A Talk on An Arid Alliance: Environmental exchanges between Australian and Indiandeserts in the long nineteenth century by Dr Ruth Morgan

About the Talk
After his retirement from the East India Company in 1821, Thomas J. Maslen set
forth an ambitious proposal for the exploration and settlement of the Australian
desert interior. Maslen never visited Australia, but on the basis of his knowledge of
India, he was convinced that he knew what the southern continent would hold.
Maslen expected that an expedition would discover an inland sea fed by rivers in the
northwest of the continent, which would support the establishment of another British
colony. Certain of the dry and sandy conditions that such an expedition would
encounter, he recommended the importation of camels and the excavation of tanks
or dams to hold water as both had proven to themselves well-suited to Indian
conditions. Four decades later, camels (Camelarus dromedaries) carried the ill-fated
expedition of Burke and Wills in the first north-south crossing of the Australian
interior by Europeans. Camels and South Asian handlers accompanied almost all
subsequent exploratory expeditions and scientific survey parties in the outback.
Through a network of trails or ‘camel pads’, they would provide the means to carry
goods and stores inland, and returned to the coastal settlements with wool and
mineral ores.

Over the past two decades, historians have rightly examined the vital role of ‘Afghan’
cameleers in exploration and trade in the continent’s interior. They have paid less
attention, however, to the particular hydrologies that their charges – the camels –
helped to both navigate and forge through the Australian deserts. Focusing on the
role of the camel in the environmental exchanges between British India and the
Australian colonies, this paper builds on the productive insights of scholars such as
Rohan Deb Roy and Jonathan Saha, who have argued for the closer analysis of the
entanglements of the nonhuman in imperial worlds. Making explicit the political and
ecological relationships between these areas, this paper reveals the historical
contingencies of making camel country: British interventions in South Asia directly
shaped the contours and timing of Anglo-European incursions into the Australian
interior, while economic, environmental, and political change in the Australian
colonies drove demand for South Asian camels and their handlers in return.

About the Speaker
Ruth Morgan is an environmental historian and historian of science with a particular
focus on Australia, the British Empire, and the Indo-Pacific, living and working on the
unceded lands of the Ngambri and Ngunnawal peoples. She teaches in the School

of History at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, where she is
the Director of the Centre for Environmental History. Besides co-authoring Cities in a Sunburnt Country (CUP, 2022), she authored the forthcoming book Climate Change and International History (Bloomsbury, 2024).

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