Robin Mills - pastoralist on Warrawagine Station
Robin Mills, pastoralist on Warrawagine Station in WA, talks about the effects of camels on his property and about how he's worked with many people in the area for a solution.
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 with Robin Mills – Interview 6:54.
We are here today at Warrawagine Station with pastoralist Robin Mills. Robin, how far are we from Perth, just to give people a sense of how far away this is?
Approximately 1600 kilometres from the cattle station yards here to the yards in Perth.
Your wife tells me it’s a 6-hour round trip to get groceries, is that right?
Yes, she leaves here about 5:30 in the morning and its 3 hours into Port Hedland, and then she will then spend up to 8 hours shopping and getting groceries to feed the staff, and then a 3-hour drive home, and she usually gets home about 8–8:30 at night.
One of the problems you have here is with feral animals?
Yeah it is, it’s one of the problems we sort of got involved in probably 10 or 12 years ago, were the camels coming in out of the desert. We’ve got about 160 kilometres of desert interface on the east side of the property where we join the Great Sandy Desert, and it became more and more obvious to me that camels were coming in as the dry seasons out and they were chasing water. We’ve got the Oko and Nullagine rivers flowing through us here and it was a good source of water for them. And they were tending to come in and do some fair bit of damage on the way.
And what sort of damage do they do? Is it damage to infrastructure but to other things as well?
In our case we’re fairly fortunate the damage is not all that severe, because much of that part of our property is not fenced, but where they have come through from the sand dunes and taken sometimes up to 500 metres of fence. They will flatten a fairly new fence. They are fairly severe on water supplies, on troughs and that sort of thing, they’ll wreck those if they can’t get enough water into them quick enough.
Again, I guess people don’t really have a sense of the scale, so when you’re talking about damage to fences you’re not just talking about a very small front fence, you’re talking about expensive fencing and quite a bit of it?
Yes it is, I mean when you’ve got a property of this size – it’s something like 170 kilometres from one end to the other – the amount of fencing you’ve got in it is a huge expense, and to replace it and getting staff at the moment is very, very difficult. Yeah, so it is pretty expensive to maintain those and the waters.
And have you seen an increase in camels numbers over the years? And if you have, how have they increased? Is it dramatically over the past couple of years, has it been constant?
It’s been reasonably constant in the early stages and then about four years ago we started to see big numbers, mobs of 30 and so, coming in and finding their way through the Isabella and Gregory range, and that’s when we became really concerned as to that, and we’d have really good seasons here in that time and probably less rain out in the desert, out the east of us, and that’s when you notice them, when they’re short of rain out there, that’s when you notice the bigger numbers coming in. We’ve been a bit fortunate this year, we’ve got rain in December last year and quite a bit of rain has fallen in the desert out there this year so the numbers haven’t been as severe this year.
I guess one of the things that we hear from people around the country is that commercialisation is one of the secrets to managing the feral camel population; you know, setting up abattoirs for meat and using camel products. Do you see that happening up here in the short term, long term; do you think it’s a possibility?
In the short term, absolutely not. We worked with the committee out of the NT for something like 8 years and we looked at every possibility of setting up abattoirs and so forth. We did a meeting last year with the Martu people from out in the desert area, out to the east of us here, and we had a pastoralist who has been involved in trying to get camels commercially into markets and so forth, and he was able to give us a first-hand description of how basically heart-breaking it is trying to muster camels, how difficult it is to get them to load onto trucks, and how almost impossible it is to transport them. And that brought it home to us that the total inability to make an industry out of the camels, and that’s a huge disappointment because it is an asset as such that’s there, although limited, there’s not a lot of meat on a camel, he’s an awful lot of bone and gristle and one thing and another, and you can probably only get, you know, about $300 or 400 of meat off a camel – the cost of rounding him up and transporting. You will not get a worthwhile return from him.
The impact that they’re having on native animals and so forth is massive. Once again, we had that meeting with the Martu people and I have a huge admiration for those people. They are great and some of their beliefs, the belief that you don’t kill something just for the sake of killing it, is of value and you don’t waste anything. And that’s a huge asset for people to have that attitude. But when you see that 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.
But also the bush tucker and their bush medicines and so forth, and the folia that’s out there, the damage that they’re doing to that. 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.
You know it’s good if we can highlight the damage it’s doing and it’s not just to the pastoralists, the pastoralists are on the edge of it, it is the whole ecology of that out there that we got to get people to understand, that’s why we must make such a fight to reduce the numbers.
Is there a solution to the feral camel problem? I mean, how can we resolve this dilemma?
I think the first thing we got to do is start this culling program that the Federal Government have put something like $19 million for, that they expect state governments to go dollar for dollar in, and that’s going to be their first hurdle, to get support from state governments and so forth.
I was fortunate enough to meet with the state Minister for Agriculture yesterday and once you can explain to these people where the problems are and that we are going to need that support, I think that’s going to be available, so anything we can get from state government as well as what we’ve got from Federal government and what we got from other sources as well to get the culling done, because it isn’t cheap and basically it is so inaccessible that it is helicopter work and so forth, and we’re going to need a fair bit of money into it over the years to come.
