SILVERTON’S renowned camel farm offers a unique tourism experience for adventure seekers and animal lovers alike, but has been struggling to find permanent workers.
Owner Petah Devine said the changeover of staff makes it difficult to keep the property functioning effectively as training new staff is a tedious and time-consuming process.
“I have mostly backpackers, and they’re only there for a certain amount of time,” she said.
“There’s a lot of time and effort that goes into training so it would be good to have some permanent staff apply who’d like to stay for six months or more.”
Ms Devine said she’s hoping to have at least one extra long-term, full-time staff member join the camel farm team, although ideally two.
The role of her employees is varied but includes walking camels, saddling camels, helping run the camel rides, feeding a menagerie of animals and a bit of cleaning.
“It would be great if anyone had maintenance skills too – welding or fencing or general maintenance,” she said.
Ms Devine’s camel farm isn’t just camels as the name suggests but is home to a huge range of different animals.
“We have camels, ponies, alpacas, sheep, goats, Texas longhorn cows, buffalo, deer, ostriches, emus, dingoes, dogs, chooks, ducks, geese, guinea fowl, turkeys, peacocks and pigs,” she said.
The farm offers camel rides twice a day in cooler months and at sunset over the summer, as well as farm tours and hosting visitors in an Airbnb and campground.
Ms Devine said someone handy with tools would also make a great candidate as she needs some shelters, tables and chairs built so that people can come and sit with the animals.
She said the power outages in October slowed the tourism season in the area earlier than usual.
“Talking to other tour operators, we all slowed down about a month early this year because of the outage when people were told not to come here,” she said.
“We sort of missed that month, and now its getting too hot.”
Ms Devine said she lost many bookings for camel rides and the Airbnb due to people being encouraged not to travel to the Far West when a state of natural disaster was issued for the area.
She offers accommodation for employees on her farm, though anyone applying will need a driver’s licence and ideally their own vehicle.
