THE DESERT GYPSY
“… Camels are a big, gentle animal … “
After more than 25 years of gypsy life on the outback tracks of Australia, the eccentric camel-drawn wagon of Dennis Wickham will be seen no more.
Instinctively outrageous in his behaviour, once limped along the streets of Alice Springs with the aid of a walking stick, an artistic beret atop his silvering hair and often dressed in a brightly floral smock and carrying a tooled leather shoulder bag.
Bright and bubbly, he openly flaunted his epicene gestures with an almost theatrical abandon, mouthing witticisms and slanderous asides like an indigenous Oscar Wilde of The Outback.
A debilitating disease was gradually stilling the wanderer’s legs and he had to adjust his adventurous spirit to a new life in a wheelchair.
“As diseases go, I can thoroughly recommend it,” he beamed. “There’s no pain or discomfort. It should become the yuppies ailment of the month.”
Behind this Alice Springs identity, in the hazy Centralian distance, there were about 15,000 miles he walked and another 19,000 miles he drove with his home-made caravan.
Unknown to many, Dennis was born in Gladstone, Queensland, in 1938.
Aggressively individualistic, over a long and unorthodox career, the ailing cameleer had been a metal worker, a nude model for art classes, and anything else offered that might buy a “spud, a chop and a bail of hay.”
After travelling overseas, he decided, in 1970, to ride a penny farthing bicycle from the U.K., via Europe, then home to Australia.
On the way to Austria, he was run over by a car and so severely injured he was hospitalised for a year.
“After coming back, I went to Alice Springs looking for wild camels. Before that, I hadn’t been west of the Great Divide. I thought of going along the Barrier Reef at low tide on a pogo stick, or Melbourne to Moscow on a scooter or something. I hitch-hiked out to the Centre in 1973, got two wild camels, walked them over to the East coast, then I turned around and walked them across to the West coast, and this was the first official crossing of Australia with camels.
“People were so negative, saying: ‘You silly bastard. You’ll die out there.’
“But when I didn’t die in the Centre, and I didn’t leave my bones on the Western Desert, I started getting telegrams from people I’d never heard of, raving on with, ‘Good on yer, mate. We knew you could do it.’”
The intrepid traveller was greeted with “cupsa tea, cucumber sandwiches, and all that bullshit.”
He mused: “After two and a half crossings of the continent, I had a letter from some silly girl wanting to ‘borrow’ my camels because she wanted to do something different, like walking across Australia.
“As I had already done it TWICE, I suggested she might like to try it with Shetland ponies. My mouth was full of poisonous sarcasm. She hung up. I won’t tell you who that was …”
“Robyn Davidson,” I suggested.
“Yair … She was a user. She sent me a bitchy letter which will be printed verbatim in the book I’m writing.”
The internationally publicised Camel Lady eventually migrated to Alice Springs where she attempted to utilise the expertise of several camel handlers and so pave her way towards the Centre-to-Indian Ocean exploit that finally resulted in her highly lucrative arrangement with National Geographic magazine in the USA.
One quickly gains the distinct impression that Dennis Wickham and his celebrated pupil did not enjoy the most amiable of relationships.
“Camels are a big, gentle animal, very much misunderstood, much maligned. They still perpetuate here at the Camel Cup that they bite, kick, spit, and carry water in their hump. Why do they go on with such bullshit year after fucking year?
“You have camel experts on the ground today – they’ve been no where and done nothing, just keep animals in a paddock, pat them occasionally – and they’re camel experts. Self-styled!”
On one occasion, while travelling in a lonely place, Dennis was stricken with food poisoning and thought he was going to die.
“When you put onions in a stew, you’re supposed to bring them to the boil every 12 hours. I didn’t know that. I damn near died. I put out water for the dog, turned the camels loose, but next morning I was still alive.”
Into Dennis Wickham’s camel world there one time came a part- Aboriginal fellow who called himself The Black Knight. Sometimes dressed in flamboyant western gear or ex-army clothes, the aloof stranger took to camping by himself in The Valley, part of the local commonage.
Around him he gathered three camels, a cow, goats and geese.
Dennis said: “Sometimes I used to see him standing at the bottom end of The Valley, like an old-fashioned shepherd, watching over his flock. He was very quiet, hard to get to know.”
One evening Dennis heard a rattle of chains and, looking up, saw one of The Black Knight’s young camels limping into his camp. The animal was heavily hobbled with harness straps around all legs and secured with lock-nuts.
“His legs were ring-barked,” said Dennis. “I tried to shift the nuts, but they had rusted together with camel piss and dust. I finished up cutting off the lock-nuts with a hacksaw.”
Offended by such treatment, Dennis reported the offender to the RSPCA, the police and the Alice Springs council.
“The cops told me to give the hobbles back to the owner, as they were his property. When I did this, he put them straight back on the injured camel. After that, whenever I saw the poor thing stumbling around, I cut off the hobbles and threw them away.”
Soon weird stories were starting to circulate around the Alice pertaining to The Black Knight’s sadistic behaviour. In a fit of temper, ran the rumour, the Knight had viciously speared a long stick into the anus of one of his camels, Dolly, rupturing her bowel, and then cut her throat, leaving her slowly to die in agony.
“During the tourist season,” Dennis remembered, “the same fellow used to ride one of his camels into the Alice to pose for visitors along the riverbank. One time the camel shied at something and the Knight was dumped on his face in front of an audience.”
Leading the animal back to his camp, The Black Knight tied it between two ironwood trees with fencing wire and angrily hacked the camel to death with an axe.
“Much later I saw the bones, the wire and the ashes where he had burnt the camel’s remains. I was very upset. Very angry.”
Returning to his camp one evening, Dennis spotted signs of a disturbance in the bush; crows fluttered up from the ground and the air carried the smell of decomposing flesh.
Dennis said: “I found The Black Knight’s young bull camel. It was tethered to a star picket, tied down low, and it had been hacked to death with an axe and left there to rot.”
Reporting the atrocity immediately to the police, when a young officer inspected the carcase he claimed the bull had died from snake bite to the tongue.
“What about the marks all over the body?” I asked the copper.
“These were made with an axe.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The body has probably been damaged by wild dogs.”
In a blind rage, Dennis armed himself with a rifle and stalked down The Valley to The Black Knight’s isolated camp.
“I’d had enough,” he reflected. “For two months I had been warning the police, the RSPCA and the council about this bloke and no one would listen to me. They just passed me from one to the other, the gutless bastards.”
Dennis found The Black Knight’s camp unoccupied.
There was a peculiar atmosphere. A disturbing smell permeated the site. He found upside down crosses and chains and strange symbols scrawled all over an old truck.
A makeshift altar on top of a hill was a place of sacrifice where The Black Knight had slaughtered goats in some obscure ritual.
“It was certainly a weird place,” Dennis said. “Something I find difficult to describe. It made my hair stand on end.”
Finding a drum of kerosene, Dennis splashed it over The Black Knight’s belongings and set the lot on fire, destroying everything in sight.
“The police prosecuted me for taking the law into my own hands,” Dennis recalled. “In court, The Black Knight admitted he had rammed a stick up a camel’s bum, then cut its throat, and hacked another camel to death with an axe, and sacrificed goats and what-not. But he was allowed to go free.
“When he admitted to all these cruelties, a court usher whispered to me: ‘Somebody should have shot him.’
“I said to her,‘Well, I did try, but I couldn’t find the bastard.’”
Following his public exposure, it is understood, the infamous Black Knight left Alice Springs for Israel, and he has never since been sighted around Alice Springs.
Affected by motor neurone disease, “just like Stephen Hawkings,” Dennis believed his condition was due to chemical exposure that has accumulated in his system and suddenly become active.
“I can no longer cope with my camels. The three older ones are to be retired. The two younger ones are being sold to a sensible young girl who is no ratbag. Some blokes with camels try to stand over them.
They have an ego problem and are in need of something they can dominate, like school yard bullies.”
Dennis planned to write a book, based on diaries he had recorded during his itinerant years.
“I am not going to sit in the shade of a gum tree and wait for death. Neither will I be contemplating my proverbial navel. Writing is important to me now. I’ve got something to say. I hope I won’t be too rough on people.”
The retiring cameleer felt over his last few years of life that he had arrived at a new phase, a time to reflect, to document the results of an unorthodox life.
For mankind, Dennis then defined his philosophy: “The universal panacea is a length of one-inch waterpipe, preferably applied to the backside of humanity, or anywhere between their ears.”
Dennis Wickham, aged 62 years, wiped his hands of this life on October 21, 2000, after losing his long battle with motor neurone disease.
I knew Dennis when I was just a young girl. My Mum and my Brother used to spend time at his camps whenever he was in the Alice. I remember him as an eccentric character who made a great billy tea! I also remember his camels, Huchang and Praline whom he loved dearly. I visited him whilst he was at the Old Timers village when he was sick, it was my goodbye and the last time I was to see him before attending his funeral. Words cannot describe how much he turned our childhood into a fantastic adventure whenever we visited him. I will never forget him….RIP Den in his words “you ol Queen!”
— Christy Scott · 26 April 2009 · #
I knew Dennis Wickham and stayed with him and Allan the prospector for a while in his ‘Camelot’camp at the foot of the range by the sewrage pond.That was in 1983. Has he written the book? Has it been published?
— Bruno Frank · 25 January 2010 · #
Between 1972 – 1975 I owned the Gabbin Store in the W.A. wheatbelt. I remember one Saturday afternoon the dogs barked and I looked out to see Dennis with his camel team. They stopped for water and my children fed the camels tomatoes before they continued walking eastward along the railway fire-break. I filmed them with my Super 8 camera and it is now on DVD .
— IVOR DAVIES · 11 March 2010 · #