Overview of the Australian Feral Camel Management Project
This short film provides an overview of the project, through the eyes of a range of people affected by feral camels.
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 7:52.
Everyday Australians from different places and backgrounds are dealing with a feral camel population of more than one million, spread across more than three million square kilometres.
Jan Ferguson, Managing Director, Ninti One Limited
“People are so over the damage that camels do, people that live with them on a day-to-day basis, that they are very, very keen to see them reduced to a number that they can live with.”
David Hewitt, AM
“At Warakurna in 2007, the administrator out there estimated that over a three-month period they caused over $100,000 worth of damage to community infrastructure, and that’s $100,000 that should have been spent on providing better facilities for the local Aboriginal population.”
Peter See, Director Land Programs, Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa
“A recent return-to-country trip, you know, the elders were horrified when they went back to discover that these very, very significant waterholes were just trashed: too many camels. Far too many camels for the country to be able to sustain.”
Robin Mills, Warrawagine Station, WA
“There’s no kangaroos, there’s no emus left in that land out there, and when you see that and you look at the area and the size of that amount of country that’s out there to realise that the camels are becoming such a dominant factor in that they’re chasing those native animals away, and it must be affecting smaller animals as well.”
[NS]
“Oh, they’re eating all the bush tuckers, even our tucker. Bush tucker like the tomato, warmala and all that thing, the camel eat that.”
Robin Mills
“We’ve talked to station owners down further towards Wiluna and where there’s a lot of mulga country, and mulgas are great trees that have been there for thousands of years, and they’re just breaking down huge areas of those and breaking them up, and that’s a condemnation on us if we don’t do something about them.”
Dr Glenn Edwards, NT Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport
“And of course camels have an impact on economic values as well. I mentioned camels coming onto pastoral leases, where they damage fence lines, often over many tens of kilometres.”
Ashley Severin, Curtin Springs Station, NT
“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 because he had 1,500 for breakfast, around the house, and they actually had their heads through the window, the kitchen window.”
Dr Glenn Edwards, NT Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport
“There’s a whole broad spectrum of impacts in the negative sense but of course camels have positive aspects about them as well. They’re potentially a resource; camel meat’s pretty good meat. So there is an upside to the camel as well.”
Butler Landy, Senior Martu traditional owner
“I understand camel not belonging to Australia. They are a good animal but too many is too many, and it’s hard to control. It upset me and sometimes it make me sorry to do what we’re planning to do but it is getting out of hand now these days. They’re breeding more than the dogs I think.”
With funding from the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country program and a strong, productive partnership of state and territory governments and key parties, action is being taken now to manage feral camels.
David Hewitt, AM
“Look, we need to do something today, and in fact 40 years ago if we’d seen an impending problem we could have shot camels then and we probably wouldn’t have the problem we’ve got today; but the experts say that they are increasing something like 70,000 a year.”
Dr Glenn Edwards, NT Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport
“We’ve got a crisis and I think we need to deal with it. We need to reduce the camel population immediately and get it down to a more manageable level because at the moment a lot of pastoral landholders, for example, are frustrated by the fact that there are so many camels. They feel that they don’t have the ability to actually deal with it themselves, because as fast as they manage camels on their land there’s more camels there to take their place.”
Peter See, Director Land Programs, Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa
“And Martu really came to the decision that while yes, culturally they were much more likely to say you can’t kill for the killing sake, Martu ended up making a really hard but strong decision to say that in wirrili country, in faraway country, they’d actually work with government to use aerial culling to actually reduce the number of camels.”
Lindee Matthews, Curtin Springs Station, NT
“Camels form a part of every single decision that we make, every single decision, 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 that 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.”
With an issue as complex as feral camels, there are no quick-fix solutions. What’s needed is a concentrated and concerted effort.
Jan Ferguson
“We did create this problem, but just because we created it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to fix it. There are a number of partners, 19 partners in the project, and it is a national project. It’s the first time that this has been attempted on a landscape scale such as this with such big pests, but we believe with the strength of the partnerships that we’ve managed to create – because we did the initial research into camels in the first place, and that built the partnerships and the relationships – so we believe with those relationships in place we can do it.”
Dr Glenn Edwards, NT Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport
“We need to immediately, over the next let’s say four to six years, we need to actually start to make inroads into reducing the number of camels and the population density in key areas, because in some areas now the population is up around 10 per square kilometre and that is unacceptably high, and the impacts in those areas are unacceptably large.”
Dr Bidda Jones, Chief Scientist, RSPCA
“We’re comfortable with the fact that something has to be done. With any kind of introduced animal that is having a significant impact, particularly on the environment in Australia, if you’re able to determine what those impacts are and address them then that’s a valid reason for controlling a particular population.”
Lauren Brisbane, Chair, Australian Camel Industry Association
“I think that the camel industry can provide a huge benefit to Australia by turning a feral animal into a resource for Australia and provide fantastic outcomes for Central Australia and the arid rangelands of Australia.”
Lindee Matthews, Curtin Springs Station, NT
“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.”
Dr Glenn Edwards, NT Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport
“So we need to have a concerted approach, a national approach to dealing with the current crisis. Once that’s happened then we can think about how we are going to manage camels in the longer term, which is I think is a slightly different proposition. Once we’ve got the population down I think it opens up a whole range of other management options that we can have, there into the future.”
