Tin Camels – Norseman

Before there were roads out here, there were camels.

Norseman sits at the western end of the Nullarbor crossing, in goldfields country where surface water is scarce and distances between anything are measured in hundreds of kilometres. Camels, and the cameleers who worked them – many of them from what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan – carried the water, stores, timber and machinery that made mining possible in inland Australia through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Horses could not do it. Trucks did not exist yet. The camel trains were the supply line, and when the railways and motor transport arrived the trade ended and many of the animals were released.