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Every now and then the Perth is OK! office gets itself in a bit of tizzy over some kind of random animal and its relationship to our fair state. Like last year, when we were convinced we could launch a whole week devoted to emu-related content after videos of them being big funny birds kept coming across our desk.

Well over the last couple of weeks our new obsession became camels, perhaps kicked off by the rogue Broome camel that decided it had enough of the tourists it was carrying. And this obsession has become Harriet’s deep dive into the hump-backed beasts that you can read below — and why having so many of them roaming around isn’t great for a number of reasons…

^{Troy Mutton, Editor-In-Chief, Perth is OK!}

Did you know WA is home to more camels than Egypt?

Or that Australia has the world’s largest population of feral camels roaming the outback?

From cane toads and foxes to feral cats and shot-hole borers, WA is certainly no stranger to exotic pests wreaking havoc on the environment, and the camel is one large one that seems to be going under the radar.

“They’re kind of Australia’s forgotten invasive.”

That’s how Curtin University Associate Professor Bill Bateman describes the feral pests, whose career has spanned in-depth research of animal behaviour, wildlife biology, and conservation.

“We don’t actually know how many [feral camels] are out there, with estimates ranging from 300,000 to over a million,” he tells us. “But Western Australia probably carried about half of that population, so we may have about 400,000 camels in WA alone.”

10 years on from launching South by South West Wines, Livia Maiorana and Mijan Patterson remain on a journey of discovery. In vino veritas, right?

Despite growing up as a first generation Australian surrounded by wine-loving Italians, Maiorana’s family encouraged her to explore more solid terroir via a chemical engineering degree.

However, after meeting life partner Patterson, a town planner by trade, Maiorana inevitably heard the call of the grape.

In 2013, the pair embarked on a “wine safari”, a fact-finding mission taking in stints at vineyards in California’s Napa and Sonoma Valleys, the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, as well as in France and Italy. A vintage in the latter country connected to her Sicilian heritage, as Maiorana accumulated winemaking know-how in situ and plans for their own project began to ferment…