Australian camels: Why are they so valuable?

Australian camels get exported to Saudi Arabia for their meat. They are valuable because Australia’s wild camel population is largely free of disease.

The story of camels in Australian is a glorious mix of ingenuity and unintended consequences. Take a camel tour at Uluru in the Northern Territory, Birubi Beach in Port Stephens or Lighthouse Beach in Port Macquarie, and the cameleers will undoubtedly tell how camels got here.

History of camels in Australia

The first Australian camels came over in 1840 for outback exploration. Settlers wanting to scout possible pastoral land in the outback realised that horses and bullocks needed way too much water. The solution? A pack animal that could go for days without water. Camels set to work constructing roads and telegraph lines, but eventually cars made them obsolete.

A government order was issued, telling camel handlers to bring their camels in to be shot. These handlers had often come over from Pakistan and Afghanistan with their camels, and had developed an emotional attachment to them. Many handlers weren’t prepared to have their camels killed. Instead they released the camels into the wild, and let them run free.

How Australian camels spread across the outback

The camels did incredibly well, breeding rampantly and adapting happily to their new environment. They spread out over the vast open spaces of South Australia and the enormous Northern Territory outback.

Nowadays, no-one knows how many wild camels there are in Australia. The numbers are probably in the millions, but there’s no way of counting.

The Australian wild camel has become a bizarrely valuable, too. Because they were originally imported from all over the place, there’s huge genetic diversity amongst Australian camels. They are astonishingly free of diseases that can affect camels in other parts of the world.

Australian camel exports to Saudi Arabia

And this good health is why Australian camels have become a bizarrely valuable commodity. Australia now exports its camels to the Gulf states. In particular, Australia exports camels to Saudi Arabia.

There, Australian camels have the reputation of providing the best meat for eating. The ships of the desert may have ended up in the wrong desert. They’re now transporting tourists rather than telegraph poles, but they’ve somehow ended up becoming the most valuable camels in the world…

It’s also possible to do camel tours in Alice Springs, the Red Centre, and Cable Beach in Broome, WA.