Stakeholder Interviews: Ashley Severin and Lyndee Matthews at Curtin Springs Station, NT
Curtin Springs Station
Ashley Severin and Lyndee Matthews, of Curtin Springs Station in the Northern Territory, talk about the impact of camels on the environment, their infrastructure, and their business.
The views, opinions, and other information expressed in these interviews are those of the participants and may not reflect the position of the Australian Feral Camel Management Project.
Transcript: Interview length: 8:34
I guess if people haven’t experienced camels first hand they really wouldn’t know the damage they can do? Tell us about some of that damage.
AS: Contrary to popular belief that cameleers will tell you that they only eat trees, that’s a load of codswallop. They’re not different to us. Would you prefer eating jerky or would you prefer to have a nice rump steak? And that’s what the grass is, a rump steak. The jerky is there all the time. They mix their diet but as you can see like now, they’ll be into the grass.
The biggest thing is when we’ve seen them, in groups of up to 1,000 in a mob and that’s a guesstimate, you know, 5, 10, 1500, 200, 300, 1,000.
LM: So certainly the environmental issues are a concern because the country, although it looks beautiful now as I said, it’s once in a decade. Sometimes it takes a long time to get it back and if the camels do take the trees, particularly the native fruits – the quandongs, and the native plums and things. They don’t just re-germinate this year. We can’t say it’s going to rain again next month, so it could be two or three years before we get a new germination on that tree. It could be another 10 years before it starts to get any growth. It could be 100 years before you get anywhere near a mature tree back again.
So certainly the environmental issues are of concern but the big one for us has been infrastructure, and primarily fences. So you know, we run a cattle business, fences are there for a reason. We need to manage our herd, we need to manage the property, we need to be able to manage the land, rest land, rotate land, and do all of those things. They just take the fences out, they just take them away. It is not as though they just knock them over and you can stand them back up. They just rip all the fences out.
The cost of that must be just enormous?
AS: Just to replace it you’re looking at between $2,500 and $3,000 a kilometre and that’s just for material not for labour. And that labour doesn’t include going out and rolling up and getting rid of the old stuff.
LM: That’s spread all over the countryside and then putting up the new ones, and again it’s not just two kilometres of fences, you know when the camels came through in early 2007 we lost 140 kilometres of fences. So, to be able to replace those means that we’ve had to pull all of that profit from the business in the last few years to do the work to replace infrastructure that we already had. So that’s three years of work in relation to fences that we haven’t been able to do anywhere else.
AS: Some of it’s your four-wire, just your typical four-wire typical station suspension fencing, a lot of it was electric fence, because I still believe electric fences have got its place up here, but you know around the yards, you could have, in some of the older type yards, we have you could have anything up to 13, 14 barb wires in a fence that high, they’re gone.
LM: And we put one around Rocky’s dam, not far from the homestead, and we’ve shortened the length of the fence from what it was originally because we needed to take some length off it, so it ended up being 1.7 kilometres and it cost us $40,000. So, it was 4 x 4 steel, 4mm thick, reinforced strainers every 50 metres, concreted into the ground for a metre, so three foot of concrete into the ground, three strands of high-tensile 3.8 tonne breaking-strain cable, two heights of mesh. Now the camels knocked it over before we finished it from the inside, they haven’t breached it from the outside since we finished it. I’m not saying by any stretch of the imagination it’s camel-proof. What I’m saying is they haven’t breached it at this point.
But we can’t do that for 140 kilometres and it’s ongoing, and as we’ve said in other forums before, camels form a part of every single decision that we make, every single conversation, every single sense of planning all has the camel component. Where are we going to put the fence? Where is it going to work so we can reduce that risk? What’s the set-up that we’re going to do? How much concrete do we need? Where do we need to spend the money for the extra reinforcing? How many bullets do we need? Where are our risk points? And that forms part of every single thing that we do and has been that way now for more than three years.
So, the camel question is one that we deal with every day.
What we’re talking about here is not one or two camels, or half a dozen camels. Again, can you give us a sense of the number of these things?
AS: Back here a couple of years ago when we really got hit, went down to a mate’s place because he called us at a quarter to six one morning and he had 1,500 for breakfast, around the house, and they actually had their heads through the window, the kitchen window.
LM: Through the shed, through the house yard, through the kid’s toys and all of that sort of stuff.
AS: The days are gone when you’d find a bull camel with his harem of camels, 20 or 30 of them, and a mob of five or six solo camels because the bulls, the males, get kicked out. Now you’re getting mobs of males anything up to 300 and 400.
LM: Shooting an animal is not the easiest thing to do. It’s not what we enjoy going out to do. But I’m the one who has to go home and make the books balance. I’m the one who has to go home and make, and be part of that decision about how we make it continue into the future.
But we’ve had some rain and there’s been more rain here and to the east of us, not in Western Australia where the big numbers are. So, it’s only absolutely logical that they start to move and they’re not stupid, they are actually quite an intelligent animal. We’re hoping that the message has got out on the bush telegraph that it’s probably not best to be around here.
We don’t like shooting to waste. We’d prefer if there was some other options but the logistics are such that you can’t get big vehicles up here, you can’t get infrastructure, we don’t have the right type of infrastructure in the right areas to be able to do any mustering, let alone be able to pay for choppers and do all of that sort of stuff and they’re not worth enough even if you get them in the yard. So the financial return isn’t there. So even if we decided that we wanted to do that on a feral-based animal, the financial return isn’t there.
In the future we’d be more than happy, and Ash has talked about it for a long time, about using camels in a rotational grazing system, but it’s not the camel behind the fence that’s the problem. So it’s not the ones that we may end up putting into a domesticated system, it’s the feral product on the outside.
There can be, and there should be, and there will be a meat industry based around the camel, but the reality is that it will need to be based around a domesticated product. We can’t rely on it into the future on a feral product because the logistics are too hard. It makes the meat completely unviable.
AS: There are rules and regulations you know. If it’s killed in an abattoirs, which camels have to be, no different to beef, they’ve got to be killed at a certain temperature, hung up and washed and whatever, and you can’t do that out here. By the time you get them to town you’ve lost your money.
Even under these circumstances, from some of the things you’ve been saying, you still have a sense for some of the features of camels?
LM: We’re farmers.
AS: Yeah, we’re farmers and we love our animals, and I don’t like shooting camels but it’s a necessity. You’ve got to do it otherwise you’re just not in business.
LM: They are a beautiful animal and there are lots of opportunities that could be utilised in relation to all the parts of the camel.
