For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share
With courage let us al combine
To advance Australia Fair
'Advance Australia Fair' (Australian National Anthem)

This article explores a surprisingly little known and only scantily document fact of modern Australia's cultural history. This was the instrumental role played by Afghan and Indian camel drivers in the settlement history of the arid interior. While the camel was to thrive in the 1960s with the first substantial importations of domesticated pack-animals were to remain a marginal group in the colonial social field, and had all but vanished by mid-twentieth century. Apart from the tens of thousands of feral camels that now roam the outback, a handful of buildings and half-forgotten tombstones are among the few surviving traces of the 'Afghan' presence in colonial Australia; substantive evidence of what, for many Australians, remains a vague and almost mythological dimension of their settlement history. Paradoxically, — as buildings could be regarded as the very antithesis of the cameleer's typically peripatetic mode of dwelling — these architectural remains are a scant but telling motif of the radical differences that were interwoven into colonial Australia's cultural fabric.