by Alex Tinson
I doubt he had ever spent one day in an office or cooped up with textbooks. We were cut from completely different cloth, but Paddy and I clicked immediately. There was something about him that touched a part of me.
It turned out that Paddy just happened to be Australia’s number-one camel fanatic. He’d spent half his life working with camels in the wild, and I could see by the way he handled his own stock that he had an intuitive understanding of their nature. He made a living out of organising camel safaris into the outback for city dwellers who were looking for their own ‘camel experience’, and the farm I went to was where Paddy kept his camels when he wasn’t on the road.
Paddy was also a pioneer. In the years before we met, he and another vet had retraced the steps of the explorers Burke and Wills and embarked on a 1500-kilometre trek by camel from the south-east corner of Queensland to the Gulf of Carpentaria at the top of the state. The journey took three months and nearly all of it was through tough country. They made it to the end, though there were many moments when they wondered what the hell they were doing. The original plan was to make the return trip, but it had been way too arduous and they tossed it in once they’d reached the Gulf.
As a teenager Paddy had also spent months at a time on various treks with his older brother Greg and young Indigenous men from the Hermannsburg community in the Northern Territory, bringing horses, donkeys and camels across to north-western New South Wales. It was Paddy’s brother, Greg, who had originally ‘fallen into the world of camels’, as he put it. But Greg had died from leukaemia and Paddy had taken on his mantle.
Paddy knew the qualities of the camel like no-one else. In fact about the only thing he couldn’t do with a camel was remove its testicles, which is why I was there with my anaesthetic kit, scalpel and sutures.
While I got to work, Paddy got talking about a big idea I might be interested in. Paddy knew blokes who knew blokes who were looking to stage the biggest ever camel race in Australia’s history. A group of Queensland wheeler-dealers was putting together plans to stage the race in 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year. They saw the camel as the unsung hero in opening up Australia’s north and the event was to be a way of marking that. Calling it the Great Australian Camel Race, it would start at Uluru in Central Australia and finish on the Queensland coast, covering a distance of more than three thousand kilometres and taking around three months. Paddy knew the territory inside out, so of course he would be at the centre of making the race happen.
Listening to what Paddy had to say, I was left in no doubt that the trip would happen and that Paddy and I would be seeing a lot more of each other. In Paddy I believed I had met not so much my soul mate as my alter ego. Paddy had lit the fuse that ignited the person I always wanted to be.
You could hear the clock ticking.
Fate might have delivered the camels to my door via Paddy McHugh but fate also had something very dark in store. To be honest, I still have trouble talking about it.
Patti and I had a third baby girl, called Anya, who was born in January of 1986. Life seemed to be going well and we had absolutely no reason to be concerned, however one day I hadn’t been at the clinic long before the phone rang. Patti was in deep distress at the other end: Anya was in her cot and had stopped breathing. I raced out the door, got back home and we sped off to the local hospital.
The same day a massive cyclone had hit the Gold Coast, bringing torrential rain that turned roads into rivers and washed away bridges. We managed to fight our way through to Tweed Heads hospital whereupon we were told that Anya’s case was so serious she would have to be sent straight away to the Mater Hospital in Brisbane, a good hour and a half away. Anya was rushed into a waiting ambulance and raced up to Brisbane with Patti and I following closely behind in the driving rain on the now treacherous roads.
The specialists at the Mater told us that Anya had suffered an ‘unexplained life-threatening event’. It might have been SIDS. We waited with Anya for three long days as she was placed on full life support but the doctors couldn’t work out what was wrong. All they could tell us was she was brain dead and that there was only one option. Anya was only nine weeks old.
I remember the moment so vividly even today. I was standing in the corridor when one of the doctors approached and told us that the brain scan on Anya was flat: there was nothing there. The decision was made that Anya would be disconnected from life support. I stood next to Patti and she appeared to be dealing with the news better than me. I was destroyed.
We were given the option to hold Anya when she was disconnected. I thought it was right that one of her parents should hold her as she went. I held her when they killed her; technically, it was euthanasia. She died in my arms and it was the worst thing that has ever happened in my life. I felt like my heart had fallen out. I could have died at that moment.
In a way we had been through this before. Our first daughter, Katya, had narrowly survived an ‘unexplained’ life-threatening event at the age of eighteen months. Again I was at the clinic when Patti called me in distress. I raced home to find that Katya had been fitting uncontrollably. We bundled her into the car and I spent the longest fifteen minutes of my life with my finger in Katya’s mouth, clearing her airways so she could breathe. She was biting so hard she just about chewed my thumb off as we made a dash to the hospital.
Katya managed to survive the ‘unexplained life-threatening event’. The doctors theorised that it might have been epilepsy. But it was a terrifying moment, and not least because we didn’t know why a perfectly healthy little girl would suddenly lurch so close to death.
But with Anya it was too late. There was no bringing her back. She was gone.
And at that moment I thought I would never let anything hurt me that much again. I have no doubt it has made me who I am today. There is always a part of me that I hold back.
Three
Augathella to Arabia
My answer to the horror of Anya’s death was to make myself frantically busy. More and more I was dividing my time between the vet clinic and being out with Paddy McHugh and the camels. And the more time I spent with Paddy, the more respect I developed for this animal. I had caught the bug from Paddy and, to use his phrase, I was falling in with the camels.
Having little or no scientific education in camels, I was coming to understand what made them such fantastic creatures. They were utterly indestructible, capable of surviving the extremes of life in the Australian desert without breaking down. They hardly ever suffered illnesses like other animals do. I learned that if you were stuck in the harshest conditions you could depend on a camel to get you out and keep you safe. I began to feel a connection to camels that I hadn’t experienced with any other animal I’d worked with.
There was also what the camel represented. The camel was the spirit of the wild and it could transport you to the pure, simple beauty you find in an empty land. With a camel you could ride out and lose yourself in the isolation of the outback.
At the same time I was becoming more and more involved with Paddy in bringing together the various strands of the Great Australian Camel Race. Paddy suggested that I might like to act as the vet for the camels he was entering in the race, but instead I sold him on the idea that I should be the vet responsible for the entire race.
There was a huge amount of planning to be done to make sure the race could be run safely. Leaving the operation of the vet practice to a trusted locum I would take off for days at a time into Central Australia to help catch camels and gather preliminary data on how camels performed over long distances.
My life was drifting away from the clinic at Tweed Heads. All I could see was a huge adventure in front of me as the official vet for the camel race and I wanted to be part of it. Inevitably that would mean major upheavals. For one thing, I would have to abandon the vet practice for three months and trust that our locum would keep it ticking over. There was also the question of Patti and the girls. Katya was now ten and Erica was six, so there was school to
think about.
In the end it was no issue at all. Patti and I decided it would do us a power of good to get away from our surrounds and spend time together on a once in a lifetime adventure. As a family we hadn’t recovered from Anya’s sudden death, at home, in her cot—a place she should have been safest. How does that happen? We had coped by putting one foot in front of the other and making out to the rest of the world that we were fine, thanks. At the same time, Patti was pregnant again, a form of proof, if you wanted to look at it that way, that we were moving on.
So we packed up the house, took the kids out of school and set off for the centre of Australia for three months. We saw the Great Australian Camel Race as a chance to have a break and renew ourselves. We didn’t realise that it would mark the start of a whole new life out of the ashes of the old.
The Great Australian Camel Race was a genuine one-off gathering of rogues and big characters.
The idea had originally come from a colourful Queensland businessman called Arthur Earle, one of the infamous ‘white shoe brigade’ who had made a fortune out of land deals and property development in the time of the then premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Arthur was good friends with Joh, and had organised for him to be the official race starter. Arthur had also organised for prize money of $100,000, a huge amount at the time and aimed at luring the best riders from Australia and all over the world.
On the operations side, the technical mastermind was a former British SAS commander called Noel Dudgeon. Noel had a wealth of experience organising the complex logistics behind military ops. Then in his late sixties, he had planned the race meticulously.
The Australian Army was also heavily involved on the operational side. A unit from Brisbane would be deployed to feed the support staff, and to act as timekeepers and tail-end Charlies at the back of the race providing communications to those at the front.
In fact the race would be as much a PR exercise for the military as anything else. We had commandoes, guys from the 2nd/4th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment from Townsville, and the Special Air Service Regiment from Swanbourne in Perth. It was a huge military presence and the race could not have happened without it.
Above all, Arthur Earle, Paddy McHugh and the rest of us wanted this to be a showcase for the camels. Most Australians have no idea how important camels have been to opening up the north of the country. The camel has enormous strength and endurance; it can carry close to a tonne of weight, far more than a horse or bullock can. Camel drays pull telegraph poles and railway sleepers. And the camel never failed—whatever it was supposed to do, it did, and it never broke down.
The race would be a serious test of endurance over some of the most difficult terrain imaginable: 3300 kilometres, starting from Uluru and tracking across the Northern Territory and Queensland before finishing on the Gold Coast. We had broken the route down into a series of legs, like a car rally, with checkpoints along the way so each competitor could be timed. We had put together what was in effect a military campaign, with our ‘army’ of competitors and camels taking on the enemy of a hostile environment. As the days ticked down to the start of the Great Australian Camel Race every move was checked and double-checked. Every possible contingency was catered for.
Or so we thought.
The sixty-nine camels and riders plus support teams, race officials and military guys gathered for the start just before sunrise on 23 April 1988.
For the competitors this was serious business, but there was also a festive air to the occasion, with wives, children, dogs and even the odd long-distance runner blow-in who had decided to join the pack. There was also a documentary crew along, recording what was meant to be a great romantic adventure: man and beast pitted against the elements.
Just after sunrise, Joh Bjelke-Petersen fired the starting gun for the first leg from Uluru to Alice Springs, a relatively easy 416 kilometres.
As race vet I had enormous responsibilities. It was my job to make sure the camels were in good enough physical shape to withstand the rigours of the race. I carried with me a blood chemistry machine so I could do ongoing blood testing and check on how quickly the camels’ hearts recovered from each day’s exertions.
It was very clear within forty-eight hours that the camels weren’t going to be the problem. We had allowed three days to complete the first leg, but some of the camels managed to get there in half that time. It was a promising beginning.
All was proceeding smoothly when, five days into the race, our former SAS commander Noel Dudgeon collapsed with kidney disease and was forced to retire. Suddenly I found myself thrust into the role of race director. This meant I was now responsible not just for the animals but the humans as well, and very soon I was to be confronted with a genuine crisis. Months of meticulous planning were about to unravel. Spectacularly.
We had staged the race from late April because that’s when the climate is normally at its best, with pleasant temperatures no higher than about twenty-seven degrees Celsius in the day and lows of around twelve degrees at night. It also took us outside the tropical rainy season, so we could expect the odd shower but nothing like the downpours you get in January, February and March.
This year, though, the rain had bucketed down so torrentially just prior to the beginning of the race that the sewage pits at Alice Springs caravan park had overflowed and flooded the grounds. When we arrived there to set up camp at the end of our first leg, the grounds were nice and dry. But, unbeknownst to us, the rains had left a nasty legacy: a bacteria called Shigella dysenteriae, which is every bit as bad as it sounds.
After breaking camp in Alice Springs we headed off for the town of Boulia, over seven hundred kilometres away and taking us from the Northern Territory into Queensland. This was to be one of the longest and most arduous legs of the race. A couple of days out of Alice Springs as we headed for the top of the Simpson Desert, disaster hit.
People started dropping with a severe case of gastro. One of the first was my daughter, Erica, who was only six. The onslaught was so bad that she was literally passing the lining of her bowel. Having already lost Anya, we were terrified about the prospects for our little girl. Taking no chances, Patti and I got Erica into a car and drove her back to Alice Springs Base Hospital where she was kept for forty-eight hours. Luckily she bounced back but tests revealed that she had suffered a severe bout of dysentery. Putting two and two together, we could trace it back to the Alice Springs caravan park.
Erica rejoined us but the further we pressed on, the more people were getting hammered with this horrendous dysentery. Suddenly the great romantic adventure had turned into a full-blown public health crisis, with the real prospect that people might die. And I was in charge.
We still had a hundred or so kilometres to go to reach Boulia. The military guys had pitched camp in a dry section of the Georgina River on Glenormiston Station, just over the Queensland border, and meanwhile the rain had started to bucket down to the north of us. I knew there was a wall of water heading our way. I told them that if they didn’t get out then they were going to get washed away. But the military, of course, listens only to itself and by the time they got themselves organised it was too late. Before long, heavy-duty army trucks were bogged in wheel-deep mud and just couldn’t move. So we were not only desperately ill, we were also bogged. And at that stage we started losing track of where everyone had got to. Some were so sick they were literally hunched over with diarrhoea as their mates positioned themselves behind them, shovelling away the mud and excrement in the driving rain. The scenes were like a bad third world refugee camp.
We attempted to push on through the rains, but the camels too were finding it heavy going, with some of them getting stuck in mud and water up to their chests. We had to lasso them with straps around their belly or their rear and drag them out. Sixteen-wheeler military semitrailers were bogged and had to be pulled out by trucks. As I attempted to move from one crisis to the next, I found the lights of my four-wheel drive were at times literally under w
ater.
Things were spinning out of control. We were marooned in the middle of nowhere, it felt like everyone around me was dying, and we were still a long way from decent medical help.
There was no choice but to suspend the race. I told everyone we had to get to Boulia as fast as possible. I didn’t care how they did it—they could carry the camels as far as I was concerned. We just had to sort this out.
We finally limped into the town and started to get a grip on the deteriorating situation. There was panic, anger, disappointment, despair: every emotion you could imagine. In the midst of this I called a meeting at the community hall of all 160 people on the race, who we divided into three groups: those affected by the disease and still had it, those who’d been affected and had recovered, and those who hadn’t yet been affected.
The Royal Flying Doctor Service ferried some of the worst cases to regional hospitals, including our race leader who spent three days on a drip at Mount Isa Base Hospital after his kidneys shut down. We all thought he was a sure bet to win the whole race. Next thing we feared he would be the first to die. We got every antibiotic we could find within a thousand kilometres of us and had them brought to the Boulia community hall, which acted as medical HQ. The Royal Flying Doctor Service also treated those who couldn’t be flown out. Dozens of the sick were camped out in tents at the local racetrack, which took on the appearance of a makeshift hospital ward. You could hear the moans and groans as you walked through the tent hospital. Some were literally at death’s door. We were meant to be raising money for the Royal Flying Doctor, so it wasn’t lost on me that we might be costing them more than they would get.
Meanwhile, a small group who weren’t sick had decided to head out on a day trip to a nearby town named Urandangie. We later heard that they unwittingly spread the disease there, too. So we had introduced what became known as the ‘camel plague’ across Queensland and our race had become notorious, in Australia and around the world.