The Afghan Cameleers of the Outback

From the 1860s, as the European settlers of Australia sought to open up the vast, arid interior of their continent, they brought in camels, the only beasts that could carry loads across such waterless deserts, and with the camels they brought the men who knew how to handle them: Muslim cameleers from Afghanistan, from Baluchistan, and from the north-western lands of British India, who came to be known collectively, if inaccurately, as the Afghans. For some sixty years these cameleers and their camel-trains were the lifeline of the Australian outback, carrying the supplies, the wool, the wire, the rails and the goods that opened the inland and linked the scattered stations, mines and telegraph lines across deserts where no other transport could go. They were almost all Muslims, and far from the lands of Islam, in a new country settled by Europeans who often treated them with suspicion and prejudice, they held fast to their faith: they kept the prayers and the fast of Ramadan, and at the railway towns and depots where they camped, such as Marree and Broken Hill and Adelaide, they built some of the very first mosques on the Australian continent, humble buildings of corrugated iron and timber, and planted date-palms beside them in memory of home. The age of the cameleers ended when the motor-truck and the railway replaced the camel, but their mark remained: the great railway line driven north through the desert is called the Ghan in their honour, and their descendants, their mosques and their date-palms endure in the outback towns. This scene depicts a cameleer camp and its little mosque in the South Australian desert. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.