ON A DUSTY corner just before the Oodnadatta Track begins to unfurl across the centre of Australia, there is an unassuming mud-walled building on the edge of Marree, a town with a population of one hundred and fifty. Grey nomads pull up outside the general store across the road in their four-wheel drives to stock up on beer coolers and meat pies, and they barely notice the humble thatch-roofed structure. Behind them, young families clamber over the platform of the old Ghan railway, paying no attention to the building. The only identifying mark next to the dirt walls and old wooden beams is a small notice stuck on a stick in the ground, which looks like it is stencilled on in pen. It proclaims that this spot is ‘Dedicated to the memory of the pioneering Muslim cameleers and families of Hergott Springs (Marree)’. It is also the remains of the first mosque in Australia.

It is 685 kilometres from Adelaide to Marree, the town that was at the centre of the arrival of Islam to Australia and the camel men who travelled here in the 1860s from Afghanistan, India and Pakistan and opened up the centre of Australia for railways, pastureland, farming and trade as no one could before them. As a marker of the enduring influence of these men, on the second weekend of July each year, Marree hosts the Camel Cup, a day of camel races and a reunion. I was told that it is held to remember the influence of the cameleers and the impact of their culture on outback Australia.