To celebrate the Outback Camel Company turning 50, founder Andrew Harper took five with Great Walks.
What’s your earliest hiking memory?
When I was three, I undertook a major 1.5km expedition with the family labrador, the plan being to visit the local shop and get an ice cream. This hiking journey entailed walking across the big bridge over the Edward River in Deniliquin and crossing the main highway. I arrived at civilisation, but realised I possessed none of this mysterious adult currency called money, and the emotional logistics immediately crumpled. So, I did the only reasonable thing: I sat in the gutter and cried at the unfairness of it all. The labrador stayed with me the whole time. Subsequent expeditions have been successfully completed on a more positive note.
How did you come to be working with camels?
My first camel expedition was in 1995 with Outback Camel Company owner, Rex Ellis. I wanted to learn about camels in preparation for my walk across Australia, that I had planned sometime before 2000. So I joined the team as a trainee cameleer for a month. And ended up buying the company 5 years later.
What makes a camel so good at remote wilderness travel?
As a human/camel team we can pretty much go anywhere, which means we can explore remote desert that never see travellers.
Outback Camel Company turns 50 this year. How do you plan on celebrating this milestone?
The first OCC Expedition was a crossing of the Simpson Desert, which was also Australia’s first commercial camel expedition. This year we are heading off on a 30-day Expedition from the west side of the Simpson Desert in the Northern Territory and concluding in Birdsville Queensland.
Has much changed in the way you run your tours over this time?
In many ways nothing has changed at all: it’s still Slow Travel. Communication technology has been the big difference. In 1995 we had a HF radio as the only form of comms with the outside world, and we also had one of these ‘new GPS gadgets’ (the size of a small house brick) that supposedly told us where we were. The second difference is in 2007 I founded Australian Desert Expeditions, where we take scientists and field ecologists on treks. These surveys are hugely popular, as trekkers are not only walking an ancient landscape, but doing so in the company of leading desert ecologists.
How important is the surveying component of any trip?
The work is important. We are surveying areas that have never been documented by scientists before, so the information we collect can provide valuable benchmark data for these remote landscapes. However, first and foremost, it is still a walking experience.
Are guests encouraged to be hands-on with the camels and the surveys?
Yes, trekkers are encouraged to assist the cameleers (under strict supervision) with loading/unloading the Humps.
What desert expeditions have you got planned over the next 12 months?
We are a seasonal operation and start trekking in mid-April and conclude in mid-September, and within that time, it is back-to-back trekking. In addition to the 50th Anniversary Simpson Desert Expedition, we also have expeditions searching for megafauna fossils, and shorter surveys documenting flora & fauna in the southern Simpson Desert.
What’s the biggest misconception of camels?
That they are bad-tempered. Actually, they are discerning, they respond in kind, and they are my professional colleagues. When you walk with camels long enough, you stop handling them and start working with them. With the exception of the larger cattle stations, and the racing and leisure industries, our twenty-first century society has largely lost its connection with large working animals and most people simply no longer live alongside animals of that scale. And so, I think some folks project onto them their ideas of how a large animal should behave.
For more info listen to this fascinating ABC Radio interview featuring Andrew Harper.
The Outback Camel Company's season is about to start and with all the rain that has fallen in the desert the wildflowers are everywhere! desertexpeditions.org