Writings

Afghan Australians or ‘Catch the Ghan and see Country’

(The Riverina Leader, 30 January 2002)

Unlike the history of the United States, history in Australia is marked by a strong Afghan presence.

Beginning in 1860, Afghan cameleers and their camels were essential for all expeditions of exploration into the interior of the continent. The Saudi Arabian dromedary, the single humped version of the species, was soon in demand. As Europeans had no expertise with this beast, experienced handlers were also necessary and that meant Afghan handlers who came, initially, not as migrants, but in response to requests from the colonists.

Images of the Afghan presence are not easily found among our colonial images. In the Art Gallery of South Australia, there is a painting by the Russian born Nicholas Chevalier, which depicts the departure from Royal Park, Melbourne, of the Burke and Wills’ transcontinental expedition. Chevalier just happened to be on the scene on the 20th of August 1860. So the painting, ‘Memorandum of the Start of the Exploring Expedition’, represents the official send-off, and is unique oil paint-journalism. Chevalier painted the moment, not knowing that the expedition would claim the lives of most of the party. Everyone is there, including two Afghans, Dost Mahomet and Esan Khan, and a Hindu, Samla, who asked to be discharged when the amazing show, (including 60 gallons of rum – ‘for the health of the camels”!) hit Swan Hill.

In the information about the painting, on the wall of the Gallery, there is no mention of the Afghans. Nor does the fact that they survived rate a mention. Dost Mahomet, with four others, waited for four months for the impetuous Burke to return from the Gulf and during this time, they suffered from scurvy and dysentery. (Esan Khan had stayed at Medindie.) If Burke had taken the two Afghan cameleers with him, he and others in the ill-fated expedition might well have survived. Unfortunately, they took camels and no one to handle them, and, even so, the camels survived the horses, until they, too, became an essential part of the explorers’ diet.

The first camel stud, staffed by Afghans, was financed and supported by Thomas Elder, at Beltana, in the Flinders Ranges. And further exploration expeditions were mounted, including those of Warburton, 1872, and Gosse, 1873. This latter expedition brought the first non-Aboriginal people, an Englishman, William Christie Gosse, and an Afghan, Kamran, to a sighting of the great monolith, Uluru, or Ayers Rock, as Gosse named it. The men were out searching for water when they saw what they thought was a hill, and found to their astonishment that it was “one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain”, with water running down the steep gullies. On the next day, July 20 1873, they searched for and found a route by which to climb the ancient sacred site, becoming the first aliens to stand and gaze in wonder from the summit. Gosse noted that his companion, Kamran, “seemed to enjoy walking about with bare feet, while mine were all in blisters, and it was as much as I could do to stand.” During the course of the expedition, Gosse came to rely on Kamran and spoke highly of him in his journal.

Scientific expeditions, many of them financed by Baron von Mueller and Thomas Elder, were all dependent on the skills of their Afghan companions. Members of these expeditions observed their different religious traditions, including the preparation of meat. There is something strangely moving and curious about these representatives of the great monotheistic religions going about their observances in the heart of the Australian deserts, interacting with the Aboriginal peoples from even more ancient traditions.

By the 1870s, Afghans had not only become essential to the great desert crossings, including that of Giles, 1875-76, but they had also began to establish themselves as traders, and haulage contractors, bringing necessary goods to stations and taking products to the new railway depots. The camel trains moved across the continent negotiating the Strzelecki and Birdsville Tracks.

Eventually there were ghan towns scattered all over – in South Australia, from Port Augusta to the Alice; in Western Australia, from Port Hedland to Kalgoorlie, where the Afghans worked in the mines; in New South Wales and in Queensland, as far as Townsville. Not being citizens, barred from the towns, they lived in camps on the edges. Few Europeans visited the camps. One notable exception was Sir Stanley Kidman who loved the entertainment and the curries.

Unaccompanied by their women, many found solace in relationships with Aboriginal and white women who were not intimidated by racism or the law of the day forbidding cohabitation between an unmarried man and woman. The contemporary consequences for those hunting for their predecessors in this country are that they are likely to turn up an Afghan ancestor. Two recent articles in the ‘Murrumbidgee Ancestor’ document such a discovery. Someone to be proud of.

The last expedition using camels and led by Dr Cecil Madigan set out to cross the Simpson Desert in 1939. The two Afghan members, Jack Bejah and Nur Mohammed Moosha, were second-generation sons of the men who had accompanied earlier expeditions. As Christine Stevens documents in her definitive work, ‘Tin mosques and Ghan towns’ (1989, OUP), “By the 1930s, the second generation of cameleers ate the same meat as the Europeans. The Muslim faith had diluted and Halal-killed meat was no longer a requirement to the younger men.” World War Two saw the descendants of the cameleers in the Australian armed forces.

Only one biography of an Afghan cameleer exists. Mahomet Allum, an eccentric and colourful figure, moved to Adelaide, in the 1920s. There, at 181 Sturt Street (just around the corner from the bluestone and brick mosque, Australia’s first) and over many decades, he practised as herbalist and healer. Rich and poor beat a path to his door. A friend of mine, a Catholic priest, remembers being taken by his mother to see him on a number of occasions. Mahomet Allum made heaps and distributed the proceeds to the poor of Adelaide. In 1951, the SA Police Commissioner, Raymond L. Leane, wrote on behalf of the officers and men of the South Australian Police Force to wish him “a happy Christmas and a bright New Year” and to thank him for his exceptional generosity. Mahomet Allum died in 1964, at the age of 106. His estate was willed to charities, most of them involved with the care of children. He never got Australian citizenship. (‘Mahomet Allum’ by Madeleine Brunato, 1972, Investigator Press)

There was, then, something exceptionally appropriate in the welcome given by members of the Adelaide Aboriginal community to 100 Afghan refugees at the Catholic Archdiocese’ Otherway Centre in Pirie Street on New Years’ Eve 2002. It was as though a real history was being remembered and honoured, a history forgotten or unknown by the majority of Australians, if the saga of the Tampa is any guide.

There is only one train that bears the name of a people in this country, ‘the Ghan’, which runs along the route of the old Afghan towns from Adelaide to Alice Springs. Worth remembering in this Year of the Outback - and Detention Centres.