Broken Hill Mosque Museum: The incredible history and cameleers behind outback Australia's last mosque

The Broken Hill Mosque Museum, marking the site of a former camel camp, is officially open two hours a week. At other times, you just give co-ordinator Bobby Shamroze a call on the blower and he'll come to open the high chain-wire gate, show you around and tell one hell of a story.

His history is just as interesting as that of the simple timber-and-tin mosque located in North Broken Hill where Afghan and Indian drivers once loaded their camels, which carted anything from chaff and wool bales to pipes and pianolas. Shamroze is much more than a caretaker of the building that's shaded by date palms and painted a deep desert red. He's a living link to the cameleers who in 1891 built what's now outback Australia's last remaining mosque. His father, Shamroze Khan, and maternal grandfather, Ziadulla Fazulla, were both cameleers who carted freight to the region's stations. Fazulla was the mosque's last mullah (religious leader).

Shamroze, 82, doesn't know a whole lot about his dad, a camel dealer and driver who managed to make and lose a fortune before his death in 1952. "My old man was 62 when I came along," Shamroze says. "Couldn't find nothin' out about him and still can't find nothin' out about him."

His mother, Miriam, decades younger than her husband, abandoned the family when Shamroze was four years old. "After mum went, it was rough," he says of his childhood. When he was a small child, "I jumped on the train and ran away to Adelaide to look for my mother".

"I just found my way around the place because I'd been down there with my father," he says. "He used to go down to the Adelaide mosque." Those were the days, he says, when "you could go missing for a month and no one would worry about you".

The last time he ran away, he found his mum who was working at a pub. He started going to school in Adelaide but was soon placed in a series of boys' homes. Shamroze returned to Broken Hill to briefly live with his grandfather before becoming a shearer, wool presser and mines worker. At 17, he met his future wife. He and Janet remain happily married 65 years later.

It's a story as colourful as the mosque, which faces towards Mecca. The non-religious Shamroze – "When I was in the boys' home, I went to a different church every week" – never had much to do with the mosque in his younger years, apart from when his grandfather died in 1960. Shamroze and his uncle washed his body there before burial.

With Fazulla's passing, the mosque fell into disrepair. After the Broken Hill Historical Society restored the building, it was rededicated as a place of worship in 1968. Today, the anteroom displays photographs, books and artefacts, and Muslim visitors occasionally come to kneel on prayer mats in the adjoining mint-green prayer room fashioned from sheets of pressed metal.