The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  The reality of what happened—and the publicity—might have been bad, but ultimately we got those people back on their feet and moving across the country, with no fatalities and no camels dying either. God knows how we did it, but it will always be my greatest achievement. There had been two record rains in the middle of the desert when it should have been dry. It was absolutely horrendous. It’s a miracle that no-one died by drowning, by Shigella or by simply disappearing.

  Just about everybody ended up sick except for me. I got by on three to four hours’ sleep for weeks on end. Maybe it was the adrenalin that got me through, but it felt as though I was on a mission to get these people out safe and sound. With the help of our military support and the Royal Flying Doctor Service we did it. The experience made me feel I was bulletproof.

  The Great Australian Camel Race moved on after its brush with disaster, but tensions between the military men and the civilians simmered just below the surface. There was one major blow-up when a former SAS military commander turned on the bloke who’d supplied him with what he considered to be a dud camel. This led to blows and I was forced to take the matter to the Queensland constabulary, where the case oddly enough went no further.

  The race itself didn’t get the headlines we were hoping for, but those who took part learned a thing or two about the remarkable resilience of these animals. What other beast could transport human beings over 3000 kilometres of sand, dust, mud, heat and torrential rain?

  In the end only twenty-four of the sixty-nine starters managed to complete every leg of the race. The camels were fine: it was only ever the humans who couldn’t carry on. I got some idea of how tough it was when I did a three-day ride, which turned into a full-on battle with my camel, who wanted to be rid of me. My rear end was just about destroyed and I had trouble walking for days.

  But I was just blown away with what the camels achieved. Not only did they cover distances no-one believed possible but they did it at an incredible pace. On one of the legs a camel travelled 220 kilometres in twenty-three hours, an average of about ten kilometres an hour and done without rest.

  As a vet it was an eye-opening experience to see the camel not only do what you wanted it to but also do just about everything better than other animals. That’s when my fascination for the camel really grew exponentially, along with my respect.

  There was to be one final twist in the tale of the Great Australian Camel Race.

  We had just about reached the three-quarter mark and were bunked down in a town called Augathella, near Charleville. I was having a beer at the local pub when a car pulled up outside. A man stepped out, introduced himself to me and asked if I might have time to talk. My unexpected visitor explained that he represented the royal family of Abu Dhabi and that he had been sent by ‘someone very important’. His mission was to find me and offer me a job to set up a hospital for camels in the United Arab Emirates.

  The man bearing the offer was Heath Harris. Heath is one of those larger than life characters and a man with a natural—and valuable—instinct for working with animals; amongst other achievements he had trained the horses for the classic Australian feature films, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli and The Man from Snowy River. Already a legend amongst Australian horse trainers, for now he was working for the ruling family of the oil-rich Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi, where he was in charge of improving their racehorse stock. Now they wished to have someone do for their camels what Heath had done for their horses.

  I was, of course, flattered and not quite sure what to say. Standing in the Augathella pub it all seemed so improbable, but Heath was clearly deadly serious. In fact he had been trying to track me down for a good month and at one stage had even hired a small plane to land along our route through the Northern Territory. It turned out that every time he tried to land he was stopped by a local cockie parking his truck on the airstrip. It was no mystery to us why: we’d been copping a lot of criticism from the animal lib people, especially after an incident when some of the camels had been mired in mud. We were convinced that any plane trying to land was carrying animal rights activists wanting to stop the race. And, given their sympathies, it wasn’t too hard to get the local cockies to lend a hand.

  This had apparently gone on for weeks. Poor Heath had started on his mission to get me when we were crossing over the top of the Simpson Desert, just after our ill-fated stay in Alice Springs. He’d returned twice to Sydney and eventually decided the only solution was to get in front of the race, hire a four-wheel drive and then drive back down the road.

  Heath summed up the whole schmozzle succinctly: ‘Fuck, mate, all I wanted to do was offer you a job!’

  When the Abu Dhabi royal family had asked Heath to work on their camels, he had replied, as only Heath can, ‘Yes, of course. I’ll get you the best camel vet in the world.’

  It wasn’t the first—or the last— time that Heath would gild the lily and then paddle fast to make good on his promises later. I felt that my experience, at the age of thirty-three—having anaesthetised two camels, castrated six of them and been in charge of an endurance race—left me a long way short of Heath’s ‘best in world’ boast, though in truth there probably wasn’t a lot of competition in the west.

  Heath jokes that all he had to do was offer me a hot shower in the Augathella hotel and a half-decent meal, such was the state I was in after close to two months on the road. He was pretty right. But I was also ready to move on. The last thing I wanted to do after the adrenalin charge of the Great Australian Camel Race was return to my old life in a Tweed Heads vet surgery.

  As far as I was concerned, there was no doubt. Nevertheless, it was a big decision.

  Heath was looking to build a team of three vets. He already had one Australian vet on board who, though highly experienced, was not a camel expert. So, apart from myself as the camel specialist, he was looking for one more. I rang my business partner in the surgery, Doug Cluer, and put it to him: ‘What do you say we up stumps and head to the Middle East?’ It wasn’t easy for Doug. His wife was a doctor and they, too, had young kids to think about.

  For my part, I had never been out of Australia; Kangaroo Island had been my only ‘overseas’ trip. I also had a race to finish. On top of that, Patti was now six months pregnant and was due a month or so after the race finished. So we would have to contend with a massive upheaval for the whole family at the precise time Patti was due to give birth. But, as always, Patti was up for the adventure.

  It didn’t take us long to make the decision. We agreed in principle and Heath went back to the potential employer he was dealing with—who that was exactly we couldn’t know, because Heath wasn’t allowed to tell us.

  Meanwhile, I set about trying to gather some information on where I might be spending the next chunk of my life. My geography is not bad and while I’d heard of Dubai, I’d never heard of Abu Dhabi, which is in fact the capital of the United Arab Emirates. I knew where Bahrain was. As a kid I’d collected stamps from Sharjah, though I had no concept of exactly where it was. And I also had stamps from Muscat and Oman from the old days when they were two different places. But basically it was all a big mystery.

  One day I took Patti and the kids up to the library to research the United Arab Emirates and, more importantly, the town of Al Ain, where we would be living. Even though it is the hometown of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, there wasn’t a lot of information on Al Ain, which is located in the desert about a hundred kilometres inland, and a mere dot on the border with Oman. We imagined we might be living in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

  I learned we were bound for a nation that had existed for only sixteen years, was governed by an all-powerful family and had Islam as its religion—at which point I remember thinking, ‘Well, no alcohol.’

  Official portraits of the UAE’s ruler showed a weathered and stern face that spoke of a man who would brook no dissent. It seemed to me that this place was not just on the other side of the world but perhaps from another world altogether.


  But a man had travelled from across the Middle East to pluck me out of the backblocks of Australia. It was as though I was being pulled by destiny.

  Doug and I decided to lease the business out to another vet, head over to the UAE and just see what happened. Maybe we’d be back; maybe we wouldn’t.

  Under the terms of the contract we had to do three months’ probation without our families. I stayed in Australia for the birth of our baby girl, Natalia, on the eighth day of the eighth month in 1988. Could there be a better birthdate for a bicentennial baby? A couple of weeks later I waved goodbye to Patti, Katya, Erica and our newborn and jumped on a plane with Doug and Heath.

  It was Barry Humphries who once said that living in Australia your entire life was like going to a party and staying in the kitchen all night. But what would the party be like in the UAE? I had not the faintest idea. I was truly flying into the unknown. Having never set foot outside of Australia, I didn’t even own a suitcase.

  Now I was on my first trip and flying business class, courtesy of the oil sheikhs of the Middle East. The salary was substantial. There were performance bonuses on offer. The kids’ school fees would be paid for. Accommodation was supplied. And it was all tax-free. What’s not to like about that?

  These were (and largely still are) the standard conditions for a senior westerner being employed in the Gulf. It was a system that began in the sixties to compensate western experts for stepping off their career ladder and upping sticks from the comforts of London or Sydney to the barely developed and intolerably hot desert climate of the UAE, where temperatures commonly reach fifty degrees Celsius in summer. It was hardship money, and it was necessary to lure the best people to a country that badly needed all the expertise it could get to build a modern functioning state from scratch.

  Up until just before our flight I still did not know who I was working for, but by the time the boarding passes were issued we discovered who we would be answering to. It was the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, first son of the Ruler of Abu Dhabi, the wealthiest, most powerful emirate of the UAE.

  Heath Harris had already spent some months in the employ of the UAE royal family and was by now accustomed to the benefits that can confer on you. He was able to fill in some of the missing pieces about the whys and wherefores of the project we’d be working on.

  Heath had met a well-connected UAE local called Abdullah al Baadi while in Russia where Heath was buying thoroughbreds for a wealthy Australian businessman and Abdullah was buying for the Abu Dhabi ruling family. Abdullah invited Heath to the Middle East to work his magic with the royal family’s horses. Somewhere along the line Heath ended up at a camel camp and, in his inimitable fashion, started messing around with one of the camels. I’ve never seen anyone like him for training animals, and it seems that he did a few tricks on this camel and soon had it doing exactly what the locals wanted. It was then that Abdullah got an idea: he wanted Heath to start a new camel hospital—which is where I came in. Sitting on the plane, I still had no real idea what it would mean to work for the Crown Prince; I guessed it might be something like working for the Queen of England. As to what went on in the Middle East, well, I had seen the movie The Black Stallion, which was set in North Africa featuring a sheikh. And, of course, there was Lawrence of Arabia, one of my favourite films. So it was Peter O’Toole and Alec Guinness playing an Arabian prince who had given me my best—and indeed only—impression of where I was going. But as I was to learn, Lawrence of Arabia is about as useful a guide to Arabia as The Man from Snowy River is to Australia. It might have been an Oscar-winning movie but in the end it was little more than a collection of colonial-era stereotypes that bore no relation at all to the reality of Bedouin life.

  Alone with my thoughts as we hurtled through the night, I reflected on how fate and chance meetings had brought me into the world of the camels. I was ready to live a life without borders.

  Four

  A work in progress

  Welcome to Arabia.

  The door from business class opened to a blast of hot Arabian Gulf air, a special concoction that comes mixed with the smell of avgas and bitumen. It was early in the morning and still pitch black. There to greet us was Heath’s man, Abdullah al Baadi, the architect of our future. Clad in flowing white robes, Abdullah was accompanied by a blue-uniformed security official carrying a massive machine gun. We were escorted down the steps of the plane to a room inside the terminal reserved for VIPs. All golden chandeliers and gold-embossed single-seater chairs, it was an area normally set aside for receiving the sheikhs of other Gulf countries.

  A waiter brought Arabic coffee, dispensed from a golden pot into fine golden cups. While others were queuing to go through the elaborate process of being issued a work visa, our passports were quickly taken, stamped and returned to us before we were escorted into the back of a black Mercedes 500.

  We were introduced to our own driver, Hamza, who would become our private chauffeur during our stay. On this occasion Hamza took our luggage and went ahead while Heath, Doug and I travelled with Abdullah in the Merc to our hotel in Abu Dhabi. Abdullah thoughtfully handed me a mobile phone to call my wife and tell her I had arrived safe and sound.

  So this was what happened when you worked for the Crown Prince: an armed escort and no need to mill with the masses in immigration. It was my first taste of the kudos that surrounds the son of the ruler of the UAE. I found it hard to get my head around the special privilege that comes not just from having power but also from working for someone who has that power.

  The next day we were summoned to a grand villa set in extensive grounds for a welcome lunch with twenty of Abu Dhabi’s leading Emiratis, all friends of our sponsor, Abdullah al Baadi.

  We took our seats at a table replete with the finest food of the Arab world, as well as local specialties like roasted goat on a bed of rice and garnished with sultanas and pine nuts. So far, this was all in keeping with the Arab Gulf stereotypes I had managed to acquire: the idea of the grand welcome to the stranger, all orchestrated by a glowering subaltern with a clap of the hands and a snap of the fingers.

  The room was alive with the sounds of Arabic, and our hosts kindly made us welcome by also speaking in English. Chatting away politely, I had just started to feel comfortable in this exotic setting when, out of the corner of my eye, I could see something quite extraordinary taking place. In strode another Abu Dhabi business figure in customary white robes—with a mountain lion on a leash.

  There were laughs and hurrahs, a hubbub of Arabic calls and exclamations. What fun. What entertainment. And no-one was in the least perturbed to have this wild cat in the room, an incredibly muscular and athletic animal that kills its prey by leaping at the neck, breaking it and then feasting.

  I exchanged a ‘what the fuck’ glance with Doug Cluer. Here we were, good Australian boys fresh from the Gold Coast, accustomed to rules for this and rules for that, suddenly blown away. Our elegant but deadly companion stayed lashed to a pole but still within metres of us as we attempted to resume our polite conversation. Within forty-eight hours of arriving I had stepped inside the private world of the Emiratis and witnessed one of those moments that ninety-nine per cent of foreigners never get to see. Money can buy a lot of things, it seems, even a wild cat imported—heaven knows how—from the United States.

  When I saw that wild mountain lion being casually led in, as if it was a pet labrador, it made me think that these are my kind of people—and this is my kind of place.

  After three days of twiddling our thumbs in Abu Dhabi and wondering what might happen next, we were summoned to move out. Speeding along a strip of newly cut highway through near empty desert, air-conditioned against the heat in a BMW saloon, we made for our new home in the interior of the country. A vast unpopulated landscape stretched before us, with sand out to the horizon.

  As we approached from the flat of the desert, the landscape softened to something more welcoming. Here was the sprawling oasis town of Al Ain, rising unexpectedly out o
f barren surrounds. There were date palms. There was grass. There were beds of flowers on the side of the road, at the roundabouts and on the median strip. Al Ain is a small dot in the corner of the UAE and not far from the Empty Quarter, the largest expanse of desert in the world. For the Bedouin this oasis was a lifesaver, a place where you arrived after days of travelling across the desert to find a reliable supply of water. It was as if, by magic, a garden had sprung up in the desert.

  We were in the rural heart of the UAE, in a regional town with a population numbering around 100,000, nearly all of them Bedouin, with only a few hundred western expats. I arrived to find that my home on the outer edges of Al Ain was nothing more than an idea sketched in the sand, itself surrounded by a sea of endless sand. The third member of our vet team, Geoff Manefield, had already been on the job for a month or so. Geoff was an amateur architect and had drawn up plans for a large residence with four bedrooms, including a room for a maid, and four separate bathrooms, a pointer to the grander lifestyle we would be enjoying as a family. But it would be at least three months before it was built, hopefully just in time for Patti and our three girls to arrive.

  In the meantime, I would be holed up in one of only two hotels that catered to westerners, the Hilton. Al Ain was hardly a tourist destination, so the hotel served as a home away from home for foreigners such as oil company executives and defence contractors who were visiting on business and typically working at locations out in the desert.

  And that’s where we were greeted by our immediate boss, Mr Zuhair. Indeed, the Hilton was Mr Zuhair’s second home. He would take his regular seat in the hotel café every evening to drink coffee with whoever happened by and to generally hold court.

  We might have looked good on paper, and Heath might have vouched for us, but in the end, if Mr Zuhair didn’t think we were right for the job, all bets were off. Mr Zuhair ran the local date factory on behalf of the Crown Prince, Sheikh Khalifa. In an earlier life he had been the Crown Prince’s teacher and had now become his confidante and agricultural adviser. He therefore had a direct line to the sheikh and his judgements could ultimately make or break us.