Australia's most famous train carries a camel and its handler on its emblem, and the official story says its name honours the cameleers who opened up the continent's interior. The railwaymen who actually coined the name seem to have had something rather less respectful in mind: a half-empty train, a lone passenger, and a joke about who the service was really for.
The truth does not diminish the cameleers. If anything it sharpens their story, because the men the name was half-mocking were the same men who had helped build the Overland Telegraph, supplied the outback stations and moved the freight in places the line had not yet reached. How a sneer became a tribute says a good deal about the outback, and about the way railways rewrite their own past.
Afghans who were mostly not from Afghanistan
The first difficulty with the word "Afghan" is that most of the men it described were not Afghans. The cameleers who came to Australia from the 1860s onwards were recruited largely from what was then western British India: Baluchistan, the Punjab, Sind, Kashmir and the North-West Frontier, with smaller numbers from Afghanistan itself, Persia, Egypt and Turkey. What they shared, in the eyes of the colonial population, was Islam, a turban and a camel string. Australians called them all Afghans, and in time shortened even that to "Ghans".
Estimates of their number vary. Material prepared for museum exhibitions in South Australia and Victoria puts it at a little over 2,000 men between the 1860s and the 1920s, with something like 20,000 camels imported over the same period. Nobody kept a complete register.
From Harry the camel to the Beltana breeding stud
The camel's Australian career started unpromisingly. The first animal to arrive, at Port Adelaide in 1840, was known as Harry and was taken on an inland expedition in 1846. The serious traffic began in 1860, when the ship Chinsurah reached Melbourne from Karachi on 9 June with 24 camels and a small party of handlers engaged for the Burke and Wills expedition. The expedition killed its leaders, but its camels had proved themselves.
The pastoralist Thomas Elder drew the commercial conclusion. In 1866 his associate Samuel Stuckey landed more than a hundred camels and 31 cameleers in South Australia. They were placed first on Elder's Umberatana run and then at Beltana in the northern Flinders Ranges, where a breeding programme turned the camel from a curiosity into the freight lorry of the arid interior. A good animal could carry around 600 pounds for days on little food or water.
- 1840: Harry, the first camel in Australia, lands at Port Adelaide.
- 1860: Camels and cameleers arrive at Melbourne for the Burke and Wills expedition.
- 1866: More than 100 camels and 31 cameleers reach South Australia for Elder's Beltana enterprise.
- 1878: Construction of the narrow-gauge line north from Port Augusta begins (some accounts give 1877).
- 1891: The railway reaches Oodnadatta, which becomes a camel railhead.
- 1923: A through sleeping-car service to Oodnadatta begins and acquires the nickname "Afghan Express".
- 1929: The line reaches Stuart, later renamed Alice Springs.
Ghan towns and the camel railheads
The railway and the camel were never rivals so much as relay runners. As the narrow-gauge line crept north from Port Augusta, each temporary terminus became a transfer point where goods came off the wagons and onto camel strings for the stations, missions and telegraph posts beyond. Marree, then called Hergott Springs, was important enough to earn the nickname "Little Asia". When the rails reached Oodnadatta in January 1891, that town too became a cameleer base, with an itinerant population that contemporary accounts put at around 150 men.
The settlements were segregated in the manner of the time. Inland towns commonly had a European quarter, an Aboriginal quarter and a separate cluster of huts, gardens and a simple mosque on the edge of town, known as Ghan Town. In Adelaide the community financed something more permanent: the Adelaide City Mosque, built in the late 1880s under the direction of Faiz Mahomet of Kandahar and still in use, is generally regarded as the oldest surviving permanent mosque in Australia. Its brick minarets were added between 1901 and 1903.
The joke behind the "Afghan Express"
Here the official story and the railway record part company. Commonwealth Railways, and later the train's commercial operators, presented the name as a tribute to the cameleers, and the camel-and-handler emblem reinforced the message. Railway historians tell it differently. In 1923 the South Australian Railways stopped stabling the northbound train overnight at stations along the way and instead provided a sleeping car so that the service could run straight through. The inaugural through train left Terowie for Oodnadatta on 30 August 1923. According to the account most often repeated, the only passenger in the new sleeper on an early run was a single Afghan man, and a railwayman remarked that if this was who the train was for, they might as well call it the Afghan Express.
The sources do not agree on every detail. One version places the taunt in the 1890s rather than 1923; another credits the name to a crew member watching a Muslim passenger leave the train at a halt to pray. What the versions share is tone. The name was a piece of railway sarcasm about an expensive service with too few paying customers, and pastoralists along the line were still using it "in ribald fashion" in the mid-1920s, partly as a comment on the train's unreliability. By the time diesel locomotives replaced steam in the early 1950s the barb had worn away, and only the name remained.
How the tribute was written in later
None of this means the tribute is false in substance. The railway north of Port Augusta was built through country the cameleers had already opened. They worked on the building of the Overland Telegraph, kept the sheep and cattle stations of the far north provisioned and hauled wool south to the railheads for decades. That the name came from a jibe rather than a dedication is a matter of record; that the cameleers deserved a dedication is a matter of fairness.
Their own reward was meagre. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 made it difficult for men who went home to return, and from the 1920s motor lorries and the advancing railway took their trade. Many camels were simply turned loose, which is the origin of the large feral herds of central Australia. The cameleers themselves largely vanished from public memory until the late twentieth century, when museums, descendants and the railway's own marketing began to bring them back.
From a narrow-gauge line to a transcontinental railway
The old line was notorious. Built to narrow gauge across country prone to flash flooding, it was regularly closed by washaways and earned a reputation for timetables that meant very little. In 1980 it was replaced by a new standard-gauge alignment running north from Tarcoola, further west; the last narrow-gauge Ghan left Alice Springs on 26 November that year. The long-promised extension north to Darwin, discussed for more than a century, was finally completed in 2003, and the first passenger Ghan to run the full distance left Adelaide on 1 February 2004.
Riding the Ghan's route today
The modern Ghan runs roughly 2,979 kilometres between Adelaide and Darwin, and its stop at Alice Springs sits close to the heart of old cameleer country. The track is not the one the first Afghan Express used, but the country is the same.
For travellers who want to see the continent from both axes, the Ghan pairs naturally with the east-west Indian Pacific; our overview of Australia by luxury train explains how the two connect. Those still deciding where to begin may find choosing your first luxury train journey useful, and the wider field is surveyed in the world's greatest luxury train journeys. More rail history is collected in the journal, and every train we cover is listed under our trains.
