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When Adelaide-based artist Elyas Alavi, a refugee from Afghanistan, started researching the lives of camel drivers working in outback Australia more than a century ago, he discovered an important connection.

Thousands of men known as Afghan cameleers travelled to Australia to carry goods in an often harsh climate before the development of railways and roads.

Alavi, 38, says he connected to cameleers through their music, language and scripts, and the notebooks they left behind.

The cameleers were a very diverse [group of people]. Among them, they were artists and musicians.

It’s important [for] me to project these historical connections with Australia. I want to show we are not the ‘others’ or strangers. We have been here for a long time.

He says the cameleers were not able to bring family members to Australia, an issue that current asylum seekers also face.

Originally from Afghanistan, Alavi spent many years in Iran as a refugee before resettling in Australia in 2007 through a United Nations program.

As a Hazara refugee having fled my homeland as a child, if I were to describe my sense of self in one word, it would be ‘uprooted’.

Alavi, a published poet in Farsi, turned to visual arts because he could not find an audience in Australia for his poems.

He addresses issues of displacement, trauma and war through his work.

The camel drivers – widely referred to as Afghan cameleers even though many also came from the provinces of modern-day Pakistan and India – helped outback communities and industry to survive by transporting goods from cities to inland areas.

From AAP.