THE CAMEL MAN
“Peter was known to the media all over Australia …”
By Bryan Clark
In the days when he strolled around the country with his camels, Sand, Sin and Sorrow, he was known to the media all over Australia as “The Camel Man.”
Lank and under-fed, his dusty feet in thongs, the Centralian camel man, Peter Holmes, faced thousands of kilometres of outback tracks and by-ways without flinching.
Many observers marvelled at his endurance and even his survival. He was quite obviously not a practical man. More a dreamer.
He carried no tucker bag or cooking gear; he wore no hat to shield himself from the blazing sun, yet he somehow managed to plod with his camels across the harsh Australian landscape, like an innocent protected by unseen gods.
“I’m no good now,” Peter Holmes grimaced as he hunched disconsolately in his cluttered little flat on the outskirts of Alice Springs.
“I’ve become too soft and comfortable. Just to walk down to the pub and back wears me out.”
He freely admits to drinking too much grog. Sometimes, too, a nervousness grips his voice and he stutters uncontrollably.
When Peter first decided on his round-Australia trek, he bought three young camels, each costing $300, plus a rickety old cart, and he trained the animals in the sandy bed of the Todd River.
“At first we were enemies,” he reflected. “They were always trying to run away. I had to keep them tied up on a nose line. One time the bloody things ran between two gumtrees. There was just enough room for the camels, but no room for the cart. They just about wrecked it before we even got started.”
One of his original camels was a temperamental feral bull with a mind of its own, he recalled.
“It started bucking one time and it fell down, its jaw hitting the ground, and the next thing I knew its tongue was half bitten off and hanging out of its mouth. Before I knew what happened, a dog ran in, grabbed the tongue and ate it.”
Later, during his marathon journey, while out on the wastes of the Simpson Desert, the camel man felt a deep sympathy for the disabled bull and cut him free to return to the wild.
“He followed us across the desert for a while, but one morning I saw him standing alone on top of a sand dune. He turned away and disappeared beyond the horizon, and he was gone.”
Always a wanderer, Peter remembered when, as a five-year-old, he toddled away from home, fully intent on leaving for ever.
“But a policeman brought me back to my mother,” he smiled.
With crude pack-saddles fashioned from bits and pieces gleaned from the Alice Springs rubbish dump, Peter Holmes ushered his camels through Heavitree Gap and started walking south. From Port Augusta, he decided to follow in the footsteps of the old-time explorer, Eyre, and he led his camels across the Nullabor Plain, blissfully careless about his lack of a waterbag and little in the way of tucker.
Isolated in Australia’s lonely heart, sometimes Peter saw his camels gazing longingly out across the desert towards magnificent sunsets, gurgling deeply in their throats, seeming to be aching for their freedom.
“I used to think of poor old Lasseter, too, who died in country like that. He wrote in his diary: ‘I have a reef worth 400,000 million pounds, but I would sell it for a loaf of bread.’
“I wanted to follow in his foot-steps to prove he wasn’t a liar or a madman.”
While walking across the Nullabor, the unchanging landscape was boring. To counteract the the weariness, Peter used to tuck the camel’s noseline under his belt and nonchalantly stroll along engrossed in a book of poetry.
One time a motorist slowed down and excitedly kept pointing back along the highway.
“The rope had pulled out from under my belt and I could see the camels about a mile back, quietly feeding on the roadside grass. I’ve often wondered what that motorist thought, seeing a bloke walking by himself out in the middle of the Nullabor, reading a book,” he smiled.
“Everywhere I met people. I gave rides for fifty cents,” he said. “That’s how I survived.”
Sometimes tourist buses crammed with local and overseas visitors stopped along the road to photograph the dishevelled adventurer and ask their list of predictable questions.
“Most of them seemed to think camels were dangerous,” he said. “I always told them they were wrong, that camels were marvellous animals, with interesting personalities, just like children: trying me out all the time to see how much they could get away with. Only the bulls can be dangerous in the mating season, that’s all.”
In a town somewhere along the way Peter saw two young nurses carry a frail old man from the hospital, bringing him to the spot where Peter’s camels grazed peacefully. The nurses held up the old bushman so his hand could reach the camel’s heads, with tears streaming down his weathered cheeks.
“I sensed he wanted to talk to me about his own camels in the old days,” Peter said. “But he couldn’t speak. The nurses were crying, too.”
In Western Australia the much-publicised camel man started to walk from the south of the State up to the far north-west. En route, he received a message that a certain 27-year-old American psychologist, then touring Australia, was interested in joining him, if he cared for the company of a female.
“She was welcome,” he recalled. “I was feeling lonely, and I was getting tired of talking to the camels and getting no replies. I wanted to relate to another human being.”
The unlikely partnership was not a happy one, it seems. The American girl was “very bombastic” while Peter was reflective.
“We used to fight a lot,” he said, “and sometimes when I upset her over something she wouldn’t talk to me all day. She was trained in a big Yankee university, but I used to tell her she was ignorant about life in general and people in particular.”
South of Port Hedland, near Whim Creek, the traveller attempted to jump his camels across a cattle grid.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” he admitted , ruefully. “At first I tried to undo the wire on the fence either side of the grid, but it couldn’t be done, so I took a chance going over the grid and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
One of his camels, Sin, had a hind leg trapped between the steel rails. Unable to release itself, the camel laid down. As Peter fondled its head, trying to decide a course of action, Sin suddenly lurched; a snap was heard as the leg bone broke, and soon the animal was free with a hind leg hanging uselessly.
“I was very upset,” Pter remembered. “The publican from the Whim Creek pub brought a rifle and he shot poor Sin. It took six bullets.”
Somewhere in the bush south of Port Hedland the camel man’s remaining animals ate leaves from the lethal Ironwood tree.
“I didn’t know anything was wrong until I noticed the camels were splattered with vomit,” he said. “They were walking around distressed and were in agony. I watched them die, one after the other; they were covered in their own vomit and groaning.”
His American companion, deeply upset, wept uncontrollably for hours then, recovering her composture, she hurriedly packed her knapsack and brusquely announced: “I’m gone, out of here.”
“She left me there,” Peter sighed, still bewildered. “She just left me there by the road with my dead camels, hopped in a car and drove away – just like that!”
In his lonely camp that night, the grieving man scribbled into his diary: “I have been thinking of all the thousands of miles we have walked together, through heat, rain, across deserts, making friends with hundreds of children – tireless, uncomplaining, all to end in agony and death in this incredibly beautiful place. When my camels died, part of me died, too. All my family are dead. Everything I loved and wanted and held important in my life has gone. Last night I cried bitterly as I said goodbye to them.”
Peter Holmes eventually returned to Alice Springs about ten years ago, his initial ambition being to find himself some new camels in order to continue his grand trek around the Australian coastline.
Now aged sixty-three, he settled into a small flat, acquired possessions, and succumbed to the material comforts of modernity.
Happiness and contentment have eluded him.
He says: “All this is a millstone around my neck. I’m on a pension and sitting around waiting to die.”
Peter, an articulate man, is writing a book about his experiences in the outback with his beloved Sand, Sin and Sorrow. He also composes sentimental verses about his profound love of the bush, the earth and its animals.
He reflects: “Most people these days don’t know what it’s like to go out into the desert with camels. It’s a deeply spiritual thing. Out there, when the sun was setting, and the birds were twittering in the trees around my camp, I had a very real feeling that someone was looking after me.
“It must have been my imagination, but it was a beautiful feeling as I sat there in the heat and cold and rain and loneliness.”
These days in Alice Springs, the weary bushman walks each day to the nearest pub for a bottle and strolls back again. His life style is abnormal, he believes, and it is slowly killing him.
When he has the money to spare, and nostalgia claims his thoughts, he buys small bunches of flowers to place on the graves of the pioneering Afghan camel men who lie in the old Alice Springs cemetery.
“I have great respect for those old fellows,” he confesses. “No-one cares about them these days, but I do.”
In the future, he hopes, he will sell off his material possessions, locate some more camels, turn his back to the world and strike out once more into the scorching western deserts in search of Lasseter’s reef of gold.
“I don’t want to die in a flat,” he says. “I want to go out again into the outback country with my camels. I want to walk till I drop down dead and, if I’m not dead enough, I’d like to get up and keep walking until I am.”
Hi Peter,
I have been pondering for a long time about a trek with camels from Sydney to Perth including the gun barrel highway. My wife and I are in our fifties and are looking for a spiritual journey and this is the one we have picked. We are in the planning stages but will definatley be making the trip as I don’t want to slowly grow old and not attempt one last major adventure. I read your accounts of your journey and can relate to the desert heart calling to come home.
Jeff and Susan Lucas
— Jeff Lucas · 6 June 2010 · #