Speaker 1: Welcome missus Marcia a Radio Eye. To day, I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic magazine dated May twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of
Speaker 1: the article I began last time, entitled Rediscovering the Ancient
Speaker 1: Empire that History Forgot. This article is by Andrew Currie,
Speaker 1: inscribed on tablets of silver with copies made in clay.
Speaker 1: The twelve fifty nine b c Accord promised mutual assistance
Speaker 1: against invaders and a good piece and a good fraternity
Speaker 1: between the Land of Egypt and the Land of Hati forever.
Speaker 1: The agreement marked a pivotal shift in the annals of
Speaker 1: state craft. Up until that moment, the rule was winner
Speaker 1: take all. Peace treaties were the winner, dictating to the losers,
Speaker 1: Shakner pointed out the Hittites and the Egyptians decided not
Speaker 1: to continue that way. The Treaty of Kadesh describes the
Speaker 1: two rulers as equals and peace as an end in itself.
Speaker 1: It's the beginning of modern diplomacy, one reason. A copy
Speaker 1: of the agreement hangs at the United Nations Headquarters in
Speaker 1: New York City. A fragmented clay original found at Hitusha
Speaker 1: in nineteen o six is on display at the Istanbul
Speaker 1: Airport Museum. Diplomacy and religion were crucial tools for the Hittites,
Speaker 1: who referred to their empire as the land of a
Speaker 1: thousand Gods. When they conquered or took control of a
Speaker 1: group of people, they permitted the subject subjugated to keep
Speaker 1: their religious practices. Rather than wiping out local deities, they
Speaker 1: folded them into the Hittite empire and pantheon. Holy statues
Speaker 1: from temples thought to embody the gods themselves were transported
Speaker 1: to Hittusha's temple district and worshiped there the way they
Speaker 1: were at home. Temple archives record the problems with this approach,
Speaker 1: like God's who didn't speak Hittite. In one example, after
Speaker 1: a new god was brought from the island of Lesbo's,
Speaker 1: Hittites realized that no one knew how to talk to it.
Speaker 1: A sheep was sacrificed and its innards were examined to
Speaker 1: determine if the new God could accept being worshiped Hittite's style. Yes,
Speaker 1: was the answer discerned in the sheep's intestines. They didn't
Speaker 1: want to anchor the gods. Villemin while, a hittitologist at
Speaker 1: Leiden University in the Netherlands told me, but at the
Speaker 1: same time, they're very pragmatic. It's kind of adorable. Was
Speaker 1: also a key to their success. They were able to
Speaker 1: bring people together not by brutal despotism, but by persuasion,
Speaker 1: using religion and beliefs. Schachner said, that is unique. That
Speaker 1: is what makes them so special. What we know about
Speaker 1: the Hittites is, by the standards of ancient history, incredibly new.
Speaker 1: Hittite writing wasn't unlocked until nineteen fifteen, when a linguist
Speaker 1: in Prague named Bedrich Kirozhni realized that the unearthed tablets
Speaker 1: were written in an Indo European language, the earliest known
Speaker 1: example of a family that today includes everything from English
Speaker 1: to Sanskrit. Over the past century, more than thirty thousand
Speaker 1: remnants of clay tablets have been recovered from Hatusha and
Speaker 1: other Hittite cities. More are found every year. That constant
Speaker 1: flow of brand new information makes histitology one of the
Speaker 1: most dynamic, fast moving fields of ancient history. Late one afternoon,
Speaker 1: I found Daniel Schwemer, a researcher from Germany's University of Wurtzburg,
Speaker 1: seated at a table in the German Archaeological Institute's dig
Speaker 1: house in vojas Kala, the village next to Hittusha's ruins.
Speaker 1: Schwemer is part of a small community of scholars who
Speaker 1: specialized in reading and translating Hittite texts. Every autumny comes
Speaker 1: to Hatusha to see what's been found during the summer's excavations.
Speaker 1: Like unpacking Christmas presents, Schemer said, you really never know
Speaker 1: what you'll get. Each new find has the potential to
Speaker 1: change what we know about Bronze Age empires. It's an
Speaker 1: area where history is still in the process of being written.
Speaker 1: Schemer said. Documents are coming out of the ground nobody
Speaker 1: has seen for thousands of years. Of course, answers to
Speaker 1: a question that the heart of Hittite research remain elusive.
Speaker 1: What happened to them? Theories abound, from political unrest to
Speaker 1: climate change, but a lone explanation seems unlikely to be found.
Speaker 1: There's no single reason why such a complex society disintegrates
Speaker 1: and completely disappears from history. Schachner said instead, a perfect
Speaker 1: storm of factors probably pushed Hittites to the limits and
Speaker 1: then beyond. Raiders were a constant threat. For example, tribes
Speaker 1: known as the Kaska living along the Black Sea coast
Speaker 1: show up in tablets, destroying temples and desecrating statues before
Speaker 1: dividing up the the priests, the holy priests, the priestesses,
Speaker 1: the anointed ones, the musicians, the singers, the cooks, the bakers,
Speaker 1: the plowmen, and the gardeners and making them their servants.
Speaker 1: Natural disasters, too, strained the Hittite empire from time to time.
Speaker 1: Recent finds from a site called Stepaneuva suggest powerful earthquakes
Speaker 1: regularly rock the Hittite heartland about forty miles northeast of
Speaker 1: Hatusha at the shop of Nuva's Palace and Tempel complex,
Speaker 1: excavations rebuilt walls and floors that rippled like waves. Archaeologists
Speaker 1: discovered buildings and storehouses consumed in a huge fire, all
Speaker 1: clues the city was hit by a devastating quake. The
Speaker 1: Hittite successfully handled these and different challenges for years until
Speaker 1: suddenly they didn't. By about twelve fifty BC, the tablets
Speaker 1: begin to show the strains of the empire's final century.
Speaker 1: Pallas Infighting and royal assassination attempts grew rampant, making it
Speaker 1: hard for Hatusha's leaders to maintain control over their subjects.
Speaker 1: Epidemic diseases were a problem too. The tablets contained prayers
Speaker 1: to ward off plagues and changes in language and writing styles.
Speaker 1: In the empire's final decades, navy signs of social strife
Speaker 1: or upheaval signs their multi ethnic state was under strain.
Speaker 1: The latest findings suggest climate change in a series of
Speaker 1: natural disasters helped accelerate the empire's decline. In a twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three study, researchers analyzed preserved wood recovered from Gordian,
Speaker 1: a city on the western outskirts of the Hittite Empire.
Speaker 1: By measuring tree rings, they could tell nearby forests were
Speaker 1: unusually stressed between eleven ninety eight and eleven ninety six BC,
Speaker 1: evidence of a punishing three year drought right around the
Speaker 1: time the Hittite Empire was ented. The drought may have
Speaker 1: sparked famine. Archaeologists found empty grain depots at Hititusha, Chapineuva,
Speaker 1: and other abandoned Hittite cities. Letters reflect the desperation of
Speaker 1: Hittite kings who begged foreign leaders to send barley and
Speaker 1: wheat as a matter of life and death, and invaders
Speaker 1: referred to as sea peoples in Egyptian chronicles, caused chaos
Speaker 1: that rippled all across the Mediterranean, weakening all alliances and
Speaker 1: prompting mass migrations. That was the salt and pepper on
Speaker 1: the Dish, says Ginch. Around eleven eighty b C. The
Speaker 1: Hittites methodically abandoned their capital. There are no signs of
Speaker 1: battle or conquest, no mass graves, no toppled towers or buildings, temples,
Speaker 1: storehouses full of gold and silver vessels, gilded spears, and
Speaker 1: booty from successful military campaigns elaborately described in festival instructions
Speaker 1: and inventory lists but missing today must have been packed
Speaker 1: up and evacuated. Afterward, the city burned, but in a
Speaker 1: final irony, the flames that destroyed Hatusha preserved its history,
Speaker 1: Too heavy to move from their archives, thousands of clay
Speaker 1: tablets the Hittites amassed over the course of roughly four
Speaker 1: centuries were left behind. Fire baked them into hard bricks,
Speaker 1: helping them survive the ensuing centuries intact. The advantage for
Speaker 1: us is that all these clay tablets were left behind
Speaker 1: when everyone fled the capital. Schemer said, what remained was
Speaker 1: the paperwork. Until a tablet emerges inscribed with an account
Speaker 1: of Fatucia's last days, the mystery abides. The Hittites managed
Speaker 1: to adapt to a harsh environment and grow into a
Speaker 1: mighty empire despite their surroundings, until circumstances beyond their control
Speaker 1: upset their delicate balancing act. The Hittites collapse and their
Speaker 1: recent rediscovery as a testament to the importance of resilience
Speaker 1: and good record keeping. Hittites clash with Egypt twelve seventy
Speaker 1: four BC, turning point at Kadesh, a century before the
Speaker 1: Hittite Empire vanished, its forces fought the Egyptians in what
Speaker 1: is believed to be history's biggest East chariot battle. It
Speaker 1: ended in a draw. Fifteen years after the conflict, the
Speaker 1: empires settled their differences with one of the world's oldest
Speaker 1: known peace treaties rivals of the Hittites in the early
Speaker 1: thirteenth century BC. The Hittite Empire was just one of
Speaker 1: the mighty powers that arose in the fertile lands of
Speaker 1: the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Ancient records show that while
Speaker 1: they were connected through regular diplomacy and trade, each had
Speaker 1: its own distinct language and culture. City of the Gods. Today,
Speaker 1: some thirty three hundred years after the peak of the
Speaker 1: Hittite Empire, the realms grandeur can be clipsed in the
Speaker 1: ruins of the capital Atusha, an ancient stronghold dotted with
Speaker 1: temples that honored a litany of deities. The capital's Great Temple,
Speaker 1: Hittite social, political, and religious life centered on its temples.
Speaker 1: Annual festivals, and Hittusha's impressive architecture projected power and promoted
Speaker 1: a common culture emanating from the empire's corp Next, how
Speaker 1: visiting the Titanic got a lot simpler by Canille Bromley.
Speaker 1: Fresh advances in three D scanning technology are making it
Speaker 1: possible to explore some of the hardest to reach in
Speaker 1: most fragile sites on Earth. Last year, Parks Stevenson stood
Speaker 1: next to the Titanic and walked slowly around it, gazing
Speaker 1: up at the massive ship. He paused to look inside
Speaker 1: one of the boiler rooms and at the position of
Speaker 1: the controls on the engines. He noticed the number four
Speaker 1: O one the ship's id, etched on the propeller blades.
Speaker 1: Rusticles hung from the steel shell, Twisted metal and personal
Speaker 1: trinkets from those long dead littered the ground. Stevenson, a
Speaker 1: retired naval officer and Titanic historian, wasn't twelve thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred feet below the surface of the North Atlantic, of course.
Speaker 1: He was in London inspecting the ship's digital Twin, a
Speaker 1: one for one computer model made possible by advances in
Speaker 1: remote three D scanning and mapping technology. The model is
Speaker 1: so densely detailed a video rendering of it can be
Speaker 1: projected to life size in a warehouse where researchers can
Speaker 1: walk alongside it and zoom in and out on individual features,
Speaker 1: like a steam valve from the boiler room, which the
Speaker 1: scan revealed was left open, possibly to keep an emergency
Speaker 1: generator running as the ship sank. The Titanic Twin adds
Speaker 1: to a growing list of similar models made of archaeological
Speaker 1: and cultural sites around the world that both preserve these
Speaker 1: fragile places and provide a new means of exploring them.
Speaker 1: Stevenson has seen the actual Titanic wreck twice since his
Speaker 1: first dive in two thousand and five, but he didn't
Speaker 1: catch so many details on his trips. You can only
Speaker 1: see what's immediately in front of you, he says, of
Speaker 1: peering through a submersibles roughly six inch viewport and camera views.
Speaker 1: It's like being in a dark room and you have
Speaker 1: a flashlight that's not very powerful. The digital twin, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, gave him an unobstructed three one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty degree view of every gnarled, nook and cranny.
Speaker 1: The scan at the storage ship was carried out over
Speaker 1: three weeks in twenty twenty two by Magellan, a deep
Speaker 1: sea mapping company based in the Channel Islands. Titanic the
Speaker 1: Digital Resurrection, a new national geographic documentary streaming on Disney Plus,
Speaker 1: tells the story of the effort. It is the largest
Speaker 1: underwater three D scan ever made, amounting to sixteen terabytes
Speaker 1: of data equivalent to the hard drive footprint of six
Speaker 1: million E books. To create it, two remote operated robots
Speaker 1: romantically named Romeo and Juliet traveled down to the wreck
Speaker 1: and systematically canvassed the site, taking some seven hundred fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand photos and millions of laser measurements. For Stevenson, the
Speaker 1: quality of detail in the scan opens new lines of
Speaker 1: inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic. The ship lies
Speaker 1: broken in two pieces, with a bow and stern about
Speaker 1: twenty six hundred feet apart. The hull descended in a
Speaker 1: straight line and as largely still intact, the scan shows
Speaker 1: it neatly wedged into the ocean floor. The stern, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, is shattered, and researchers have never been
Speaker 1: able to definitively say how that happened. When Stephenson looked
Speaker 1: at the scan, though, he could immediately envision the back
Speaker 1: half of the ship's spiraling as it sank and disintegrated
Speaker 1: into rubble. At a first glance, he says, it just
Speaker 1: made sense. In the past, a full grand scale of
Speaker 1: the wreck could be depicted only through artistic renditions or
Speaker 1: photomosaics created by humans. Neither method conveyed conveyed precise verisimilitude.
Speaker 1: The machine run three D model, however, is exact. As
Speaker 1: soon as I saw the Titanic digital twid images, Stevenson says,
Speaker 1: I could tell number one, I'd never seen Titanic like
Speaker 1: this before, and number two it felt right. The quest
Speaker 1: to create exact models for more accessible surveying started over
Speaker 1: a century ago. The technology that makes digital twinning possible
Speaker 1: dates back to at least eighteen fifty eight, when a
Speaker 1: German engineer named Albrech Maidenbauer was tasked with surveying a
Speaker 1: church and nearly fell to his death while measuring the facade.
Speaker 1: To avoid another dangerous climb, he worked out a way
Speaker 1: to mathematically calculate the measurements of large objects from photos,
Speaker 1: a technique he called photo grammatry. Today, photo grammatry, combined
Speaker 1: with lidar, which uses lasers to measure distances, as well
Speaker 1: as advanced computing power, produces models that can accurately replicate
Speaker 1: the most minute details of enormous structures like Mount Rushmore
Speaker 1: or the esthetic proportions of Mclangelo's David. The Italian Renaissance
Speaker 1: master's sculpture was one of the first major artifacts to
Speaker 1: be digitally modeled in two thousand by Stanford University. Though
Speaker 1: not as massive as the Titanic, the statue's relatively large
Speaker 1: size seventeen feet tall and twelve thousand, a hundred pounds
Speaker 1: and finely chiseled details make it a good test for
Speaker 1: how accurately three D technology might reproduce objects on a
Speaker 1: grand scale to day. The tech is so precise that
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty a team at the University of Florence
Speaker 1: produced a three D printed copy accurate down to David's
Speaker 1: resolute expression and every defect of the original stone. People
Speaker 1: travel to see masterpieces of human creativity because they want
Speaker 1: to feel the presence of something awesome or genius, but
Speaker 1: too much of our presence can destroy places that are irreplaceable.
Speaker 1: Hundreds have visited the Titanic, most of them at enormous expense,
Speaker 1: including five on the ill fated titan submersible. These explorers
Speaker 1: are the source of significant damage suffered by the wreck.
Speaker 1: Human piloted submersibles have in it burdenly, stripped a mast
Speaker 1: and gashed the bow. Beyond tourism, sites may be unpredictably
Speaker 1: damaged by natural disasters, climate change, or war. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: three D documentation company si ARC created models of Nigeria's
Speaker 1: ousen Osogbo Sacred Grove just before the sculpture laden forest
Speaker 1: shrines were destroyed in a flood. Chance Kaufner, a program
Speaker 1: manager for Google Arts and Culture, which supported si ARC
Speaker 1: in these efforts, and hosts these models online hopes the
Speaker 1: shrines can be rebuilt from the scans. Kaufnauer's group supported
Speaker 1: similar efforts to create digital twins of a cathedral and
Speaker 1: a historic government landmark in Ukraine that are now damaged
Speaker 1: by the war. On an even grander scale, digital twins
Speaker 1: can be made of not only buildings, statues, and shipwrecks,
Speaker 1: but also entire cities, living or dead. Alison Emerson, and
Speaker 1: archaeologist at Tulane University, is making a digital twin of
Speaker 1: parts of Pompeii, a famously fragile site where she spent
Speaker 1: the past sixteen years digging through layers of soil to
Speaker 1: uncover the city's earliest history. Emerson says digital twinning is
Speaker 1: the biggest leap forward for archaeology since photography our process
Speaker 1: is inherently destructive. She says, of excavating a site, we
Speaker 1: can never redo it. We can dig the site once,
Speaker 1: and so the focus in modern archaeology has been on
Speaker 1: recording as well as we possibly can. Her team's twin
Speaker 1: of a block in the southeast of the city was
Speaker 1: made with just a few hand held cameras. The model
Speaker 1: allows them to visualize the site with the walls of
Speaker 1: a room taken away, or a roof added, or how
Speaker 1: the land looked before the building was constructed. They can
Speaker 1: call up the model back in the lab and continue
Speaker 1: conversations that previously would happen only in the field. Emerson's
Speaker 1: work has revealed how one building at the site was
Speaker 1: both a restaurant and a workshop for people manufactured read
Speaker 1: baskets and mats, details that help her understand the city's
Speaker 1: economy and the daily life of its working class. For
Speaker 1: her part, Emerson plans to make her model of POMPEII
Speaker 1: and the coompanying findings available to the public, avoiding a
Speaker 1: common outcome for these projects. Because digital twins are expensive
Speaker 1: to create, many ambitious projects end uplocked way in the
Speaker 1: private archives of universities or governments. I did not want
Speaker 1: the model to live on a team member's laptop, she says.
Speaker 1: While Magellan has not announced any plans to make its
Speaker 1: Titanic scans free to the public, the documentary itself shows
Speaker 1: what's possible. Much of the existing research on the shipwreck
Speaker 1: has been conducted by private expeditions that guard bindings, an
Speaker 1: ongoing source of concern for scientists and citizen enthusiasts. Alike,
Speaker 1: Stevenson remains concerned the wreck is not being treated as
Speaker 1: an archaeological site. It's one of the most famous sites
Speaker 1: in the world, and we don't even have the basic
Speaker 1: baseline information needed to establish what's there at any particulegular time,
Speaker 1: because you've had different explorers who don't share information. He says,
Speaker 1: the digital twin has the potential to allow more visitors
Speaker 1: to experience it in a less destructive and more collaborative way.
Speaker 1: It's unlikely people will stop going to the Titanic wreck site.
Speaker 1: Its draw has proven irresistible for those with enough money
Speaker 1: and motivation. In two thousand and one, for example, a
Speaker 1: couple exchanged vows crouched in a submersible perched on the bow.
Speaker 1: A digital twin certainly doesn't replace sitting on the deck
Speaker 1: of the Titanic, says Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and National
Speaker 1: Geographic Explorer who discovered the wreck in nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: along with Jean Louis Michael, but he thinks it will
Speaker 1: help preserve the wreck for those who cannot resist going themselves.
Speaker 1: He offers two warnings, don't touch it, don't get married
Speaker 1: on it. Next Australia's Great Big Camel Conundrum by Sean Williams.
Speaker 1: Imported from the Middle East and Asia in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: caials now thrive in Australia's air and out back, but
Speaker 1: drought and climate change are raising tough questions about whether
Speaker 1: they belong. Jack Carmody has built a sizeable YouTube following
Speaker 1: by showing his viewers what it takes to run a
Speaker 1: cattle station in the Australian outback. The rugged work of
Speaker 1: mending troughs, reinforcing fences and shooting trespassers feral horses and donkeys,
Speaker 1: that is, and one particularly destructive invasive species, camels, introduced
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century to help colonists survey the country's
Speaker 1: vast interior. The creatures are now wrecking havoc across the
Speaker 1: outback and decimating the Carmody family's ranch property, or what
Speaker 1: Australians call a cattle station. At more than fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: square miles, the property Prenty Downs is the size of
Speaker 1: Rhode Island. So there's plenty of work to be done,
Speaker 1: and in this modern Internet age, there's plenty of content
Speaker 1: to be created on Carbony's channel, Jack out the Back
Speaker 1: no videos are more popular than those focused on in
Speaker 1: Spite against the camels, which the straight talking father of
Speaker 1: three culls with his rifle, taking out nearly eight hundred
Speaker 1: each year. The approach might seem alarming, but to Carmody
Speaker 1: and other cattle farmers, it's simply the most rational solution
Speaker 1: to a dire problem, like weeding the veggie patch, as
Speaker 1: he puts it, and in a twist that is perhaps
Speaker 1: good for YouTube and bad for cattle farming, the camels,
Speaker 1: like stubborn weeds, keep coming back. Australia is now home
Speaker 1: to the large world's largest feral camel population, with estimates
Speaker 1: from several hundred thousand to as many as a million.
Speaker 1: Females can give birth every two years and live up
Speaker 1: to forty years in the wild, meaning the number of
Speaker 1: camels can double every nine years. Weighing on average one
Speaker 1: thousand pounds, they roam in herds from fewer than ten
Speaker 1: to several hundred, trampling ecosystems and destroying infrastructure. Creatures are
Speaker 1: voracious consumers of plants, eating with other wildlife and live stock,
Speaker 1: and limiting food sources for aboriginal communities. They destabilize sand dunes,
Speaker 1: which can lead to erosion. Camels also foulw water holes
Speaker 1: with their droppings or by mobbing them, only to die
Speaker 1: of thirst. Their carcasses poisoning what little water is left. Water,
Speaker 1: in fact, is the source of the biggest problem. When
Speaker 1: enough moisture rich plants are available, camels famously can subsist
Speaker 1: for weeks on end without a drink, but when they
Speaker 1: do go thirsty, they're insatiable. An adult camel can consume
Speaker 1: fifty gallons in the day. When natural sources of water
Speaker 1: dry up on Aboriginal land, pastoral territory, and cattle stations,
Speaker 1: camels go looking for a drink wherever they can find it.
Speaker 1: In the process, they often rip up pipes, destroy toilet blocks,
Speaker 1: and knock air conditioners out of windows. What's even more
Speaker 1: concerning is that a rising number of droughts is pushing
Speaker 1: the animals into ever closer in frequent contact with humans.
Speaker 1: One of the most damashing of these conflicts occurred in
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen on a Northern Territory cattle station named Curtain Springs.
Speaker 1: Six years earlier, feral camels, desperate for a drink, erect
Speaker 1: one hundred miles of the station's fencing and i mean
Speaker 1: just totally destroyed, says Lindy Severand, who runs the farm
Speaker 1: with her family gone. Replacing the fencing cost about half
Speaker 1: a million dollars. Ranchers have a legal obligation to remove
Speaker 1: feral animals on their property. When she saw the camels
Speaker 1: were back, Sovereign called the Australian Feral Camel Management Project,
Speaker 1: which had called twenty seven thousand camels from the region
Speaker 1: the previous year. Within forty eight hours, snipers arrived at
Speaker 1: the property and over the next four days they shot
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred camels dead from their helicopters. But the feral
Speaker 1: camel calling program, budgeted for four years, ended in twenty
Speaker 1: thirteen with little political will in cities to keep the
Speaker 1: distant out project going, and feral camel numbers have only
Speaker 1: gone up. According to biologist Tim Lowe, co founder of
Speaker 1: Australia's Invasive Species Council, a private nonprofit, the current impact
Speaker 1: of feral camels on farmers and rural Aboriginal Australians is
Speaker 1: very substantial. Costs and damage and control less estimated at
Speaker 1: twelve million dollars in twenty thirteen, are unknown today. Low
Speaker 1: and other experts say if they can't get the population
Speaker 1: under control, the country's next droughts will lead to more crises.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of ideas, both practical and fanciful, for
Speaker 1: what to do with the feral camels, but it's helpful
Speaker 1: to understand why they were brought to Australia in the
Speaker 1: first place. In the eighteen thirties, British colonists struggling to
Speaker 1: survey the outback on horses that tired easily caught word
Speaker 1: of camel's extraordinary endurance. The first camel to enter the
Speaker 1: country arrived in eighteen forty from the Canary Islands, and
Speaker 1: others followed from a rape via Afghanistan, British India, and
Speaker 1: the Persian and Ottoman Empires. Colonists also brought in more
Speaker 1: than two thousand camel operators or kamaliers, whom they collectively
Speaker 1: called Afghans. Despite their disparate origins, camels helped open the
Speaker 1: remote interior, transporting food and supplies, as well as gold
Speaker 1: prospectors and workers building railway and telegraph systems. Then, the
Speaker 1: White Australia Policy, enacted in nineteen oh one to prevent
Speaker 1: non Europeans from immigrating, began to thin the number of
Speaker 1: kamaliers as wood technology. By the nineteen thirties, cars and
Speaker 1: railroads had rendered Australia's camel industry all but obsolete. Many
Speaker 1: foreign kamaliers returned to their homelands and their camels, up
Speaker 1: to ten thousand of them. Suddenly, jablists were set free
Speaker 1: to Rome when traditional use for these wayward animals is
Speaker 1: to enlist them in the camel trekking industry, which offers
Speaker 1: a ruggedly authentic way for travelers to see most of
Speaker 1: the remote parts of Australia's interior. Camel trekking was made
Speaker 1: famous by Robin Davidson's nineteen eighty memoir Tracks about her
Speaker 1: solo seventeen hundred mile journey by camel across the deserts
Speaker 1: of Western Australia, and the industry now comprises a dozen operators.
Speaker 1: One of the longest running is the Outback Camel Company.
Speaker 1: Andrew Harper, who has owned the outfit since two thousand
Speaker 1: and has twenty one camels, estimates that fewer than one
Speaker 1: hundred camels around the country are being used for trekking.
Speaker 1: We are governed by the seasons, says Harper, and with
Speaker 1: limited numbers of people wanting to make desert treks. It's
Speaker 1: not like your normal business model focused on exponential growth.
Speaker 1: But there's also a more dramatic way to ride feral camels,
Speaker 1: one that, like the animals themselves, has been imported from abroad.
Speaker 1: Each year, more than four thousand people visit the Queensland
Speaker 1: village of Boulia, population under five hundred, which hosts one
Speaker 1: of Australia's most famous cat camel racing tournaments, a competition
Speaker 1: where the purse totals some thirty thousand dollars. The animals
Speaker 1: are temperamental, few heats pass without a buck or a bite,
Speaker 1: and any jockeys worth their salt to have the scars
Speaker 1: to prove it. Every single camel has got a different personality,
Speaker 1: says jockey Bretlin beaver Neil. You hope you get a
Speaker 1: good start and yeah, hold on. Camel treker Paddy mc
Speaker 1: hugh founded the Bouliah Camel Races in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1: It remains a modest enterprise, as does the entire domestic
Speaker 1: racing circuit, which has only about a hundred camels in competition,
Speaker 1: but mc kew thinks that figure could grow tenfold. A
Speaker 1: Formula one style circuit could connect Australian races with contests
Speaker 1: in North Africa and in the Persian Gulf, where racing
Speaker 1: camels can be worth over a million dollars. This concludes
Speaker 1: readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has
Speaker 1: been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and
Speaker 1: have a great j