Why There Are Wild Camels Near Lake Eyre — and All Over Central Australia
Every so often on the drive up toward Lake Eyre, someone in the group spots a camel wandering the scrub well away from any obvious enclosure and asks the obvious question: what is a camel doing out here, completely wild, in the middle of the Australian desert?
It’s a fair question, and the answer is a genuinely interesting piece of Australian history.
How Camels Got to Australia
Camels aren’t native to Australia. They were imported, starting in the 1840s and continuing through the late nineteenth century, specifically to help with exploration and transport across the arid interior. Camels handle heat, distance, and lack of water far better than horses, which made them invaluable for opening up central Australia to European exploration and settlement.
The camels were imported primarily from British India and Afghanistan, and along with them came experienced handlers — the Afghan cameleers we talk about when we stop in Marree. These men and their camel teams supplied remote stations, built early telegraph and rail infrastructure, and made outback exploration genuinely feasible in country where it otherwise wasn’t.
How They Became Wild
As motor vehicles and rail networks expanded through the early twentieth century, the working camel industry declined rapidly. Rather than being systematically removed, large numbers of camels were simply released into the outback as they were no longer needed for transport work. With no natural predators and country well suited to their physiology, camel populations grew steadily over the following century.
Just How Many Are There?
Australia now has the largest wild camel population in the world — estimates have placed feral camel numbers in the hundreds of thousands across central Australia, spread through Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland. It’s a genuinely striking fact: more wild camels roam Australia’s outback than anywhere in the Middle East or North Africa, where the species originated.
Why This Matters Ecologically
Feral camels have a real environmental impact — competing with native wildlife and livestock for scarce water and vegetation, and causing damage to fragile desert ecosystems and culturally significant sites like waterholes and mound springs. Management of feral camel populations is an ongoing challenge for land managers across the regions our tours pass through.
What You Might See on Tour
Sightings aren’t guaranteed, but camels are occasionally spotted from the road, particularly around dawn and dusk when they’re most active. If you do see one, it’s worth appreciating the strange fact of what you’re looking at — a species from the other side of the world, thriving in a landscape it was never native to, now more populous here than almost anywhere else on Earth.
