I’d have to say that this was one of the highlights of our trip. We were taken by tour bus to the camel station at Ayers Rock Resort where we started with a quick talk about camels.
It turns out they were bought to Australia because horses just couldn’t handle the hot desert conditions. The early settlers bought out Afghan Cameleers and Camels to explore central Australia and for the construction of the Adelaide to Darwin telegraph line. Once the Ghan was build the railroad made the camels redundant. The government of the day decided that camels were now a pest and that they should be put down. The government ordered the cameleers to take their camels into the desert and shoot them. Most of the cameleers thought of the camels as pets in the same way we think of our dogs as pets and refused to put them down. Instead they took them out into the desert and released them. Now instead of having 10,000 camels in Australia they have multiplied and there are over 1 million feral camels!!!