“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, does not see much of a future for his craft. “Taxidermy is a dying art,” he said.

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