Srinagar, June 11 -- The photograph surfaced in Alice Springs nearly a century after it was taken.

An Afghan man kneels in prayer on the desert ground in central Australia in 1934. Sunlight falls across his white clothes as the vast interior stretches behind him in silence.

The image rests today inside the Norman Ellison collection at the National Library of Australia, though the man himself survives without a recorded name.

A South Asian storyteller researching Australia's "Afghan cameleers" discovered the photograph during a recent reporting trip through the outback. Her investigation soon uncovered a startling personal link.

A distant relative of hers had once worked among the cameleers who crossed Australia's deserts with camel ca...