Bejah Plants a Date Seed

Bejah Plants a Date Seed is a 1952 Australian radio serial drama by Megan Machin about the Calvert Expedition in Western Australia.

The play came second in the ABC's Jubilee Radio Serial Competition.

The serial tells the story of Dervish Bejah, Afghan camel driver, who accompanied Lawrence Wells on the ill-fated Calvert Expedition across the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Machin met Bejah in Marree the previous year.

The serial was played in the morning. The Adelaide Mail thought this would give the show "such a negligible audience that it hardly seems worth broadcasting at all. As quite a number of listeners would be interested In a prize-winning serial. I feel the ABC might have chosen a better time to put 'Bejah' on the air."

A critic from the same paper later said "Machin has written a splendid descriptive and dramatic story of the Calvert expedition... The man who saved it was Bejah, a giant Afghan camel driver, and it is his story that Mrs. Machin tells with rare insight and understanding."