Stranger Country Read online

  ‘A tender and thought-provoking exploration of cultural and national identity, and a bewitching love letter to Australia, recounting the pain of what’s been, the complications of the present, and offering hope for what is to come. Tan’s curiosity and deep reverence for the land and its first inhabitants makes her the perfect travel buddy on this journey into the heart of Australia.’

  Michelle Law, author of Single Asian Female

  ‘With 85 per cent of Australia’s population scattered along the coast, too often we look out and across the sea for meaning and adventure. Monica Tan’s Stranger Country is a call for us to look within: at our rich and varied geography, our long and buried history of diversity, and the 60,000-year-old culture on our doorstep. The cliché that Australia has no history or culture is false—we just don’t often take the time to tell it. Stranger Country does. A necessary Australian story.’

  Rachel Hills, author of The Sex Myth

  ‘Self-aware and provocative, Monica gets to the heart of what it means to call Australia home as a non-Indigenous person. Never self-indulgent, Monica looks outwards and examines herself critically as she learns about the culture of the country she grew up in. I loved it, and came away with a new lens through which to see myself.’

  Bridie Jabour, journalist and author of The Way Things Should Be

  ‘Stranger Country is a marvellously engaging, beautifully described record of a quest into the meaning of belonging, that documents both the gritty reality of a 30,000-kilometre solo road trip around Australia by one young woman, and her profoundly intelligent journey of mind.’

  Isobelle Carmody, author of The Obernewtyn Chronicles

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © Monica Tan 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76063 221 2

  eISBN 978 1 76087 079 9

  Internal design by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Internal images from the author’s collection

  Map by Julia Eim

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Cover images: Shutterstock

  To my Australian Studies students, past, present and future.

  I acknowledge and pay my respects to the elders—past, present and emerging—of every nation through which I travelled on my road trip. I acknowledge that I live, work and study on Darug, Eora and Guringai Country.

  I would like to extend the protection and care of my ancestors to any Indigenous Australians in China, just as their ancestors have taken care of me.

  Contents

  Map

  Author’s note

  Introduction

  Part One Going West

  Part Two Central Australia

  Part Three The Kimberley & The Pilbara

  Part Four Lurujarri Trail

  Part Five Top End

  Part Six Arnhem Land

  Part Seven East Coast

  Afterword

  Birdspotting

  Acknowledgements

  Selected bibliography

  Author’s note

  This book documents a 30,000-kilometre solo road trip I took around Australia in 2016. To write this book I relied on eighteen journals I penned over the course of those six months, along with hundreds of photos, additional research and my memories.

  Although I spent the majority of my six months on the road in central and northern Australia, this should not be read as any reflection or validation of the commonly held belief that the Indigenous Australian cultures located there are ‘more authentic’ than those in other parts of Australia. Rather, I chose to spend more time in those areas because they were less familiar to me than southern and eastern Australia. I considered this trip a rare opportunity for me to explore parts of Australia that are physically distant and difficult to access for a Sydney-sider.

  Almost every person in this book was given the opportunity to review the passage in which they featured and suggest changes. In a small number of cases, I wasn’t able to make contact. My decision to include them wasn’t made lightly and was based on a strong sense that their contribution is vital to the telling of this story.

  Many but not all people featured in this book are under a pseudonym. Due to word constraints, many locations, people and events were omitted.

  This is a true story and, I hope, a truthful one.

  Introduction

  When I look back on growing up in Sydney, I don’t recall meeting any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. This is despite the fact the city is home to the largest population of Indigenous Australians in the country. As far as I’m aware, none of my neighbours, schoolmates, teachers or local shopkeepers were Indigenous people. They weren’t among the actors and pop singers on posters stuck to my bedroom walls. They weren’t the politicians I saw on television or the authors of books on my shelves. Throughout my childhood, adolescence and even my twenties, ‘Indigenous Australia’ was just a concept to me, one that rarely had a presence in my life.

  I was born in Australia to Chinese Malaysian parents. As teenagers in the early 1970s, they had separately migrated here from rural north Malaysia to study at university. They met and married in Sydney a decade later and raised their four children in the city’s leafy and well-to-do north-west. My parents’ social circle rarely overlapped with Indigenous Australian social circles. In fact, from what I can recall barely any of my parents’ friends weren’t of Chinese heritage.

  Like many non-Indigenous Australians, I was introduced to Indigenous Australia at school. My Year 8 history teacher would stand in front of the classroom with a thick textbook open in her hands like a hymnbook, intonating in a low drone. She would lick her forefinger to turn each page, and that was the cue for all us students—although most had zoned out—to do the same. Our textbook depicted the ‘Aborigines’ in colonial sketches as fit, dark-skinned men holding spears. In the most prosaic of terms, the book stated that as the new settler society swept across the continent, some of these ‘primitive’ people were shot but the majority died from introduced diseases, and almost all of those who remained were absorbed into white society. Indigenous Australians were apparently cleared away from the land in one fell swoop, leaving a clean slate upon which Australia could be founded.

  What a shame, I thought, but I wasn’t ashamed. Those history lessons left me with the impression that what had happened to Indigenous Australia was awful but inevitable. It was less an advanced human civilisation and more a quaint relic, an insubstantial society that had lived lightly on this continent—no wonder it had been so quickly and easily smudged out by colonial forces.

  My conscience was clear. At the time of colonisation, my ancestors were living in a China preoccupied with internal political instability and aggressive military action against the British. If you were going to blame anyone for what happened to Indigenous Australia, I decided, you should blame white Australians. And even then, could you? The colonisers were dead. What�
��s done is done.

  Thanks to these experiences in the Australian education system, I considered myself permanently immune to the charms of historical study. So I was somewhat surprised more than a decade later to see that prove untrue when I spent four years living in China in my late twenties. I loved hearing stories of emperors and empresses, while learning to draw direct parallels between the palace intrigues of the past and the machinations of the contemporary Chinese Communist Party. I loved reading ancient tales of drunken poets, immortal beings and star-crossed lovers, and suicidal martyrs to the motherland. I became intoxicated by culture, language and history.

  History, I learned, can also be a people’s cross to bear. Throughout his reign in the mid-twentieth century, Chairman Mao Zedong framed the past as having a stranglehold on the present, preventing China from achieving modernisation. One of the precepts of the Cultural Revolution was doing away with the Four Olds: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. This triggered an orgiastic period of madness in which a great deal of renowned architecture, literature, art and sites of religious significance were destroyed or desecrated. But despite the colossal traumas and political upheavals endured by the Chinese people, some things just don’t change there: everyone is still a foodie and a romantic, as well as hardworking, brash, energetic, patriotic to a fault, and preoccupied with ‘face’ and social status; old people still dance in the parks or increasingly in public squares adjacent to shopping malls; the lyricism of the mountainous countryside remains strong, having inspired hermits for thousands of years as it hopefully will for thousands more; and the weighty sense of the country’s 3000-year history is still carried proudly by many people as though it is an ornate silk bridal sedan chair. It isn’t difficult to find an uneducated farmer who can recite a seventh-century poem. National festivals honour beloved historical figures who died thousands of years ago. Primetime television is peppered with popular period dramas.

  Chinese people also know the diverse regions of their country well—they know that northerners eat noodles, while southerners eat rice, and that in Shanghai women wear the pants in the relationship. Chinese tourists routinely visit different parts of their country in order to learn local stories and customs, eat local dishes, and even pick up a few new words. But if you ask your average Sydneysider what food people eat in Western Australia or what women are like in Adelaide, they will likely shrug. In this age of digital communication, mass media and rapid transportation, modern communities throughout Australia, even the most far-flung, will never experience the centuries of isolation required for the development of unique regional cultures. In the Australia of popular imagination, or at least in mainstream Australian society, we have no equivalent to Fujian, the Chinese province of my ancestry, where it’s possible to drive an hour from one village to another and find mutually unintelligible local languages.

  I don’t remember where or when this occurred to me—perhaps I was eating a steaming bowl of famous Guo Qiao Mi Xian noodles in Yunnan province, or watching Tibetan Buddhist nuns prostrate themselves in Sichuan province—only that I thought, very clearly, Damn, I wish I came from a country with hundreds of local languages and cultures. My inner-leftie piped up with an objection: I do live in such a country.

  Non-Indigenous Australians tend to view our continent as a giant biscuit with one bite taken out at the top and another at the bottom, the mainland divided into five states and two major territories, the crumb of Tasmania tethered on. But the continent is also a mosaic of over 500 Indigenous nations, each with its own distinct language, cultural practices, history and experience of colonialism. At the time of my epiphany, my knowledge of Indigenous Australia was virtually nil. Guiltily, I realised I couldn’t name a single Indigenous Australian nation—yet I could name dozens of Chinese minority groups. Australia had been home to rich cultural diversity for tens of thousands of years, but I had failed to go looking for it.

  When I moved back to Sydney in 2013, I promised myself that I would approach my country with the same fresh eyes I had brought overseas.

  Three years went by before I embarked on my road trip around Australia. I worked at The Guardian as a reporter and culture editor, and I interviewed Indigenous Australian musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, writers and cultural authorities. They mostly lived in capital cities, although occasionally I travelled further out. I headed to Broken Hill in Barkindji Country to cover the largest native title case in the history of the state, and I wrote about the ancient Ngunnhu fish traps of Brewarrina. One week in 2015, I hopped on the Fiftieth Anniversary Freedom Ride through regional New South Wales; I even swam at Moree’s local pool where back in 1965 Charlie Perkins—the first Indigenous student to graduate from University of Sydney—and some local Aboriginal children had bravely defied local segregation rules to the jeers and fury of the townspeople.

  Indigenous Australia stopped being just a concept to me and became one part of my life. I was getting to know Indigenous people living in Sydney and the nations from which they came—names such as Yolŋu, Wiradjuri, Barkindji and Noongar no longer stumbled awkwardly off my tongue. The false narrative I had absorbed from high school history class was replaced by lived experience: Indigenous Australia is made up of living, breathing, morphing cultures that have stories of resilience and survival as well as tragedy and oppression. These cultures, far from primitive, are simultaneously ancient and adapting to a postcolonial reality, and they hold the keys to connecting to the land upon which we all live.

  For a long time I not only attributed my patchy understanding of Australian and Indigenous Australian history to those uninspiring history classes, but also to my immigrant background. As a Chinese Australian, I regarded myself a minority person surrounded by so-called ‘real Australians’. Most of my schoolmates were white, and from that I assumed their family histories on this continent must go back much longer than mine. Surely they had been raised with a better baseline understanding of Australia than I had. Only later did I learn that many of these friends were, like me, descendents of recent immigrants—from Hungary, Poland, Italy, Iran, Bosnia, Germany, the UK and New Zealand. Eventually it dawned on me that in Australia skin colour is not a good indicator of indigeneity. Half of all Australians today were either born overseas or have at least one parent born abroad. Millions of Australians, white or not, grew up with some other country’s songs in their ears, skies in their eyes, history in their hearts. We are a nation dominated by immigrants, their children and grandchildren, and as such our collective memory of the Australian story is short.

  Why does that matter? So much is good about our country: it’s one of the most prosperous, egalitarian, free and peaceful nations on Earth. It is tempting to write off the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous Australians—who are forced to carry the burden of our colonial history—as collateral damage to an otherwise successful experiment in modern multicultural democracy. But only a cruel and unjust society asks three per cent of its population to foot the bill eternally for the other ninety-seven per cent.

  There is also something hollow and sad about living as permanent guests—or worse, despised intruders—on someone else’s land. ‘Wonderful place, but they have no culture,’ I once overheard a German man glibly say of Australia to some other tourists; at first I bristled, then I wondered if he was right. I’ve met some Indigenous Australians who, in a similar vein, take pity on us unmoored, half-made non-Indigenous Australians. We are strange, stateless people, without a distinct language through which to identify ourselves, without shared long-standing traditions to create stability, without history to provide a framework, and without culture to draw strength from. We occupy lands whose caretakers form the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth with an unparalleled connection to Country. It’s no wonder that our two groups struggle to understand each other.

  Will I ever really belong to this country? As a Chinese Australian? As a non-Indigenous Australian? On my road trip, I didn’t set out to definitively answer su
ch questions. My goal was far more modest: I just wanted to know Australia. What did the Australia lying beyond the fringes of my home town look like, sound like, feel like? What stories, secrets and unexpected wisdom did it contain? How would I feel moving through these unfamiliar lands that I ostensibly called home? I was particularly keen to get out to remote areas where I had never been. Since moving back from China I had holidayed in regional New South Wales, gone trekking in Tasmania and flown to Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne for work, but the vast expanse of central and northern Australia was still a mystery to me.

  I was thirty-two years old—three decades gone—and barely knew the country of my birth. It was time to change that.

  I left Sydney feeling afraid. I was afraid of breaking down in the middle of nowhere. Afraid of getting bitten by a snake. Afraid of getting raped. Afraid of dying. And then, I was almost as afraid that nothing would happen on this trip. Afraid I had given up my apartment and chucked in my job for months on a boring, dusty road.

  I wanted to learn about Indigenous Australia as I travelled, having acknowledged that like most Australians I knew not nearly enough. But I was afraid that wherever I went, I would be here and Indigenous people over there, the gulf between us unbridgeable.

  Days before my departure, my colleagues and I celebrated the end of my two years at The Guardian. I was leaving on a somewhat sour note after falling out with my boss and mentor. For months I’d quarantined a lot of poisonous feelings. But in the final few days, whatever seal containing them had broken. High emotion was coursing through my body, leaving me pale and trembling. My eyes watered at any hint of kindness; the smallest sign of a slight left me breathless as a sharp elbow in the guts. But it’s okay—this is the bad bit, I told myself, it will get better from here.

  ‘Buy a doorstop,’ advised one of my colleagues at farewell drinks. She had done a lot of solo travel and said she always put a doorstop under her hotel-room door as added protection.