‘Nobody with a sane mind’ would buy this stuffed camel – and then a Sydney private school saw her

Who on earth would buy a two-metre-tall stuffed camel? For more than a decade, shoppers at an Alexandria antique store have asked this question, craning their necks and staring up into the glassy eyes of Michelle, a balding, 50-year-old humped beast with a price tag of $13,000.

The answer, it turns out, is eastern suburbs private school Scots College.

The beloved mascot of Mitchell Road Antiques in Alexandria – a full-sized, taxidermy camel, adored by the community – has finally found a forever home, after it was purchased by the college to be placed inside its $60 million John Cunningham Student Centre.

Equally puzzling – how does a camel end up in an antique store to begin with, and why did a school buy her? While Scots College declined to explain its purchase, the Herald was able to piece together Michelle’s busy afterlife. We tracked down Dr George Hangay, an 84-year-old Hungarian beetle expert and taxidermist and the man responsible for giving Michelle a second life.

Sitting in his home on the northern beaches, Hangay is shown a photo of Michelle in the antique store. She’s wearing a lopsided sombrero and half her ear is torn, but his answer is immediate.

“Yes, that’s my camel.”

An artist always recognises their own work.

He explains she was killed “sometime in the late ’70s”, likely in the Northern Territory, skinned, and her pelt was sent to Sydney in a 44-gallon drum of alcohol. Hangay and his team spent “around two months” putting the camel back together.

“It was in good condition,” he said. “No hair pulling out. I sanded it down with a bloody big knife, and then we mixed up a very expensive tanning solution made of whale oil. Then it went out of fashion because we stopped killing whales. But it was very good stuff.”

They created a skeleton out of timber and metal, moulded it with clay “until it looked like camel” and then stretched the pelt over its new body.

Once finished, she was put on display in the Australian Museum as part of its “Arid Australia” exhibition. Current museum director and chief executive Kim McKay said the camel was “used as more as a prop rather than a collection item”.

There she lived until the late 1990s, when she was loaned to the National Opal Collection on Pitt Street and its attached opal store, in a transaction Hangay described as “unorthodox”.

Damien Cody ran the collection alongside his brother Andrew. He remembers the camel arriving.

“We had a relationship with the Australia Museum, we had some of their opalised fossil exhibits in our store in a business arrangement where visitors could come in and see incredible displays that weren’t in the museum, and we would tell the story of how opal formed and how it was found [through Michelle],” Cody said.

There she lived until renovations in the early 2000s and the “poor old camel didn’t really have a spot.”

Eventually, they sold the camel after she began to “disintegrate” and the museum no longer wanted it back.

“One of our partners found a home for it somehow … as to where it ended up, we don’t really know,” Cody said.

It’s unknown what journeys Michelle took during the early 2000s. Her next known sighting was around 2015 when she popped up at Mitchell Road Antiques.

She was great at bringing in new customers, but terrible at going home with them.

Looking at a photo of dishevelled Michelle in the antique store, Hangay tuts.

“Nobody with a sane mind would buy something [like this],” he said.

Oddities can be difficult to sell, said Mike Archer, the director of the Australia Museum between 1999 and 2004 and the person who loaned the camel to the Opal store.

He recalls purchasing a cave bear skeleton from an antique store in Redfern which was “very pleased” to offload the figure after it “caused problems in his shop”.

“It had such a horrific pose, standing up on its hind legs with its arms outstretched, and it was very intimidating,” Archer said, explaining that just before he came to collect the skeleton, “a young girl [rounded] the corner in the shop, saw the bear, and promptly urinated on the floor”.

However, “there is always somebody who wants [something like this] for whatever weird reason”.

The current museum director described the camel purchase as “pretty weird” but wasn’t too surprised.

“In the world of taxidermy, anything is possible and often is,” McKay said.

The Herald contacted several taxidermists, who valued the camel at $9000 to $11,000.

Hangay, whose partner in creating Michelle died last week, said he did not see much of a future for his craft.

“Taxidermy is a dying art,” he said.

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