Pioneering Afghans

"In the Outback of Australia
Few men ever came
Came a string of laden camels
Heading north to Alice Springs...." 

Road trains and tour buses plough up and down the Stuart Highway. Soon trains will run all the way from Adelaide to Darwin. The Outback has been thoroughly opened up. Yet, as the song reminds us, the great Australian inland would have remained a closed book without the contribution of Afghans, who first rode their camels into the harsh interior to facilitate the building of the railways.

In its heyday, the legendary Ghan railway ran for 1,500 km between Adelaide and Alice Springs. In 1982, a century after it was laid, the line was moved to a new route less prone to floods and the old track decayed. Nowadays, only tourists, Christmas party-goers and wedding guests get to ride on the chugging hulk that has become a museum piece. The railway’s history is entwined with the former subjects of the British Empire who helped to build it -- Afghan, Indian and Pakistani cameleers. Like the old Ghan railway named in their honour, their memory was buffed up in 2002 when Australia celebrated the Year of the Outback.

The Afghans came to Australia without women and often intermarried with the Aboriginal population. Eric Sultan, who is of Afghan, Aboriginal and Irish descent, is very proud of his mixed background. Jokingly, he calls himself a “liquorice all-sort”.

Eric’s grandfather came to Australia from Kandahar in the late 1860s to drive camels for the early Outback pioneers. “He started off around the Maree area and then went on to Oodnadatta,” he said, referring to places in South Australia. “I heard that he came up into Central Australia but that he also went up into the Queensland area as well.”

He must have covered hundreds, even thousands of kilometres, an astonishing achievement for someone just walking with a camel in the brutal heat.

“You talk about the heat,” said Eric. “It must have been unbearable for them but they acclimatised to them sort of conditions. They didn’t know about air conditioning and things like we do today.”

Heat, dust and flies aside, nothing could have prepared Eric’s grandfather for the culture shock of coming here. Nineteenth-century Australia, choosing to ignore its Aboriginal history, was white, Christian and Anglo-Saxon. The Afghans with their Muslim customs, strange clothes and diet would have found it hard to fit in.

“I don’t think the term ‘racism’ would have been around then but they were a different breed of people altogether, the way they dressed, their religion…” said Alex Sherrin, a tyre fitter turned amateur historian in Alice Springs. As a former “garbo man” – his words – he used to rescue old books about Australian pioneers before they ended up at the rubbish dump. His imagination was caught by the romantic Afghan cameleers, who have also inspired artists and even country and western singers, such as Ted Egan:

The song tells of the line that ran through Maree, where all the Anglo-Saxons lived on one side and the Afghans lived on the other and never the twain should meet:

For the railway line runs through Maree
And star-crossed lovers are doomed to be
Forever denied their true destiny
By parents who know what is best.”

The completion of the Ghan railway and the arrival of the motor car put the Afghan cameleers out of work. Forced to integrate into mainstream Australian society, they let their camels loose to become “feral” and took up jobs as horsemen, drivers and farmhands. In the process, they also abandoned their religion. It is only recently that Eric Sultan has got back in touch with his Afghan, Muslim roots and he now attends a small mosque on the edge of Alice Springs.

“The religion was lost to my father’s generation,” he said. “When it came time for us to bury that generation, we just had to learn a little bit more about the religion because he was born Muslim and we preferred our father’s generation to be buried as Muslims.

“It is very hard for people of my generation because we still have our old ways, as well, and it’s so hard to change. But what we’ve got to do is encourage the young kids, get them to come to the mosque, a little bit of religious teaching and also just to come and have fun.”

Teaching youngsters about Australia’s Afghan history is what brought Eric Sultan and Alex Sherrin together. Knowing the children at Sadadeen Primary School had no idea who their school was named after, Alex Sherrin decided to show them.

Charlie Sadadeen was a legendary cameleer, who came to Alice Springs in the early 1900s, carrying loads for local farmers and businesses on his herd of 60 beasts. Alex wanted Charlie to turn up in person and tell the children about his life but since he died some 70 years ago, Alex needed a stand-in. Preferably someone of real Afghan descent.

He found Eric, standing with his Imam, at the mosque and told them of his idea to put on a little piece of theatre at the school. They were hesitant at first but later Alex got a phone call from Eric.

“Did Charlie Sadadeen have a beard?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Alex.

“Then I think I know someone who might do it for you.”

So Eric, who himself sports a substantial beard, dressed up to re-enact the part.

“Eric appeared at seven or eight o’clock at night, so the kids were pretty hyper by then,” said Alex. “They were just spellbound and for weeks, literally weeks afterwards, the children kept talking about this Afghan bloke who came to their school.”

Some elderly people in the audience seemed to believe they really had seen Charlie Sadadeen, back from the dead.

“I think old Herbie probably still believes to this day that he was talking to Charlie Sadadeen,” said Alex. “I had tears running down my cheeks. I had to admit, no, he is gone.”

Following his success at the school, Alex came up with the idea of re-creating the last camel train so that the Afghans would be properly remembered in the Year of the Outback.

“Even though there are a lot of landmarks around Alice Springs, a lot of people living here today don’t fully appreciate what those old cameleers did in helping open up the Outback,” he said. “And so, we wanted to re-enact the camel train from the railhead at Oodnadatta to the Alice Springs Telegraph Station.

“Good things out of bad – you had September 11^th in 2001 – but because of that, it’s brought both the Muslim and Christian religions closer together here in Alice Springs. There’s been a lot of interaction between the Imam and various ministers from different churches.

“To be down at Oodnadatta, at the actual ceremony, sending the camel train off, we had the Frontier Services Minister, Reverend Tony Davy, he played a part in it, and then the Imam played a part and it was just beautiful.

“We’ve got a photo at home. The Imam from the mosque, he told us that when they pray, they have their hands upraised. Well, in this particular photo, there’s the Imam praying and if you look in the background, there’s the Uniting Church Minister, also standing there with his hands upraised. We just pointed out to our children that regardless of what’s going on overseas, here in the centre of Australia you’ve got two religions genuinely respecting each other’s beliefs and that was beautiful.”                       

Sharon Mascall

Photos by Steve Strike