Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  We marched past human-sized sand monuments rippled with buttresses like the many folds of a draped sheet. A fierce wind howled from the west, blowing grey sand from the pinnacle peaks. Occasionally the ranger made comments as we walked, and at some point he mentioned that the region is too large for archaeologists to dig at random. Instead, the spirited westerly winds—here and there, now and then—lift the lake’s sand shroud to reveal treasures and long-dead things. Of course, the westerlies are just as likely to cover a relic up again, so some sprinkling of good fortune is required for discoveries.

  ‘Our ancestors? They lived through the Ice Age,’ continued the ranger. ‘Even with the megafauna animals. A lot of people asked if we killed the megafauna animals; I think it might have been the climate change that killed them.’

  The day prior, when I’d just arrived at Mungo National Park, inside the visitor centre I’d seen a model of a wombat-like creature with a piggish upturned snout, the size of a mini car, called a Zygomaturus. Among several other megafaunal fossils found in the park were a short-faced, giant kangaroo called a Procoptodon, and a stout flightless bird called a Genyornis that was larger than today’s emu.

  I was blown away by the climatic and environmental changes the ranger’s ancestors had survived. They had outlived the megafauna, while over tens of thousands of years the lake had filled and dried up several times, and then remained mostly dry for at least the past ten thousand years. Through it all, the land’s human caretakers had adapted to the changes and maintained their intimate connection to this place.

  But it’s no wonder that in the 1970s, Western scientists and archaeologists didn’t regard contemporary Aboriginal people as the direct descendants of the Mungo pair and were baffled by the anger from the traditional owners to their work. The idea of an unbroken ancestral chain many thousands of generations long seemed fantastical, when for thousands upon thousands of years mass movements of people have been common—driven by war, greed, the desire for a better life, or to escape natural disasters. Take my people, the Han Chinese of Fujian province: in the past two thousand years alone we were chased all over China, frequently spurred to conquest and colonise or to escape conquest and colonisation.

  Yet, in the decades since the Mungo discoveries, science has continued to confirm the exceptionalism of Aboriginal Australia’s connection to Country. A study of mitochondrial DNA from Aboriginal hair samples (collected during anthropological expeditions in the early to mid-1900s) has revealed just how little geographical movement took place after the initial occupation. According to the study, today’s Aboriginal Australians are the descendants of a single founding population that arrived in Australia fifty thousand years ago and spread rapidly around the continent’s east and west coasts, meeting somewhere in southern Australia a couple of thousand years later. After that, distinct Aboriginal Australian groups remained in discrete regions using local resources.

  In the visitor centre I had also been amused to see a cabinet of notes posted from contrite visitors who, following divine retribution, had come to regret their thievery of rocks and sand from the park, including:

  Dear Tanya, I enclose a 5 million-year-old piece of Rock from Lake Mungo. I know you said not to—I did—and I’m sincerely apologetic. Especially as I spent a week in hospital on my return home from Mungo at Easter time after crashing my bicycle into a car! I can’t say you didn’t warn me. I have a fascination for rocks and collect them in my travels from time to time. We really enjoyed the tours we took with you.

  These were not the only items stolen from the park that had found their way back home. Eventually the traditional owners and the scientists of Mungo reconciled, agreeing to shared research agendas, and sealing this spirit of good faith was the repatriation of Mungo Woman from the university in 1991—the culmination of overcoming countless economic and bureaucratic hurdles.

  On the lunette, our tour group gathered around a slight mound of crunchy greyish sand. Some weedy-looking plants had sprouted from its surface. Beads the size of kangaroo droppings, made of grey, orange and white clay, were scattered about. The ranger picked one up and rolled it around in his palm. ‘Our ancestors used to collect all this mud and roll them into balls. They’d throw them into the fireplace because two of these here worked as a heat bead, cooking the food at a steady rate, where it wouldna been burning.’

  While the burial sites are off limits to scientists, these fireplaces remain accessible, and despite their underwhelming appearance contain important secrets. Baked clay hearths preserve a record of the alignment of the Earth’s magnetic field, revealing a significant shift in this field some thirty thousand years ago. Known as the Lake Mungo Geomagnetic Excursion, it has been confirmed at other locations around the world.

  The ranger showed us more of these lightly scorched patches of sand and said they were the remnants of cooked wombat fat mixed in with the silt. ‘This fireplace here,’ he pointed, ‘I call it a young one—it’s about nine thousand years old. So it’s older than the pyramids! That fireplace there, folks, that about thirty-three thousand years old.’

  Along with the other tourists I oohed and aahed on cue, albeit a little half-heartedly. Sure these hearths were older than the pyramids, but weren’t they also just thin layers of ash? I tried reminding myself that what made these fireplaces compelling was how they formed a physical connection to Mungo Man. I pictured him in my mind: an Ice Age hunter-gatherer warming his sore elbow by a roaring fire on a night just as cold as the one I had experienced. Studies of Mungo Man show signs of osteoarthritis in his dominant spear-throwing right arm and two missing lower canine teeth, which some academics posit were knocked out in a ritual, consistent with initiation rites.

  Around when the ranger mentioned finding what he said was a 14,000-year-old carpet snake skeleton (‘which was still curled up!’), then pointed out a pile of wombat bones—22,000-year-old, ‘probably’—I began to feel fatigue at all these stupendously large numbers. In the same way that Australia’s wide, sunburnt plains and immense sky deflate in photographs, our brains fail to grasp figures so far beyond the scale set by our puny lifespans.

  ‘How big were they?’ asked the lean woman. ‘They wouldn’t have been big people?’

  She had a habit of saying whatever was on her mind, while her husband hadn’t spoken all morning. They had three blonde daughters, each the spitting image of their mother, and wearing matching bright pastel wind jackets and fluffy beanies.

  ‘Yeah, they would have been very tall,’ said the ranger. A biomechanical analysis of a trail of Ice Age footprints showed that several of the men approached two metres tall.

  ‘Oh, they were tall?’ the woman said.

  ‘Yeah, they was tall.’

  ‘Uhhhn.’ She reminded me of my high school PE teacher, unhewn and salt of the earth. ‘Aboriginal people aren’t very tall, though, are they?’

  ‘Look at me, I’m only short fella,’ the ranger replied congenially. He said those old people were running and hunting every day. ‘They reckon their burst of speed was much greater than the fastest runner we’ve got today.’

  I thought about a photo I’d seen in the park’s visitor centre, with the caption: ‘This photo is of the Nanya tribe. Harry Nanya, born shortly after the Rufus River massacre, shunned European society and lived a traditional life in the mallee country with his huge family.’ The photo showed five tall men with strong, thick torsos standing on a grassy patch near the bend of a river, each armed with a spear double their height. Women knelt on the ground, as bare-chested as the men, and in front sat a row of children with skinny legs stretched out. Nobody smiled showing their teeth but several wore amused looks and all appeared dazzlingly fit. They had very dark, clear skin that shone.

  Nanya, I later read, was considered one of the area’s last head clansmen to resist being absorbed into European life. Incursions with Europeans had killed most of his family, with at least thirty of his people dying at the hands of South Australian police in 1841 in the
Rufus River Massacre. As a young man, he went into the waterless mallee country between the Great Darling Anabranch and the South Australian border, armed with a steel axe and accompanied by two women, and lived in isolation for the next three decades. Other than reports of tracks and piles of freshly cut mallee roots, there were few sightings—at least by whitefellas; Aboriginal stockmen were said to be aware of the group’s movements.

  There’s something beautiful about the Nanya tribe’s quiet resistance. For possibly tens of thousands of years Aboriginal Australian nations had held true to their languages, cultures and kinship traditions with faithful conservatism and remarkable consistency, and maintained their equilibrium with the natural world. In their isolation this worked perfectly, but once punctured it was vulnerable to destruction. As all remote corners of the globe were absorbed into a singular reality, mainly via colonialism, for Aboriginal Australia the shock of butting heads with a radically different civilisation was something they have yet to recover from.

  By the 1890s, the population of Harry’s family had grown, and with more frequent sightings European settlers became uneasy. The twelve men, eight women and ten children were eventually persuaded by Aboriginal stockmen to come out from hiding, then taken to a station. Initially they refused to eat whitefella food, but according to biographer Robert Lindsay a photo that was reportedly taken two years later showed two of Nanya’s daughters had ‘become stout on a flour and sugar diet’. After Nanya died many of his children would follow, succumbing to introduced diseases. In 1905 his son Billy boarded a paddle-steamer to Point McLeay Mission in South Australia and was so tormented by crew members, he jumped into the steamer’s engine and was cut to pieces.

  I find it impossible not to feel heartbroken that with the end of Aboriginal Australian isolation came such thorough abuse of their ancient cultures. It’s as though colonisers picked them up with two hands like an antique vase and threw them against a brick wall.

  ‘Aboriginal people generally aren’t tall these days, no?’ the PE teacher said doubtfully, her head cocked to one side. She was standing next to her three minion daughters who all wore the same dull expression. The youngest was chewing the end of her shirtsleeve. I considered the possibility that fifty thousand years ago in some dank European cave, a child much the same chewing the end of her little caveman fur coat.

  ‘A lot of the desert people are skinny and tall,’ said the ranger, with the patience and good humour of a saint.

  ‘Uhhhn.’

  ‘Around the coastal areas they’re solid, stocky built Aboriginals—’

  ‘Uhhhn.’

  ‘—so I think it might be weather and climate-related.’

  We came to the end of our tour on the lunette, and the ranger led us back through the gate and up the ramp. We stopped at a piece of carved rock on the path that led back to the car park.

  ‘We got a lot of Dreamtime stories here,’ said the ranger. ‘We got one about the brolga.’

  ‘The brolga,’ I said, ‘is that a bird that … that still exists now?’ I hesitated, half-worried the brolga was a non-existant creature and my question was as stupid as asking if the unicorn or dragon was extinct now.

  ‘You see the brolgas at every lake, river or creek, and you always get a welcome by these birds. They’ll dance for you. We have Dreaming stories that explain why they dance.’

  The ranger reminded us that aeons ago this dry lake was full of water, possibly home to birds like brolgas and swans, and fringed with edible reeds, teeming with fish, yabbies and freshwater mussels.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe it, ay,’ he said, ‘but we get a lot of people still come out here with their boats.’

  I couldn’t believe that. ‘Because they think it’s a lake …’

  ‘… and they can go fishing?’ finished a woman. We were all laughing.

  The ranger smiled. ‘This one fella walked into our centre with his fishing rod: “Ay, matey, where’s the water?” And we started laughing because we thought he was having us on. But he was for real.

  ‘He said, “I’ve come out here to do a bit of fishing.”

  ‘I told him, “You’re about seventeen thousand years late, mate!”’

  Most Australians live in state capital cities and have limited interactions with large native fauna. You’re unlikely to see a koala in an inner-city tree or an emu drinking from a suburban waterway. Yet images of these animals are familiar to all Australians—from the media, school, children’s books, our currency, and government and corporate branding—and so it’s easy for us to forget how objectively odd some of these creatures are. There’s simply no equivalent to a kangaroo or a platypus elsewhere in the world.

  When Captain James Cook first encountered our famous hopping marsupial, in current-day northern Queensland, his description lumped together a number of European references. He wrote in his journal, ‘the Skin is cover’d with a short hairy fur of a dark Mouse or Grey Colour — Excepting the head and ears which I thought was something like a Hare’s … it is said to bear much resemblance to the Gerbua excepting in size the Gerbua being no larger than a common rat’. He concluded, correctly: ‘it bears no sort of resemblance to any European animal I ever saw’.

  When in 1798, a naturalist sent a pelt and sketch of the platypus back to the British motherland, a staff member at the British Museum used scissors to check for stitches that might explain how such a duck-like beak could wind up on such a beaver-like body.

  Because the echidna resembles the porcupine and hedgehog, it has never raised as many eyebrows as the platypus. But these two animals are the world’s only egg-laying mammals (or monotremes) and share a common ancestor. The spiky creature was named by the Europeans after Echidna, an ancient Greek goddess who was half-woman and half-snake. Although I didn’t grow up seeing echidnas shuffle down the suburban streets of my part of Sydney, during my trips out bush in my thirties I’ve come to love these introverted creatures. Each roams the Earth on its own, in a slow but purposeful waddle, and when you get too close they comically curl up into frightened spindly balls.

  However, I’d never seen an echidna like the one before me: half-skinned, trussed with wires and dipped by a young Barkindji man into a black tin of water boiling over a wood fire.

  The day before I had left Mungo National Park and driven south until I was back on the Sturt Highway. I spent the night at a friend of a friend’s place in Mildura. The town sits near the intersection of the Murray River with another critical Australian waterway, the Darling River. This part of the Murray makes for a state border so that among the huddle of towns, those that sit to the north of the Murray, such as Wentworth and Dareton, are in New South Wales while those that lie south, such as Mildura, are in Victoria. I’d seen the famous river dotted with plush houseboats that drifted, sun-soaked, under an open sky. It rains very little out there.

  Now I was at the men’s shed in Dareton near Mildura, run by the Barkindji Maraura Elders Environment Team, to meet with program manager Dameion Kennedy. I’d found him standing in a tight circle on the grass with a group of teenage boys. The boys all wore hoodies and baseball caps, and were slouching through that stage of adolescence in which, between a few grunts and occasional mumbles, bodies do all the talking.

  Only up close, when their circle opened, did I see—to my utter amazement—what they were doing to the echidna.

  They’d killed this poor bugger somewhere on the side of a road. Now spines were flying everywhere. Scalding the helmet-shaped ‘porcupine’, as Dameion called the echidna, made it easier for the group to get its quills out.

  One gangly boy plonked the carcass, which was giving off billows of steam, on the table and continued vigorously dragging his knife across it in steady, swift strokes at the base of the remaining black spines.

  ‘Give him a bigger knife,’ said Dameion. He was forty years old with a wispy salt-and-pepper beard and warm, liquid brown eyes.

  Someone passed the boy a knife—a dead ringer for Crocodile Dundee�
��s this-is-a-knife knife—and a pair of wraparound sunnies to protect his eyes from the pointed missiles shooting into the air.

  ‘Does it taste like chicken?’ I asked, the obvious question when confronted with a half-skinned echidna. Now bloated from several dunkings, it was the size of a large chicken, and the same whitish colour but with a grey rather than pink tinge.

  ‘Like pork but oily,’ said Dameion, moving back a little when a flying spine popped him in the chest like a tiny spear trying to take down a giant. They still had to gut the thing and remove its four ant glands before it would be ready to eat, he said—otherwise the meat would taste of nothing but ants.

  I wondered what ant tasted like. I assumed acrid.

  ‘Do you mind if I take some of the quills?’ I asked.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  I crouched and began to pick them from the grass, dropping them one by one into a sandwich bag I had with me. They were beautiful: needles that at their tips darkened from ivory to ebony like freshly sharpened lead pencils.

  Dameion said that the Barkindji women used to make necklaces out of them and advised I solder the ends so they weren’t so pointy. He leaned down to pick up one of the animal’s paws. ‘Take this as well,’ he said, placing it carefully in my open palm. I smiled with delight. It was the size of a cat’s paw but with five very thick nails. A petrified high five. I added it to the sandwich bag.

  I’d heard of Dameion through an unexpectedly fortuitous series of events. On arriving in Mildura I had, as was now my custom, pulled into the town’s visitor centre. Like in Balranald, the centre was in a modern building tastefully landscaped and decorated with art. Inside, sunlight poured through some skylights. I approached the counter, and a middle-aged woman looked up at me with a smile.