Stranger Country Read online

  In another remote part of New South Wales is the Yetta Dhinnakkal Correctional Centre for Aboriginal men that is minimum security in the most literal sense: it has no high walls, bars, armed guards or razor wire, and lies smack bang in the middle of a former cattle station—nothing but 10,500 hectares of mulga and gidgee scrub. With its open spaces and bush environment, it aims to put its clients on the right track and eventually out of prison for good.

  I knew a local art teacher who took university students on photography expeditions through the part of the country I was driving through. One year her charges included a student from New York City who had grown up on the seventeenth floor of a skyscraper. The teacher told me, ‘After we left town and the view emptied out, the poor thing began to have a panic attack.’ How do you comfort a native of that frenetic, vertically built, glass-and-concrete habitat thrust into such a tremendous stretch of nothingness? Perhaps tell her to close her eyes and put her head in her lap, and then whisper into her ear recollections of gleaming skyscrapers, yellow cabs, honking buses and dirty, crowded subways.

  Australia’s unrelenting desolation poses no questions to its travellers and inhabitants, nor does it invite curiosity from them. Instead, it demands total submission. In failing, you risk going stir-crazy.

  The horizon was so even you could balance a marble on it. I sent my Toyota RAV4 racing up a road that disappeared into a rudimentary vanishing point. There was no sign of life other than a thin layer of ankle-high scrub. Such commitment to austerity has an element of fanaticism about it; a cleanliness usually found in the abstract world of pure mathematics.

  Thank god for this road! Even devoid of other cars, it was evidence of mankind’s presence, announcing that others had been here before and would pass through again. Out here a road is the only lifeline to places beyond the horizon with buildings, food, electricity and water, where other humans gather and have shored up our own safety. There was no faster way for me to die than to veer off this road and fling myself into the terrifying nihilism of the flat scrub. I was reminded of the tagline to the 1979 classic film Alien: ‘In space, no one can hear you scream.’

  After two hours the land began to undulate, and I arrived at a large sign decorated with a setting yellow sun on a strip of red land against a black sky, evoking the Australian Aboriginal flag. The flag was designed by the Luritja and Wombai artist Harold Thomas, who still holds the copyright, and flown for the first time in 1971; the yellow represents the sun, red the earth and black the Aboriginal people.

  I parked the car to stretch my legs and read the sign’s Mutthi Mutthi words ‘Telki thangurra. Pirnmatha’, translated as ‘Our Country is beautiful. Please come.’ I noticed the land was dipping into shallow bowls—these were the relict lakes, I guessed—the edges of which masked what lay beyond the horizon. There were few trees, mainly greyish-green saltbush with tiny, hardy, succulent buds. I found it difficult to imagine how Mutthi Mutthi people ever sustained life out here. I plucked one of the buds and tentatively licked it, detecting the faint taste of salt.

  As daylight slipped away and the temperature dropped, I arrived at a campsite crowded with a dozen other campers in four-wheel drives: some young families along with grey nomads, as travelling retirees have been affectionately nicknamed. Grey nomads often dominate remote-area campsites, being the main cohort of Australians with the luxury of time and money to cover the Outback’s tremendous distances. I picked a spot on the edge of the clearing that looked out at some thin bush. It didn’t seem to matter how often I went solo camping, I always felt a touch self-conscious; it was just so bloody rare to see a solo camper, let alone an Asian solo camper. Looking different made me feel vulnerable, and so I preferred to camp away from everyone else.

  I’d forgotten to bring firewood, and the trees around the campsite weren’t the lovely, thick eucalypts from my days along the Murrumbidgee River, continually dropping heavy branches perfect for burning. The compact red dirt only supported some gnarled pine trees and a thinner type of tree with needle-like leaves. The few dropped branches were no thicker than my leg. In any case it was a national park, where you aren’t supposed to collect wood—a rule I appreciated was necessary for environmental preservation but always gave me a wistful pang as it robbed me of one of the pleasures of camping.

  On the positive side, something about being in open country, freshened with cool, clean air, made me feel as if my trip had finally begun.

  I reorganised my belongings so I could set up bedding in my car, moving everything into the front two seats. Beside my car I erected a small cooking and wash station: just a water tank propped up on a stool and a box of utensils next to my fold-out table. For dinner I threw chopped-up carrot and garlic, along with a biscuit of dry noodles, into my pot bubbling with chicken-stock soup.

  Back when my parents were still together they never took our family camping—not atypical of immigrant Chinese. My dad didn’t have much money growing up in rural Malaysia, and after moving to Australia as a nineteen-year-old, long-haired university student, he studied medicine in the day and drove a taxi at night. Later, as a doctor, he provided a good life for his family. His is a classic Australian immigrant tale. The recent rise of China on the world stage and its newfound wealth was also a source of pride for him as an overseas Chinese person.

  My family spent several summer holidays in Malaysia. However, once we took a holiday to Tasmania, and one afternoon went on a river tour. From the heated comfort of a luxury cruiser, I watched a white family setting up their tents on the riverbank.

  I thought, Is that what Aussie families do on their holidays?

  I turned to my dad. ‘How come you never take us camping?’

  He had a glass of white in one hand; with the other, he cut a wedge of cheese and placed it atop a cracker with a sliver of local salmon.

  ‘Camping?’ he said, as if he’d never uttered the word before. ‘Isn’t this better?’

  Tramping through mud, battling bugs and fishing for dinner is not my dad’s idea of a holiday. If anything, it sounds exactly like the way of life a thousand generations of Tan family commoners endured, something he’d strived hard to avoid.

  A friend of mine, a fellow Australian-born Chinese, has long been terrified of the Outback because she is convinced those who live there are racist towards Asian people. She’s never put this thesis to the test, but my general impression of the Chinese community in Sydney is that her assumptions aren’t uncommon. The bush is regarded as dirty, ugly, boring and dangerous, and its human inhabitants as redneck and boorish, perhaps the sour dregs of the former convict colony. Such spooky shadowlands are better off mined, farmed and locked in concrete, neutered and tamed—the sooner, the better.

  These immigrants aren’t to be blamed for this: their prejudices are an extension of colonial fears and postcolonial cultural cringe that has long viewed the Australian natural landscape as a dark and menacing place, likely to swallow up everyone from wandering virgins (as in the classic Picnic at Hanging Rock) to swimming prime ministers (Harold Holt in 1967), and featuring townships that have devolved into a primal state (see the booze-soaked, violence-studded Wake in Fright).

  Also, the food sucks out there.

  Yet here I was—a wet behind the ears, idiot hipster, Asian gal townie, stumbling through the Australian wilderness for six months. Or at least, so I appeared. In truth I was no longer a total newbie when it came to going bush and knew first-hand much of my friend’s prejudices against the countryside were unfounded.

  Soon I was sitting in my camp chair and scooping hot noodles into my mouth. Between bites, I looked up at a night sky sprayed with white dots like those on a lizard’s skin. I felt a rush of pleasure. My Sydney life already seemed like a figure shrinking on the horizon as I sailed steadily away. I was freezing, and tired, but satisfied I had survived one more day on Earth and had done all that was needed to survive at least another day more.

  I went to sleep in my car, but woke only a few hours later w
ith my nose, the only part of my body I’d left exposed, hurting like hell from the cold. I pictured grabbing it between my gloved fingers and snapping it off like an iceblock. My breath was visible as hot steam; the temperature had dropped to zero. It was amazing to think I’d essentially crawled into a giant refrigerator for the night. I tried to check my phone for the time but in the cold my battery had drained. I was almost happy to see I remained more resilient than our clever digital devices—the robots hadn’t defeated us yet.

  I had on nearly every item of clothing I’d packed: thermal leggings, pyjama pants and waterproof pants I usually only wore hiking; a thermal long-sleeved top, pyjama top, polyester-fleece zip jacket, polyester jumper and down-stuffed jacket; two pairs of thick socks, gloves, a scarf, neck warmer and beanie. To protect my nose I wrapped my scarf around my face. Draping an aeroplane blanket over my shoulders, I wriggled back into my down sleeping-bag feeling every bit the bandaged-up mummy. I was exhilarated to be sleeping in the kind of chill that shot through all my layers and went straight to my heart.

  As I drifted back to sleep, an image of the toasty fire that Mutthi Mutthi people would have kept roaring all night—and probably still do when they’re out on Country—hovered in my mind, as did the thought that a megafaunal wombat-fur cloak would feel mighty nice right about now.

  There are certain places in Australia where, even if you aren’t from there, you can detect an emanating spiritual power. The region of shallow dry lakes in Mungo National Park is such a place. One need not be a member of the park’s three groups of traditional owners—the Barkindji, Ngiyampaa and Mutthi Mutthi peoples—to feel one is walking on holy, ancient ground. You could even be the first in your family to have been born on this continent, and a total dunce when it comes to Aboriginality, yet sense a presence in the park’s endlessly whispering trails of sand.

  I’d given myself a full day to explore the park. It forms part of nineteen dry lakes once strung together by a channel of water, and is sandwiched between mallee trees and dune fields to the west and the riverine plain I’d just driven through to the east. This area, geologically speaking, has long been quiet and stable; for thousands upon thousands of years, sediment washed out from the distant mountains and collected in this low-lying stretch of lakes like a sink strainer. The area is also where Mungo Man, some of the oldest modern human remains outside of Africa, was found.

  I drove out to the edge of the main lake, after which the remains were named, and joined a dozen tourists milling about. We were booked to do a two-hour tour led by a park ranger. At 9 a.m. the sky was bright blue, but the day was still thawing out from its ice-cold slumber.

  Very shortly the ranger appeared, a stocky man with a bristly moustache, wearing a green uniform and a baseball cap. We gathered close around him as he opened by speaking in Barkindji language, briefly translating for us: ‘Nai means “welcome” and kira means “Country”, so welcome to Country,’ he said, looking to the ground but speaking meaningfully. He gave a small smile that made his moustache crinkle like a furry caterpillar. ‘Now, you’re probably wondering where Mungo Man, Mungo Woman been found. They been found that direction there.’ He pointed up towards a horizon dusted with yellow sand. ‘Where that white wall, is known as the southern end of Mungo Lake.’

  It was there in 1968, he explained, that a young geologist called Jim Bowler stumbled across an intriguing mound of old bone and charcoal. The following year Bowler returned with some archaeologists who, with excitement and in the midst of a trampling flock of sheep, identified the aged bones as human. It was a discovery so fragile ‘the whole thing could be swept away in a heavy downpour’, as one archaeologist later described it in the documentary Message From Mungo. Caught off guard by such a significant find, another of the archaeologists collected the bones in a small suitcase and used his clothing to keep them steady while they were transported to a university.

  Studies revealed the remains were of a woman who had lived at the lake roughly forty-two thousand years ago. She had been twice-cremated, then buried in a round hole in one of the sand dunes. The discovery single-handedly blew out the scientific community’s timeline of how long Aboriginal people had inhabited Australia, and put these lonely fields of sand on the global map.

  Not content to make just one incredible discovery, five years later Bowler was riding his motorbike on the same dry lake shores when he discovered a human skull. This time his team uncovered the complete skeleton of a 1.7-metre-tall male, roughly fifty years old—an impressive height and age for such an early human. Mungo Man, as he was later known, had been carefully positioned in his grave on his back with hands interlocked over his groin and body sprinkled in a brownish-red ochre.

  That ochre wasn’t found in the area, the ranger told us. ‘So it was traded in from somewhere else. For someone to have that ochre scattered over his remains, he must have been high up. He must have been a king or a chief of the tribe at that period of time.’

  I had read that at the time of Mungo Man’s discovery, Western scientists presumed all these early modern humans around the world were nothing but blockheaded cavemen, scratching around in the dirt, not evolved enough to conceive of anything as sophisticated as an afterlife or a soul. Yet here was stunningly clear evidence of ritualised, spiritual care from these early humans.

  ‘We got a lot of burial sites around this here area,’ the ranger said. ‘But we don’t want no one to go round test or carbon date our elders or our human remains. We know how old they are.’ He nodded gravely.

  It was a good reminder of the fact that not everyone was happy to learn Mungo Woman’s remains had been thrown into a suitcase and stolen away as if by thieves in the night. To the traditional owners, Mungo Woman and Man were their Auntie and Uncle. You could stick as many ‘greats’ as you wanted in front of those words, it wouldn’t change the fact that the traditional owners had a sacred responsibility to care for the people buried at the lake.

  Within a short period following the discovery, the region was crawling with ‘cowboy archaeologists’: bearded white men bragging about the size of their Pleistocene sequence—as one woman archaeologist later described it in Message From Mungo—while pocketing stone tools and human remains willy-nilly under the time-honoured legal defence of ‘finders keepers’. To the Aboriginal community, these archaeologists were digging up their past without consent and appropriating it for their own professional advancement. Some traditional owners began to speak out, led by the ‘four Aunties’: Mutthi Mutthi woman Alice Kelly, and Barkindji women Alice Bugmy, Tibby Briar and Elsie Jones.

  ‘The best thing the archaeologists can do is study these old fireplaces and that will tell you an accurate date,’ said the ranger. ‘It also tells us about the weather and the climate at that period of time. The evidence shows we been round here for over sixty thousand years. Maybe longer.’

  ‘A long time,’ said a long, lean woman who stood next to her husband and daughters.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the ranger.

  ‘A very long time,’ the woman repeated.

  The ranger chuckled. He capped off each section of his lecture with a distinct laugh that was wheezy like a squeeze toy. I admired his charitable approach to the tensions between his people and the scientific community, a quality I recognised in many Aboriginal Australians I knew.

  ‘Anyway, we’re grateful that Jim Bowler did find Mungo Woman,’ he said. ‘If it weren’t for him, Mungo wouldn’t be on the map today. But people always been told that the old people used to live out here, that was long before Jim Bowler.’

  I found that surprising. ‘You already knew there were people buried here from a long time ago?’

  He said his people had always spoken about the burial sites as places to be avoided. Then he held out one bare arm. ‘The hairs on your hand stands up. And when that happens to us we know straight away there’s something here. We always take off.’ If they had to visit those burial sites, they first cleansed their bodies with the smoke of burning
mallee leaves, to prevent the old spirits following them back home.

  There were now plans to construct a keeping place that would store the hundreds of skeletal remains taken from Mungo.

  ‘Who took them?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably scientists,’ the ranger said.

  ‘I suppose people thought they were doing the right thing at the time,’ another tourist added politely.

  The ranger led us to the lip of the sand dune, or ‘lunette’ as it’s known by geologists. Tourists were forbidden from walking over its fragile surface unless accompanied by a ranger or tour guide. We walked down a ramp with the ranger unlocking a gate at the end so we could pass through onto the lunette. I held up my hand to block the harsh sun and cast my eyes around this strange arid place of sand and shrub. Pinnacles on the horizon looked like the stiff peaks of whipped egg white. I found ‘lunette’ an evocative name, apt because the clay and sand lip was crescent-shaped, its grey-dust surface reminding me of a lunar landscape. As our feet met the lunette’s surface, it turned out to be surprisingly compact. The sands gently sloped upwards with the hardened silt crunching underfoot. Here and there I saw pools of fresh, soft golden sand where the ghostly wind had left a rippled imprint.

  A lunette lines the downwind side of each relict lake. Over forty-five thousand years of occupation, people’s hearths, middens (ancient ‘trash heaps’ where they discarded shellfish remains, and fish and animal bones), stone tools and burials, along with the bones of megafauna and other animals were captured in the lunettes’ orderly layers—a goldmine for scientists wanting to establish accurate timelines.

  In a revered place, you instinctively know not to whoop and holler. As we followed the ranger up and across the twenty-metre-high lunette, the usual bubbling chatter of a tour group failed to froth up. Most of us walked in thoughtful silence or talked in hushed tones as if we were inside a library—and not a local library, but one of those grand state libraries where you can almost hear voices from the past murmuring restlessly from the pages of all those musty old books.