The Afghan cameleers of Australia, 1860 to the 1930s

At a glance

• Between about 1860 and the 1930s, several thousand camel handlers from the Pashtun country, Baluchistan, Sind and the Punjab worked in inland Australia. Everyone called them "Afghans", and the settlements they built outside outback towns were called Ghantowns. [1, 9, 10]

• The camels for Burke and Wills reached Melbourne on 9 June 1860 with the cameleers Dost Mahomet, a Pashtun from Ghazni, and Baluch Khan. The first commercial shipment, 31 men and 124 camels, landed at Port Augusta on the Blackwell at the turn of 1865 and 1866. [2–6]

• Camels carried supplies for the Overland Telegraph and the railway north from Port Augusta, and the train that reached Alice Springs in 1929 is still called the Ghan. [5, 6, 14]

• They built mosques at Marree, Adelaide and Broken Hill. The Adelaide mosque of 1888 and 1889 and the Broken Hill mosque of 1891 survive. [11–13]

• Hostility in the press and politics, and then the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, shut the door behind them. Most went home or died in Australia; some descendants, many of them with Aboriginal mothers, gathered at Broken Hill in 2023. [9, 16, 17]

Who the "Afghans" were

The name was a label put on the men, and sources disagree on who wore it. The History Trust of South Australia's SA History Hub says colonial authorities called all Muslim camel men "Afghan" because of their turbans, loose clothing and common faith. [10] The curators of the South Australian Museum's exhibition Australia's Muslim Cameleers (2007), Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, say the men were predominantly Pashtun, Baluchi, Punjabi and Sindhi. [9] The Adelaide mosque's own history lists their homelands as Baluchistan, the Punjab, Sind, Rajasthan, the North-West Frontier, Peshawar, Kandahar and Quetta, with a few from Turkey and Persia. [12] The first imam of that mosque, Hadji Mullah Merban, named the tribes in 1893 as "Berohees, Mektanees, Sindhees, Kutohees, Borees, Hindus, and natives of Bombay, Calcutta and Punjab". [12]

Christine Stevens, who spent six years in the 1980s travelling to old Ghantowns and talking to descendants, wrote in 2011 that the cameleers were predominantly Afghan tribesmen, Durranis, Afridis and Baluchis, and not Indians, as she says some historians claim. She added that the men crossed the Durand Line as they pleased and many lived near Peshawar and Karachi. [1] June Edwards, in the Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, wrote that although known as Afghans the cameleers "were in fact Pathans from the border of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan". [6] Those two writers put Pashtuns first; the museum curators and the History Hub put them among several peoples.

Some of the best-known men can be placed. Dost Mahomet was a Pashtun from Ghazni. [2, 4] Faiz Mahomet was born in Kandahar, by Stevens's account and the Adelaide mosque's, and his younger brother Tagh came out with him. [1, 12] Hadji Mullah Merban came from Kandahar too. [15] Bejah Dervish, the most celebrated of them, was a Baluch from Baluchistan. [7] Abdul Wade is claimed by two places: the Australian Dictionary of Biography says he was born at Coonah in Kunar to Ghilzai parents, while the Wakefield Press book and the mosque's history say Quetta. [4, 8, 12] A Pashtun reader will know the Ghilzai, the Durrani and the Afridi as the tribes behind some of these names.

Dost Mahomet and the first camels

In 1860 George Landells brought 24 camels from Karachi for the Burke and Wills expedition, and they reached Melbourne on 9 June. [5, 10] The cameleers who came with them included Dost Mahomet, the senior handler, and Baluch Khan. [3, 5] Jones and Kenny give Dost Mahomet's story in their book. He was the son of a mullah of Ghazni and had served as a sepoy in the British Indian army, and at 45 he was the oldest cameleer in the party. [4] He was left at the Cooper Creek depot with Brahe's party while Burke went on to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and he came away with Brahe on the morning Burke returned. [4] In 1862, with Howitt's relief expedition at Menindee, a bull camel bit him. The camel, one account says, "lifted him off the ground and shook him with great ease, as a cat would shake a mouse". [4] He lost the use of an arm. In July 1862 he and Baluch Khan asked the Exploration Committee to pay their passage back to Karachi, but he went back to Menindee and worked there. [3] The Burke and Wills research archive gives his name in the records as Botan or Batan, which may refer to his tribal group, Pathan, and says he died in 1880, where the Wakefield Press text says the early 1880s. Central Darling Shire restored his grave in 2006. [2, 4]

The Blackwell and Beltana

In South Australia the trade began with Thomas Elder and the Stuckey family. Samuel Stuckey went to Karachi, and the Blackwell landed 31 cameleers and 124 camels at Port Augusta; the History Trust dates it to New Year's Eve 1865, and Stevens to New Year's Day 1866. [1, 5, 6] The men worked three-year contracts at Elder's station at Beltana in the Flinders Ranges. [6, 9] They were single men, generally from poor families, and those who were married mostly left their wives at home. [6, 15] In early 1870 they went on strike and most walked out to Blinman. [5, 15] The State Library holds a photograph of a group of them at Beltana on 25 January 1870. [6]

How many came is not settled. The curators of the 2007 exhibition estimated more than 2,000 men and 15,000 camels between 1870 and 1900. [9] The Pichi Richi Railway Society gives 20,000 camels and 2,000 to 4,000 men between 1870 and 1920. [14] A South Australian history site says no more than 3,000. [15] The History Trust counts about 800 men in Australia in the 1890s. [6]

Carrying the interior

The cameleers' work was freight. A string of up to 70 camels carried wool, stores, mail, water, building and railway materials, and brought back baled wool. [1] Camels hauled materials and supplies for the Overland Telegraph, finished in 1872, and again for the railway line begun north from Port Augusta in 1878. [5, 6] According to the South Australian history site, Hadji Mullah Merban, from Kandahar, led the Afghan camel drivers on the telegraph line from Port Darwin. [15]

The expeditions of the 1870s and 1890s relied on them. Saleh Mahomed went with Warburton in 1872 to 1873 and with Giles in 1875, and Kamran, Jemma Khan and Allanah went with William Gosse in 1873. [5] Gosse was the first European to sight Uluru, and he wrote of Kamran that "He seemed to enjoy the walking about with bare feet, while mine were all blisters, and it was as much as I could do to stand". [5, 6]

Bejah Dervish went with Lawrence Wells on the Calvert expedition of 1896 and 1897. Wells had tried to hire a white camel man first and failed. The Dictionary of Biography says he came to rely on Bejah more and more as the country got worse, and on 27 May 1897 they found the bodies of two of the party, Charles Wells and G. L. Jones. [7] Wells said of him, "we would never have got through alive without him". [9] He was given a reception at Government House in Adelaide and the expedition's compass, inscribed for him, and he bought land at Marree in 1902. [7] He died at Port Augusta on 6 May 1957. [7] When Cecil Madigan wanted him for the Simpson Desert crossing of 1939, he was about 77 and sent his son Jack instead. [7]

Faiz and Tagh Mahomet, and Abdul Wade

Some cameleers became carriers in their own right. Faiz Mahomet came to Australia at 22 and was the jemadar, the head of the cameleers, at Beltana. [1, 15] With his brother Tagh he set up a carrying business at the new railhead of Hergott Springs, now Marree. Stevens dates this to 1883, the History Hub to 1888, when it says Elder released the brothers from their contracts. By the early 1890s, the History Trust says, they owned more than 900 camels and employed around 100 men. [1, 6, 10] They followed the gold rush to Coolgardie, in 1892 by the History Hub's date and 1893 by Stevens's. [1, 10]

On 10 January 1896, at Coolgardie, Tagh Mahomet was shot dead at the mosque. The South Australian history site names the killer as Goulham Mahomet, and the Express and Telegraph headlined it "Cold-Blooded Murder, Shot in a Mosque, Killed Whilst at Prayers". [15] Stevens says the man was a Ghilzai and Tagh a Durrani, and that old rivalries from Afghanistan went on in Australia. [1] That is her account; the other sources do not give a motive. The same year his application to be naturalised was refused, though he had lived in Australia for more than 30 years. [10]

Abdul Wade took another road. He reached Victoria in 1882 as an indentured labourer, and by 1890 he and his cousin Gunny Khan ran a camel firm at Bourke, New South Wales. [8] In 1892 he began importing camels and cameleers for the Bourke Carrying Company, and in 1903 he bought Wangamanna station near Wanaaring, where the settlement had a mosque. [8] He was naturalised in 1902, wore English clothes and rode a white camel, and the men who worked for him called him an "Afghan prince". [8] He offered his camels to the Australian government for the Imperial Camel Corps in 1914 and 1915, and the offer was accepted. [8] He sold Wangamanna as motor transport arrived, left for Afghanistan in October 1923 and gave up his Australian passport the next year. His children stayed in Sydney. [8]

Ghantowns and mosques

The Ghantown was the cameleers' own quarter at the edge of a town: camel yards, tin huts and a mosque. [1, 15] Marree, then Hergott Springs, was the largest, called "Little Asia" or "Little Afghanistan". [10, 11] Towns often had three parts, one for the Europeans, one for Aboriginal people and a third for the Afghans, and in Farina and Marree the cemeteries were divided the same way. [15]

Marree's mosque was a corrugated iron building. [7] The State Library of South Australia holds a photograph of about 1884 and calls it Australia's first mosque, built "as early as the 1880s". [11] A timeline compiled for the Broken Hill Historical Society dates it to 1882, by a camel breeder called Abdul Kadir. [5] It was pulled down in 1956 by Syed Goolamdeen, who said in 1962 that he was too crippled to look after it and that the cameleers' children let go of the faith after their fathers died. [10] A replica was built in the town in 2003, by the same timeline. [5]

The mosque on Little Gilbert Street in Adelaide was the cameleers' own work. The mosque's history says Faiz Mahomet, who wanted a home for unemployed, old and stranded cameleers, invited Hadji Mullah Merban to Adelaide in 1886 and applied for the land in 1887. The bluestone mosque went up in 1888 and 1889 and cost 450 pounds. The men paid by subscription, ten shillings a year for a driver and a pound for an owner. [12] In 1893 Abdul Wade paid 360 pounds to take over the debts so the mosque would stay "in the hands of his countrymen". [12] Four brick minarets were built between 1901 and 1903. [12] Camel men came from all over the outback to pray there in Ramadan. [6] It is still in use, and SBS describes it as Australia's oldest mosque in use. [18]

Broken Hill's mosque, a wood and iron building on the old North Camel Camp, was built in 1891, on ground used for worship since 1887. Broken Hill's cameleers also gave money to the Adelaide mosque. [13] After the last mullah died, it fell into disrepair, and the Broken Hill Historical Society restored it and reopened it in 1968 as a museum. [13] The last practising mullah was Fazulla Ziadulla, and his grandson Amanullah Robert "Bobby" Shamroze is its coordinator and caretaker. [13, 17]

Prejudice and the law

The hostility was open. At Port Augusta in March 1893 Alexander Poynton told voters he would put a "prohibitive Poll Tax" on any more Afghans and camels, a month before 94 men landed there. [15] From Bourke to Barcaldine cameleers and bullock teamsters clashed, and after the shearers' strike of 1891, when pastoralists used cameleers to carry wool, the police and army had to protect Afghans and their camels. [1] In Western Australia the State Library says the press showed cameleers unfavourably and governments added restrictions. [16] Pamela Rajkowski, a South Australian historian, says the cameleers were forbidden to join a union. [18]

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the White Australia Policy, closed the door. Cameleers were refused naturalisation, and many who went home to visit their families were set the dictation test on their return and refused entry. [16] Some got certificates exempting them from the test: the Wakefield Press book shows the certificate of Juma Khan, aged 53, issued in 1924, and Seager mentions Shah Kail's of 1913. [4, 9] Wives and children were kept out until the late 1920s. [14] Mohamet Allum, an Adelaide herbalist to the city's elite, spent most of his life in Australia as an "alien". [9]

The end of the camel trains

Rail and the motor lorry ended the trade. The line reached Oodnadatta in 1890 and Alice Springs in 1929. [5] In 1936 there were 1,500 camels at Birdsville and one cameleer. [5] Many men went home. [10] The History Trust says most who stayed married into the Aboriginal community, with a few marrying European women who then lived as Muslims. [6] Stevens notes that the men planted date palms wherever they went and that a date farm at Alice Springs still keeps varieties named for them. [1]

The Ghan

The Ghan began as a joke at a railway station. The Pichi Richi Railway Society's account is that on 30 August 1923, the first through train with a sleeping car, from Terowie to Oodnadatta, stopped at Quorn. An Afghan passenger got off and ran to a quiet corner of the yard to pray, and the engine driver, Ernie Smith, said that if he was the only passenger they would have to call it the "Afghan Express". The name was shortened to "Ghan Express" and then "The Ghan". [14] The railway society says that the official Commonwealth Railways explanation, that the train was named for the cameleers, and the plaque unveiled at Alice Springs in 1980, do not match the history, and it also calls the name "fitting" as a memorial to them. [14]

Descendants

Philip Jones says the children of cameleers and Aboriginal women grew up knowing something of the Quran and Islam, went to Quranic schools, and many held to the faith for most of their lives, though he says Islam never spread among Aboriginal people more widely. [19] Stevens wrote in 2011 that the few second-generation descendants still alive kept the pork taboo and remembered a few phrases in "Pushtu" and a few prayers in Arabic. [1] She named the families still at Marree as the descendants of Khan Zadaa, Moosha Balooch, Dadleh Balooch and Mullah Assim Khan. [1] Charlie Dadleh, son of Dadleh Balooch and an Irish mother, worked the Birdsville Track from the age of 14 and told Stevens, "I perished three times along the Birdsville Track." [1]

In September 2023 more than 50 descendants gathered at the Broken Hill mosque with the ambassador of Afghanistan, who said of relations between the two countries that "any history book would start from the cameleers". The embassy gave a bench in memory of the cameleers. [17] In 2022 the headstones in the Muslim section of Broken Hill cemetery were translated. [18] The exhibition of 2007 ended with a painting by Ian Abdulla, an artist of Aboriginal and Afghan descent, called Afghanistan Blood in Him like Me. [9] For other branches of the diaspora see Pashtuns in Britain, Pashtuns in the Gulf and Pashtuns today.