Cloncurry is known for its Afghan Cemetery but a little known fact about the town is it once had a mosque.
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That was because the town was home to cameleers who were brought to Australia to help build the inland in the 1860s to 1901, when their entry was restricted by the White Australia Policy.
While the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860-61 was a disaster it showed that camels were suited to harsh Australian conditions, and camels and cameleers were imported in large numbers to help build projects such as the Overland Telegraph line, the Rabbit Proof Fence and to move water and goods around.
While they came from all over South Asia, they were all called Afghans, sometimes "Ghans" giving their name to the train that replaced them hauling traffic between Adelaide and Darwin.
They were a common sight across Western Queensland.
In her 2011 book Outback Queensland: A Narrative of Defiance, Patricia Coates said the cameleers could do in 12 days what a bullock took five weeks to achieve.
She said Mohammed Allum bought a camel team and opened grocery stores at Cloncurry and Duchess and said Cloncurry had the largest Ghan town in western Queensland.
They lived on the western side near the junction of the Anabranch and Coppermine Creek in slab huts and corregated iron shanties.
They had their own market gardens and a single-room mosque where prayers were led by Mullah Syid Omar, known as "the bishop" to the white population.
Omar was the chief cameleer of camel merchant Abdul Wade of the Bourke Carrying Company, which dominated the western Queensland camel business.
Wade was remarkable man "with teeth white enough to make you wish to be an Arab" who owned 600 camels and who worked hard to fit in even offering all his camels for the First World War effort.
By the emergence of rail and road transport had effectively ended the cameleers' business.
Ms Coates said Cloncurry Ghan Town died out after the copper boom leaving many of its residents to eke out a life as hawkers and shopkeepers.
Sadly she said, the mosque has long gone and "the gardens have long withered and died away".
Today the only remnant is the Afghan cemetery in the north western part of the main cemetery on Hudson Fysh Dr.
The graves there are aligned north-south with the head in the north and the face of the interned turned towards the holy city of Mecca.
It contains many graves but only two surviving headstones - one of which is the "Mohammedan Priest" Mullah Syid Omar, who died July 14, 1915 of unknown causes.
The second is of Aboriginal woman Nellie Edwards who died in 1939 and who may have been a cameleer's wife.
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Derek Barry
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
Editor of the North West Star Mount Isa since January 2016. Prior to that, an editor at several regional southern Queensland newspapers. Passionate about telling local stories. Comes with a strange accent to due an Irish accident of birth.
