A ten-day camel trek through the Australian outback | Hacker News Reader

A ten-day camel trek through the Australian outback

themonthly.com.au

A hilarious, and well written story.

I fondly remember my camel riding experiences along Cable Beach in Broome many years ago. So much more peaceful and sedate than a horse ride.

A good addendum to this story (if I can find it) will be one that I've heard here a couple of times, of a young lad who decided to walk across the Kimberley desert with a camel pack, and it turns out one of the camels was pregnant and gave birth during the trek, and he ended up carrying the baby camel on his back a lot of the way. A similar story of courage, strength and hilarity...

Watch "From Alice to Ocean", which covers the same ground, with camels, better.

One of the first CD-ROM multimedia presentations to be any good.

There is a lot in this story to consider - if you love Australia, the land, then this sort of story is bitter-sweet. It's about as white and imperialistic an "Australia desert story" as you can get, and induces much cringe. (Potatoes? Really?)

For those of you fascinated by this story you should know that camels are not native to Australia, and have been considered a destructive, intrusive species. Sure, they work great in the Australian desert - but they've had a negative impact on that environment, in that they destroy the crops grown by First Nation Australians as part of their tens-of-thousands-year-old land caretaking traditions.

So .. Camels are one way to do it. Walking by yourself, another:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-03/clinton-pryor-in-canbe...

There are aboriginal communities who are using camels to their advantage, generating jobs and income for the community.[1][2]

Of course that's not the whole story, and these feral animals do create some damage to the native environment.[3] Australia now has the largest volume of wild camels anywhere.[4]

There are two sides to every story. Some see only the negative aspects, some see positive opportunities.

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-09/camel-economy-for-remo...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/an-aboriginal-company-is-...

[3] http://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2016/12/21/young-aborigin...

[4] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22522695

> First Nation Australians

Please don't do that. Describing tribes as "nations" is a silly neologism when they did it in North America, and it's even sillier when applied to the even more primitive social structures that existed in pre-colonisation Australia.

Sorry, but no. The only thing primitive about the first nation of peoples that inhabited the land which later came to be known as "Australia", is that they were massacred and brought into non-existence by the invasion of white Europeans who, still yet today it seems, even still seem to think that their way of life is superior, and therefore anything otherwise is utterly inferior. However, this is a matter of great debate.

Another interesting Australia/camel story is that of Robyn Davidson, whose solo camel-crossing was made as the 2013 film Tracks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson#Tracks

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2167266/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com