Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m just a tourist passing through, and I was wondering if you happen to know anything about the local Aboriginal culture.’

  She scrunched up her nose. ‘Ooh, you might have to go to the library for that.’

  When I said I was also interested in history, she passed me a pamphlet titled ‘Mildura: Australia’s First Irrigation Colony’.

  Feeling uninspired, I headed to an adjoining cafe to sit for a bit and contemplate my next move. I ordered a hot chocolate and at a table flicked through the pamphlet and learnt it was here in Mildura that some of the earliest irrigation schemes were set up. While there were plenty of bumps and hiccups along the way, the seeds of that experiment eventually sprouted and proliferated across over a million hectares of neatly quartered fields in south-east Australia. The Murray-Darling Basin today is known as Australia’s food bowl and responsible for one third of the country’s agricultural output. In coming to Mildura I had driven through some of this agri-industrial complex: green fields from which grains of rice and bales of wheat are harvested, along with maize, canola, citrus and wine grapes.

  This genteel agricultural town was founded on Mildura, an old cattle station whose name had unclear but likely Latje Latje etymology, meaning ‘red earth’. A considerable number of Australian places have Indigenous names, but their connection to Indigenous Australia was so long ago severed and the words so thoroughly acclimatised into Aussie English that this aspect of the country is often forgotten or even unknown by locals. Foreigners and new arrivals, I’ve often noticed, are better at pointing out how alien words like Bondi, Coogee and Parramatta are from the English language.

  I returned to my car and drove ten minutes up the highway, passing through Dareton. It’s a separate town but close enough to feel like an outer-suburb of Mildura. Up a short main street, I past a Vinnies, chemist, supermarket and takeaway chicken shop, and felt a listlessness about the town. Several of the stores were boarded over with ‘for lease’ signs in the front windows. When I had to slow down for a trio of Aboriginal people crossing the road, on impulse I decided to park my car and take a poke around.

  By chance I found myself directly opposite a door painted in ochre-coloured Aboriginal designs. I had no idea if the local Aboriginal community (whose nation name I had yet to learn) had been sidelined by the white mainstream and that making a connection would just require a bit of effort on my part, or if the community stayed out of sight by choice. I didn’t want to be an imposition, nor did I want to not try—such an awkward situation. On my travels I’d encountered so many non-Aboriginal Australians in remote towns who hadn’t once driven around the corner or up the highway to visit the Aboriginal communities in their own backyard—communities that, when I visited, proved warm and welcoming—that this no longer shocked me. It was so easy to fall into a town’s pattern of segregation.

  What to do? From inside my car I stared at the door. It had no visible signage, and the storefront windows were papered up. What kind of idiot just knocks on a random door? I came up with a compromise: I’d go gently, and pull back at the first sign I was sticking my nose in someone’s private business.

  I got out of my car and approached the door, then gingerly rapped on it. It was unlocked. I hesitantly pushed it open. ‘Hello?’ I asked.

  An older man with a charcoal-grey goatee was busily tidying up his desk. His told me his name was Greg. He didn’t seem entirely sure what I was doing in his office. I wasn’t too sure either and mumbled something about being on a road trip and having an interest in Aboriginal culture.

  ‘Good, more young people like you should be interested,’ he said in a clipped tone, and began scribbling contact details for me on a piece of paper. It had been floating like flotsam on the stacks of books, folders and pamphlets that rendered his desk invisible. As he wrote I babbled self-consciously about my time at Lake Mungo.

  Greg handed me the slip of paper; in block capitals he’d written the names and phone numbers of Aboriginal organisations thousands of kilometres away in south and central Australia. None appeared to be related to any of the Aboriginal groups around here.

  ‘It might be best not to say you used to be a journalist—although writing a book is probably okay,’ he told me, in a manner both brusque and encouraging. ‘You might have to be a bit devious.’ He frowned, sensing ‘devious’ wasn’t the best word. ‘I mean, you might need a journalist’s nose.’

  ‘Persistence?’

  ‘Yes, precisely.’

  No shit, I felt like saying. Only through persistence had I wound up in this office.

  Greg was still shuffling papers, looking for phone numbers, as I cast my eyes around. Flyers advertised Aboriginal health services and local festivals. ‘What is this place, anyway?’ I asked. I’d guessed it was some sort of employment agency.

  Greg stared at his table until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here it is!’

  He passed me a brochure titled ‘BMEET: Barkindji Maraura Elders Environment Team’.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, looking apologetic and harried, ‘but I have to be somewhere. If you’re keen to learn more, you should meet our program manager, Dameion Kennedy.’

  And that’s how I wound up at BMEET’s shed further up the main road, watching Dameion and his young charges boil and skin an echidna.

  By the time the animal was spine-free, with one boy trying to burn its remaining hairs off with a lighter, Dameion suggested we take a look around BMEET’s new gallery and art workshop. It hadn’t yet officially opened to the public—hence the unhelpful woman at the Mildura visitor centre.

  As we walked past displays of beautiful hand-carved redwood platters and painted didgeridoos made from local gum trees, Dameion told me more about BMEET. ‘We do caring-for-Country programs and teach a lot of our young people about our cultural heritage.’

  ‘If not for BMEET, the kids are just on the streets,’ he told me. ‘There’s not much to do around here—it’s a pretty boring little town.’ He shrugged, adding, ‘Unless you go fishing and hunting. That’s good fun.’

  Dameion seemed to me to be an upstanding guy: selfless, humble and motivated. The area around Dareton was Dameion’s grandmother’s Country. She was of the Barkindji people of the Wiimpatya clan group.

  ‘Is there a Barkindji word for river?’ I asked him, picking up a platter and turning it over in my hand. It was the warm colour of amber beer, and its sanded-down surface was riddled with a dark mottled pattern like the cross-section of a lung.

  ‘Yeah, barka,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’ I realised my question had probably sounded dumb.

  ‘Barka means “river” and ndji means “belonging to”,’ he said, ‘so Barkindji means “we belong to the river”.’

  I thought back to Mildura’s colonial irrigation propaganda. ‘I’m guessing there’s a difference between how your people see the river and how the whitefellas see it?’

  ‘Huge difference! Obviously our people never irrigated.’ He shook his head. ‘The whitefellas drain and drain and drain to grow their crops and to get rich. But we’re not about getting rich. We need our Country rich. The plants and the bush tucker and the animals and that, that’s what we live on. And as you seen today we’re cooking a porcupine, that’s a native food for us people.’ Irrigation was why the rivers were in such a mess, the wetlands were shrinking and the birds had all but disappeared, he told me.

  In one of the tourist brochures I’d picked up at the Mildura visitor centre, I’d read some chipper stats on fresh produce from the region: seventy-five per cent of Australia’s table grapes, sixty-nine per cent of its almonds, forty-eight per cent of its pistachios. What the figures don’t show, however, are the issues that drove the town’s irrigation pioneers, the Chaffey brothers, into bankruptcy continued to plague Murray-Darling farmers over the following two centuries.

  Australian soils are among the most nutrient poor and unproductive in the world. Our continent is also particularly saline
because a hundred million years ago most of it was submerged under a shallow sea; the clearing of native vegetation along with invasive irrigation systems bring all that residual salt up to the surface. Thirty years ago salinity levels hit such alarming heights, they threatened the viability of the agricultural industry. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority was forced to introduce salt interception schemes: bores and pumps that take highly saline groundwater and dump it far from the river, like a colossal dialysis machine.

  In order to manage unpredictable water flows, the Murray-Darling Basin was plugged up by state governments long ago with hundreds of reservoirs, lock and weirs, coastal barrages and dams. While stabilising supply, this has wreaked havoc on the natural flood-drought cycles of the river ecosystems. During the severe decade-long drought of the 2000s, growers sucked the waterways dry until a number just stopped flowing and the entire system was close to collapse.

  In an effort to repair the damage, BMEET has been collaborating with scientists to conduct tree surveys and implement water-health programs. It seemed to be paying off, and Dameion was clearly happy and proud to report that areas which hadn’t seen water in years were beginning to flow again.

  ‘We all know the country needs water. It’s natural—if you got a tree and it’s dying, you give it a drink.’

  This part of Australia, river country, boasts the most incredible gum trees I’d ever seen. Among the nearly 900 varieties of eucalypts, ‘river red gums’ are towering and grand. Their ribbons of bark reminded me of impressionist paintings, dripping and swirling with creamy white, tan, stormy grey and silvery sheens. This icon of the Outback lines rivers across most of the country, even dry central Australia. The tallest of them are hundreds of years old and able to grow fifteen storeys high. I had been advised by a friend never to set my tent directly underneath one. They have a habit of dropping their very heavy boughs without warning—hence their rather ominous nickname ‘widow maker’.

  These magnificent trees have suffered from the basin’s water shortages, with record numbers of river red gums in the lower Murray stressed, dead or dying. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they were chopped down and hacked into sleepers for the railway network that crosses the country in long, flat ladders. They continue to be massively undervalued.

  ‘We all got to work together as Australians,’ he emphasised. ‘I tell a lot of people this is all our Dreaming now. We got to dream our river back to life because we all live here.’

  The next morning as I crossed into South Australia from Victoria on the Sturt Highway, the earth became sandy and red. From my speeding car all I could see were scorching bald plains, fenced off with barbed wire and splintering posts.

  A quarantine inspector checked me for fresh fruit and veggies—South Australia is trying to keep the fruit flies out. He raised his eyebrow at the insides of my car, jammed tight with gear like organs in a body. ‘Moving?’ he asked, bemused.

  ‘Nope, camping.’

  Most of the travellers I was sharing the road with lived out of caravans or utes fitted with drawers and fold-out kitchens that kept everything hidden. But in my RAV4 I had no option but to keep my gear in boxes and bags that, along with my water tanks and jerry cans, were shuffled around in an infuriating, never-ending game of Tetris. I maintained the same rules as I would have living in a ship’s cabin: keep immaculate order, or else watch everything turn into a tangle and spend hours looking for that spare set of batteries or the bottle opener you swear you packed somewhere.

  I wanted to keep following the Murray River downstream to its mouth where it meets the Southern Ocean in the sacred Coorong region. This stretch of the river, crossing through South Australia, has arguably suffered the most from the accumulated agricultural activities upstream in Victoria and New South Wales. It’s also Pelican Dreaming Country, and I saw plenty of those self-possessed birds nonchalantly paddling up and down the green water like miniature black-and-white sailboats.

  In the Coorong I planned to visit the home town of David Unaipon. The Ngarrindjeri polymath preacher, writer, inventor and musician—once known as Australia’s Leonardo da Vinci—was born in 1872 at Point McLeay Mission. His portrait is on Australia’s fifty-dollar note.

  The internet didn’t offer much about what I might find in Point McLeay Mission, now called Raukkan, on the secluded banks of Lake Alexandrina. I suspected that the hundred-person settlement wasn’t set up for tourists—and it was a long way for me to go if it turned out to be for nothing. So I pulled into the more accessible town of Tailem Bend to discover if any trace of Unaipon remained there.

  I headed to the visitor centre, where I met the elderly Ray Bolt near some glass cabinets. The centre doubled as a railway museum and felt like an old wooden box carrying a mixture of trash and treasure. Luckily, Ray knew a thing or two about Raukkan.

  ‘I don’t know why people have a problem with them,’ he said to me conspiratorially. ‘They’re just people like you and me.’

  ‘Do some people in town have a problem with them?’ I whispered back.

  ‘Yeah, some people.’ He rested his hand on my arm in a way that felt warm and grandfatherly. ‘But I don’t understand why you’d have a problem with someone just because they have different coloured skin or are a different race!’

  Ray opened the wooden doors of an antique railway ticket holder. Taped to the back was a photocopied image of Unaipon’s church that Ray said still stood in Raukkan. Underneath was a photocopy of a plaque with a quote from Unaipon: ‘In my despairing moments Providence has enabled me to take heart again and continue my advocacy of the rights of Aborigines to occupy a more worthy place in the life of the nation.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘It is, isn’t it? David Unaipon was a very clever man.’ Ray turned to me with a jubilant smile. ‘You know, I worked in locomotives for forty-four years!’

  He was dressed in a plaid shirt and an old-fashioned black cap that said, ‘OLD GHAN TRAIN LOCOMOTIVE DRIVER’. He flicked through photos in a plastic folder, including one from 1983 of a younger, but not exactly young, Ray Bolt. His jolly face beamed from the driver’s section of a stout sooty-black locomotive.

  ‘Do you feel sad now that you’re retired?’ I asked.

  ‘I was at the beginning, and for two years every evening I’d dream I was still working on them,’ he said, with a touch of woe.

  I could relate. Every night I dreamt I was still working in the Guardian office. Sometimes the dreams were so detailed I awoke remembering the words I’d been typing on my laptop: ‘Mr Trump, the New York billionaire businessman running for US president …’ Although lately there had been some signs my dream self was finally catching up to reality, with colleagues interrupting me: ‘Didn’t we have a farewell for you?’ ‘You just can’t keep away from us, can you?’

  Having concluded I had cause to visit Raukkan, I said goodbye to Ray and hit the road.

  There isn’t much left of the Murray after Tailem Bend; it curves once or twice more before emptying out into Lake Alexandrina, named after Queen Victoria back when she was known as Princess Alexandrina. The undulating land was slicked here and there with silver strokes of shallow water, around which the road was forced to perpetually wind its way. The ground was covered in tussocky dark-olive grass.

  By now I had well and truly settled into these long drives through landscapes that melted imperceptibly one into another, and had lost that fear from the start of my trip. My calls home had turned into brief text messages, and the time between those messages grew longer. I now took so much pleasure in a quiet country drive, I could barely recall the version of myself who, only five years before, was a real city bug and didn’t have her driver’s licence. I felt safe and empowered behind the wheel. I could carry all that I needed, and I had the ability to go any place and—just as importantly—leave any place. When necessary, in a hurry. I was reminded of how the bicycle became a tool, and therefore a potent symbol, of women’s liberation in nineteenth-ce
ntury Western society.

  As I drove I listened to the music of Ngarrindjeri singer-songwriter Ruby Hunter, who died in 2010, and her husband and music partner Archie Roach through my car stereo. The pair fell in love as homeless teenagers living on the streets of Adelaide. They were survivors of the Stolen Generation—a long and dark chapter of twentieth-century Australian history, in which mixed-descent children were removed to ‘smooth the pillow of a dying race’. Officials were of the mindset that as the rest of their race died on government and church-funded missions, these children could be assimilated and interbred with white society, then employed as cheap labour for colonial settlers—thereby reducing their burden on the state. A national inquiry into the forced removals produced a 1997 report called Bringing Them Home, stating that when a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. ‘The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.’

  I was particularly haunted by Roach’s ballad ‘Munjana’, a tender and melancholic tale of an abused young woman whose baby boy is taken from her. The separation kickstarts a fresh cycle of violence and pain, and the song ends with a bittersweet reunion over the phone: Munjana has located her now-adult son in a prison far, far away from his homelands.

  Still in my car, I took a short ferry ride over a watery gap in the land called The Narrows. The ferry was small enough to be operated by one woman sitting in a plexiglass booth. She wore a high-vis vest, her stringy blonde hair tucked under a knitted beanie. I waved to her, and she returned it with a relaxed shake of her hand before going back to gazing out at the water. What a peculiar life, wadded in silence. Days passing on that ferry going back and forth over this slender funnel of water. Lonely as a lighthouse keeper. It was so serene out here, yet solemn too, with sodden skies and gloomy moors that could inspire a Wuthering Heights sequel.