant in the Raj army, and son of Jack Bejah, a member of Madigan’s 1939 expedition that gave the Simpson Desert its name. There is something about Amy that is familiar. It turns out she was one of the jockeys yesterday at the Camel Cup. It’s not much, but I’m happy that there is still a connection between the descendants and yesterday’s event, which largely seemed like an excuse to drink beer during the day to me.

  ‘The way we make them [the camels] go fast is to tell them it’s curry day tomorrow!’ she says with a smile as people jostle past with pots and sacks of food for the meal later on.

  While preparation continues for tonight’s feast, Sam and I walk through town to a few of the ‘sites’ we haven’t seen. Despite its arid location, on the corner of the Birdsville Track is a two-storey wooden building known as the ‘Lake Eyre Yacht Club’. Old catamarans litter the front yard and I wonder if this is a joke linked back to the days when Sturt travelled this region with a boat looking for Australia’s great inland sea. From the top deck there are beautiful views across the plains and to Afghan Park below us. The yacht club is controversial on this side of the tracks. Kati Thanda as it is correctly known, is sacred for many Indigenous people here, so swimming and utilising the lake, as the yacht club does, is disrespectful of the Indigenous culture for many residents. The proprietor of the yacht club, which is in the old Sunday school building, doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the cultural aspect of the lake, though to convince me of its validity he promises that there are plenty of regattas here, and just last year they, ‘sailed from Warburton Creek all the way into Lake Eyre’.

  Next we walk out behind the pub past the airfield to Marree’s cemetery. Just like the town, it is segregated. There are European, Aboriginal and Afghan sections spread out across the red dirt. Many of the Afghan graves, marked by two wooden posts, face Mecca, including that of the Austrian cameleer Josef Kosh who lived here with the Afghans in Ghantown while Mathew was growing up.

  We return later that night and the crowd is edging closer to the fire. There’s a nice atmosphere to the get-together, with people chatting in groups and local Arabunna Aboriginal man Reg Dodd treating the crowd to renditions of Johnny Cash songs on his guitar.

  There is a break in the music, the fire crackles with old fence posts and steaming pots of curry are brought out to the crowd of 70 or so. We eat, cradling flatbread, rice and curries on our laps while an old Afghan love song, ‘Khala Khala’ is performed by Butch and Larl Zada on the accordion in remembrance of why we’re here.

  Because of the enormous population of camels and the hard times faced by their descendants, I ask the group what I think is an obvious question, ‘Did you ever eat camel growing up?’ Rick Dadleh, the great-nephew of ‘Deano’ introduces himself and tells me that they don’t eat camel here, never have. ‘It was always the workhorse of the Afghans,’ he says. ‘And the Aboriginals wouldn’t eat it because of the whole Jesus thing,’ he adds.

  I’m not quite sure what he means: the fact that the three wise men were supposed to have travelled on camels, or something else. Within the space of a few generations, the devout first generation of cameleers had given way to something uniquely Australian, encompassing Aboriginal, European and outback culture that we witness tonight. I feel lucky to be here, though Rick is a little disappointed, he tells me as he wanders back to the fire. ‘Normally we get many more, even 70 people coming across just from New South Wales for the reunion,’ he says.

  ‘Dick Smith was here for my 50th birthday,’ Rick tells me of the event four years earlier. ‘There used to be lots more people here then and we had camel rides at sunset through the town for the kids. Dick didn’t come for my birthday,’ Rick confirms. ‘Though he did come for this,’ he says looking around at the crowd tucking into the curries together and listening to the locals singing to commemorate their roots.

  People weave in and out of conversations under the full moon and I sit down next to Abdul Sultan to chat. He worked in the Whyalla steelworks for many years and as we talk he tells me of one descendant he knew who passed through Marree many years ago. In 1928 the goldfields of Western Australia were a rough and isolated expanse of dust and desert. Despite the conditions, an Afghan cameleer named Jack Akbar and a local Aboriginal woman, Lallie Matbar fell in love. They were forbidden to marry in Western Australia, largely because of the unorthodox union of these two outcasts in white Australia, so they fled across the country hidden in a truck to South Australia. The authorities chased them and a Kurdaitcha man, or Aboriginal assassin with emu feathers on his ankles, pursued them, though eventually they found peace and brought up their family together on the banks of the Murray River.

  I grab another XXXX and meet Larl Zada, a former railway worker whose job was once to dress as an ‘Afghan guard’ for travellers on the Ghan. He is a squat, friendly looking man with dark skin and large eyes framed by enormous lashes. Larl comes from the Dadleh and Zada line of Afghans in Australia, and his grandfather, Khan Zada, was married to May, a local Aboriginal woman.

  As the cold wind pushe
s the smoke in my direction I stifle a cough and wheeze into my asthma puffer. It prompts us to talk about how harsh living up here was and Larl tells me he once drove one of the old cameleers from Marree down to Adelaide to see an Afghan herbalist because he didn’t trust regular doctors.

  After many of the cameleers were forced to seek alternative sources of income in the 1920s and ’30s, some became miners, hawkers and herbal healers. The most famous herbal healer was Mahomet Allum, a cameleer and horse trader from Kandahar who moved to Adelaide in 1928 and opened a clinic on Sturt Street just down from the Central Market. Many of the recently arrived cultures: Welsh, Italian, Greek, Indian, Chinese and Syrian believed in natural remedies and Allum would source cascara bark and senna leaves as laxatives; and anise, figs, dates and camel milk to fix headaches, toothaches, dandruff and worms among other ailments. Allum’s main belief was in stomach cleansing, and his ‘Black Jack’ purgative of senna pods, butter, honey and anise was famous. There would often be 600 people on the streets waiting for an appointment on a Saturday morning with Mahomet Allum. Many locals still recall the fanfare around the man with dyed black hair and eight assistants.

  Larl remembers the tall Afghan healer well from his journey down with the cameleer, ‘We took the train and then bought an old V-dub in Adelaide. He [the cameleer] was scared of all the traffic and the noise, so I went with him. I remember the licorice medicine and Allum’s big house on Anzac Highway,’ he says.

  I ask Larl about his Afghan roots and if the link to his youth still persists, ‘I see it as part of who I am,’ he says sipping his beer. ‘My dad died in 1955, so I never really got the stories of what it used to be like as a cameleer here, or back in Afghanistan,’ he adds. Larl looks across the plains lit by the full moon and tells me that the Afghans opened up most of the tracks here in the outback and even some of the Aboriginal people would continue to use their paths through the desert.

  While most of the people here are blood descendants of the Afghans, one lady I meet by the fire in between songs has an interesting connection to the group. Sue Dadleh has been in Marree for 50 years now and she has no plans to leave. She originally came up here to work at the pub, though when she got off the train the publican ‘treated me poorly. So I told him “what for” and I got straight back on the train home,’ she says.

  ‘Where are you from originally?’ I ask.

  ‘Have you heard of Snowtown?’ she replies, embarrassed at its more recent associations. Marree and the outback still appealed to Sue though and it wasn’t long before she came north again, this time as a telegraph operator. Not long after that she met Ron Dadleh*, and that was it.

  ‘I married Rick’s uncle Ronnie,’ she tells me and she worked as an operator while their kids grew up in town. She eventually started working for the local Aboriginal school here and even though she retired last year she still helps out most days, ‘They ask me, “How do you do this?” or “Can you drive a bus?” so it keeps me busy.’

  Sue tells me that it used to be a women’s paradise here. There was so much to do and it was a social place, ‘Five hundred people lived here, there were lots of jobs, 118 kids at school and we had a great Christmas!’

  ‘Even though many people were Muslim?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, Santa used to come up on a railcar with presents for the kids – yo-yos and lollies – it was so good back then’, she says.

  The mixing of faiths was quite common here back in the old days. Marie Williams, daughter of Abdul Bejah, overhears us and says that when she was growing up here she went to every sort of church service, ‘Mum and Dad were Muslim but they never expected us to be. Even so, I went to the Adelaide mosque as a kid. I learned Arabic too.’ Marie confirms what Rick said earlier, that as the camels went and their grandparents and later her parents died, the links to Islam lessened.

  ‘My great-grandfather, Dervish Bejah, married an Australian and that’s the only reason we’re still here tonight,’ she says. ‘Otherwise we’d have been sent back to Balochistan,’ and it still seems like a bit of a sore point. Dervish was a skilled cameleer and after many expeditions in Central Australia he settled in Marree and married the widow Amelia Shaw in 1902.

  There is something special about this night and the bonds of these people here. It is a connection born through struggle and persecution, of being both Afghan and Aboriginal and being seen as outsiders from all sides. Despite all this, we’re welcomed without question and I feel I’d be much luckier to be considered part of this group of Australians than any I encounter on the other side of the tracks during my visit. Despite the moon continuing to rise, more fence posts are thrown on the fire and more beers are passed along the line. It’s a strange and inspiring thing, this reunion in the desert. My family is much more conventional, though it has been decades since I’ve seen many of my cousins, and even then the links of blood and ancestry seem to diminish. Not many communities I know do this with such enthusiasm and openness. Sam and I are here drinking beer and chatting, there’s an Estonian girl from the pub talking to Maxie, local farmers are drinking rum out of the back of a ute with Afghans and Aboriginal people and everyone is here together to celebrate their shared links.

  ‘It’s the next generation who will keep this going when I’m gone,’ Larl tells me as we watch the crowd. He kicks a glowing coal back on the flames and says, ‘I guess it’ll keep going as long as the Cup does,’ highlighting the importance of the Cup and the desert to the families who came here with their camels more than 130 years ago to the outback town of Marree.

  * Ron Dadleh sadly passed away on 2 October 2018.

  CHAPTER 6

  GREAT WHITE

  The Australian relationship with the shark is a strange one. There is no doubt that many Australians have a natural affinity with the ocean, as Tim Winton writes, ‘Australians are islanders. Coastal people. Almost all of us live on the edge of the world’s biggest island. On the veranda of the continent.’ Alongside this affinity is the acceptance that it’s not ‘our’ ocean and that we share it with a multitude of creatures – sharks included. While many people have embraced sharks as important regulators of oceanic equilibrium and as majestic and prehistoric apex predators with vulnerable populations, the other side of this debate, which often surfaces just after a shark-related incident, is that great whites and other sharks on the fringes of the Australian coastline are a murderous band of predators increasing in number and ferocity. There have been various reactions when this occurs, from the drum lines (baited hooks) and nets around beaches in New South Wales and Queensland to the controversy in Western Australia with the catch and kill laws implemented in 2014 that were in place until March 2017.

  The shark that grabs our imagination most vividly is undoubtedly the Carcharodon carcharias, the great white or white shark, which grows to up to 6 metres long for female sharks and males up to 4.5 metres long. There are particular areas with large populations of great whites: around Durban in South Africa, off the Pacific coast in the southern US and Mexico and in certain areas of the Mediterranean. In Australia, there is estimated to be a population of approximately 1460 adults in the west and southern coastal regions of the country. While there have been recent shark attacks in Queensland, Western Australia and on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, the area which remains central for Great Whites is the barren expanse of the Spencer Gulf and the cold water stretching out to the west from the isolated Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.

  Where does our fear of the great white come from? According to the Taronga Conservation Society, there was one shark-related fatality in all of Australia in 2017 and two in both 2016 and 2015, with an average of 1.1 fatalities per year over the last 20 years. To put this in perspective, there are 35 000 kilometres of coastline in Australia and approximately 11 900 beaches, according to the CSIRO. As a comparison, 74 people died between 2000 and 2013 after being thrown from horses and 25 died from bee stings.

  Much of this primal fear, I think, can be put down to a single
two-minute scene. In the 1975 film Jaws, from Peter Benchley’s book of the same name, a young lady, Chrissie, and her beau run down to the ocean in Massachusetts to skinny dip on a dark, moonlit evening. Chrissie jumps in and swims out to a buoy. As she waits, we see a silhouette of her treading water from below. The shot moves closer and closer until the camera shows Chrissie above the water again, imploring her companion to come in the water to join her. And then something grabs her. We’re not sure what it is as she is taken – as if on a carnival ride – across the bay. It toys with her, dragging Chrissie to the buoy and back before she disappears into the dark water, gone for good. Her attacker is a great white shark.

  I think it is this sense of the unknown that this scene evokes in us. We never know entirely what’s below us and out in the dark ocean beyond what we can see. This confirms what many of us feel – that we’re visitors in the ocean and we can never be completely at ease in an environment where we can’t breathe under the surface without help, we can’t see without goggles and we need flippers if we want to move fast through the water like many of the creatures who live there. While Australians love the beach, there is something unknown and even eerie about the ocean beyond those places where we can swim between the flags and make sandcastles with our children. Even if we play by all the rules, there’s still a risk that something is lurking below. Jaws had a monumental effect in scaring people away from the ocean and provoking aggressive responses to sharks all around the world.

  Obviously a lot has changed since 1975, though I still think there is an echo of that same deep-seated fear when we swim in the ocean today. There is a sense of anxiety and vulnerability that sharks might be prowling and patrolling and waiting for us below.

  I am travelling to the Neptune Islands. I want to see if the fear that was evident in viewers’ reactions to Jaws in 1975 is something we still experience when encountering the largest shark on the planet, even now with tourist shark diving and environmental awareness calming our primal fear. It is 650 kilometres by road from Adelaide to Port Lincoln and then another six hours south by boat to the Neptune Islands to encounter the great white in its own environment.