Sheiks, Fakes & Cameleers Online Exhibition

Faiz and Tagh Mahomet were Afghan brothers who were related to the Amir of Afghanistan through marriage. They worked for Thomas Elder’s pastoral company in South Australia prior to starting their own camel transport and haulage business. They moved to Western Australia’s Goldfields with the 1890s gold rush. By 1892, the brothers had set up camel stations and stores across the Goldfields and as far north as Geraldton. They were awarded government contracts to supply the construction teams building railways and the overland telegraph that connected the remote West Australian interior to the outside world. 

Faiz Mohamet NAA_.jpg

The brothers’ partnership ended suddenly in 1896 when Faiz’s younger brother Tagh was shot dead while at prayer in Coolgardie. His assailant, former business partner Goulam Mahomet, was later hanged for the murder at Fremantle Prison. 

Faiz continued to run his business despite the government’s increasingly restrictive practices towards Asian-owned business. A faithful Muslim, Faiz Mahomet travelled across Western Australia to seek donations for the construction of the Perth Mosque. On 13 November 1905, Faiz laid the Mosque’s foundation stone. He later returned to India, where he died in 1910. A commemorative plaque for Faiz and Tagh Mahomet is located on St Georges Terrace, recognising their contribution to the development of Western Australia in the 1890s.

Born to a wealthy trading family in Karachi, Hasan Musa Khan’s links to Australia trace back to his uncle Khan Bahadur Moradkhan who was the first South Asian supplier of camels to Australia.

In 1893, Khan travelled to South Australia to work as a clerk for businessmen Faiz and Tagh Mahomet before travelling to Western Australia to help oversee the Mahomet brothers’ camel haulage and supply venture in the eastern Goldfields. 

Highly educated and fluent in several languages, Khan was known as a philosopher and man of letters and quickly became a prominent member of the early Australian Muslim community.
Khan married Sofia Blitz, a German Jewish woman in 1898 by special license at the Supreme Court in Perth. They had four children together and were quickly adopted as members of WA’s high society.

A prolific writer, Musa Khan often spoke out about the unfair treatment of his countrymen in Australia. He donated many books and pamphlets, including his co-edited booklet on the history of Islam in Australia, to the State Library’s collection. 

In 1904 Khan was instrumental in proposing the building of the Perth Mosque, which remains the second oldest continuously-functioning mosque in Australia.

Family legend has it that in his late teens, Goolam Badoola was at the port in Karachi with his two camels when another camel broke away from its handler. Badoola re-captured the animal and was rewarded for his efforts by being asked to join the group of cameleers en route to Australia. The voyage took three months and landed in Port Augusta, South Australia, where Badoola found work transporting goods across the inland tracks to settlers and miners.

When gold was found in Western Australia, Badoola headed west. It was here that Badoola - a cameleer from Baluchistan, then a province in the northwest of British India – became an Australian hero. When a flood gripped the areas around Geraldton in 1900, Badoola took his camels to rescue stranded victims at Cue who were at risk of starvation and drowning. He also brought in much needed water and food supplies. This act of heroism earned Badoola recognition from the WA government, who granted him Australian citizenship and a sum of money for his extraordinary effort. 

Using the money to purchase a property in Mount Magnet, Badoola became one of a select number of cameleers to own land and be granted citizenship rights. In his forties Badoola married Mariam Martin who was the daughter of a Malay Muslim man and a Yamatji woman of the Badimaya people from the Murchison Gascoyne (Mount Magnet). They had four children before Mariam died in childbirth in 1929. Today, proud of their family heritage, the Rinds are a prominent Baluchi/Aboriginal WA family.

Known as “the Sinbad of Lahore” Muhammed Bux was born into a family of Kashmiri silk traders in 1857 in what was then Lahore, India. Escaping an unhappy childhood whilst still in his teens, Bux started a life of seafaring adventure working on British ships profiting from colonial expansion into lucrative Indian Ocean trading routes. It was during one of these voyages that he heard from an Englishman about Australia, the “land of the gold mines”.

Bux’s first voyage to Australian shores brought him to Melbourne in 1885. On a return trip he landed in Fremantle with little more than the clothes on his back. His entrepreneurial spirit soon saw him go from a travelling hawker to a shop-owner, before building a thriving import and export business. Living simply above a shop, first with his father and later with his wife and daughter, Bux set about acquiring several buildings and businesses in Perth and contributed to the camel trade by bringing in shipments of camels. 

By 1898, his nose for business saw The West Australian newspaper describe him as a “leading man among the Asiatic residents of the city”. A philanthropist, Bux recognised the need for WA’s Muslim community to have a place of worship and helped finance Perth Mosque. In Lahore, he established a Mosque next to the family home which is called ‘Australia House’ and built a girls’ school in an area known as ‘Australia Chowk’ or ‘Australia Bazaar’. Today in what is modern-day Pakistan, his family are known as the ‘Australia-wallahs’ who can trace their family back seven generations to their ties with Australia.