In the remote Australian outback, hundreds of spectators descended on a town of just 65 people to watch something you won’t find anywhere else: camels thundering across the desert at full gallop. The Marree Camel Cup, held on Saturday in a settlement nearly 600 kilometres north of Adelaide, brought together more than a dozen competitors for a 13-race spectacle celebrating one of Australia’s most unlikely and controversial animal populations.
The story of how camels ended up racing in South Australia reads like an accidental experiment in ecological unintended consequences. Beginning in 1840, more than 10,000 camels were imported into Australia, brought in to haul goods and people across the harsh interior. Muslim cameleers, many from Afghanistan and other parts of Central and South Asia, came with them starting in the 1860s to manage the animals. But when railways and eventually motor vehicles arrived in the early 20th century, these beasts of burden were simply released into the wild. Today, estimates suggest between 300,000 and a million feral camels roam the Australian outback — animals that now compete with livestock for food, damage fences and waterholes, and destroy Indigenous cultural sites.
What makes a good racing camel? According to trainer Kyrraley Woodhouse, who turned professional in 2013, it’s all about attitude. You want a camel with “a little bit of temper, a little bit of fire in them — a sort of splashy look in the eye,” he told AFP. Most of his racing camels have been captured from the wild, trained into competitors that need to be wary but not aggressive — think of them as the racehorses of the desert, high-strung and forward-thinking. This year’s winner, Young Gun, ridden by Patrick Dennis, proved that strategy pays off.
The ecological math, though, is sobering. Without active management, camel populations could double every eight years, according to South Australia’s primary industries department. That’s why authorities rely on mustering, shooting, and trapping at water points to keep numbers in check. It’s a stark reminder that sometimes history’s solutions become tomorrow’s problems — and that managing wild populations requires constant vigilance and difficult choices. Meanwhile, Australia exports a small number of live camels: 68 so far in 2026 heading to Malaysia and Indonesia, a tiny outlet for an exploding population.
What started as an efficient transport solution has become a fascinating collision of sport, history, and ecological management in one of the world’s most extreme environments.
