Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  On the other side of The Narrows were a pretty picnic spot and a wooden jetty. At the end of the jetty sat three large pelicans in a tete-a-tete. A muted sun strained through a cloud bank and turned the waters of Lake Alexandrina into polished liquid mercury. I laughed at a group of odd-looking birds pecking in the grass on the bank; their navy and black feathers had the sheen of a freshly brushed tuxedo, and they walked with the exaggerated high-step of a flipper-wearing diver as if their webbed feet were too big for them. I wondered what they were called and took a photo so I could look it up later. They showed a keen interest in my sandwiches, and I had to shoo them away like pigeons.

  A light rain was falling on Raukkan, a community of matchbox-shaped homes spread over a series of gentle hills. I drove down the single road that led to the town entrance. There I found an open gate and a low stone wall with a sign reading ‘Nguldi arndu’ (‘Welcome’) on one side. After that, the road was bordered by brick houses and then a grassy park with a playground and a couple of colonial-era buildings. All seemed quiet.

  I pulled out my phone, which I’d recently used to take a photo of the church taped to the back of Ray Bolt’s cupboard. I compared it to one of the buildings before me, a lovely red-and-white brick church—yes, that was it! I walked up to its wooden door, which was shut. There were three people with camera equipment shooting something nearby. I decided to ask a young man who didn’t too look busy if he minded taking a photo of me in front of the church. He agreed, and just before he snapped a photo of me grinning, I pulled a fifty-dollar note out of my wallet and held it up.

  ‘You know the church is on the note?’ he said.

  ‘No way!’ I said.

  ‘Take a look.’

  I peered at the note.

  It has a portrait of Unaipon, and to his left some technical drawings of his many patents. The best known is a modified handpiece for sheepshearing, which was quickly adopted by the wool industry. Over his lifetime he made patent applications for many other inventions, including a centrifugal motor, the multi-radial wheel, and a mechanical propulsion device, but those patents all lapsed.

  Then I saw the church: behind Unaipon’s right shoulder is a miniature sketch of a pentagonal building with a bell hanging at the top. Also on the note, standing in front of the church, is a man called Milerum ‘Clarence’ Long, the last initiated member of his clan, with his wife Polly Beck—a couple who were long gone from Raukkan.

  ‘Amazing,’ I said.

  I felt humbled to be standing in front of a church that millions of Australians carried a portrait of in their wallets, yet had no idea it still stood, let alone where it could be found.

  Unaipon is one of those fascinating figures from Australian history who confounds stereotypes and defies easy categorisation. He read widely, could play the organ, was a non-smoker and teetotaller, a savvy media personality, and a reputable orator who drew links between Ngarrindjeri and Christian spirituality and was obsessed with proper English. He ‘embodied the potential—in White terms—for Aboriginal advancement’, his biographer Philip Jones once wrote—or, said in another way, he flipped the white man’s upper hand by proving he could do everything they could, only better.

  He had a complex range of views: he once advocated for a separate Aboriginal state, pushed for Aboriginal self-determination, and appeared to support the end of Aboriginal isolation and a transition into the Australian mainstream facilitated by European-style education. In 1938 he had a disagreement with the New South Wales branch of the Australian Aborigines’ League over its National Day of Mourning on Australia Day, striking at the heart of so many questions that remain relevant today. Where does the balance lie in demanding restitution and defending cultural autonomy, while still taking a pragmatic view of surviving and thriving in the white man’s world? Is adaptation without assimilation possible? Back then, as now, every person draws the line in a different place.

  Unaipon spent the ninth decade of his life in this settlement, having retired from so many years of travelling and preaching. Not one to kick back and relax, in his waning years he was fixated on cracking the secret of perpetual motion—the holy grail of physics that had eluded so many before him (‘Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists,’ said Leonardo da Vinci in 1494). Unaipon died in 1967, just months before a national referendum ended the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the national census, an expression of their broader participation in Australian society.

  I drove up Unaipon Street, which led from the edge of town to the top of a hill. Here the brick homes faced Lake Alexandrina, stretching so far and wide it could be mistaken for a subdued ocean.

  Not far from the lake, at the Mouth, the Murray ends its 2500-kilo-metre journey and is united with the sea. This area is known as Tapawal to the Ngarrindjeri people, a profoundly spiritual place where the fresh water of the river mixes with the saltwater of the sea. There are several of such sites around the country and often sacred to their traditional owners. In a previous trip to north-east Arnhem Land I had learned of how the mix of two waters has taken on an added meaning as a metaphor for reconciliation: two radically different cultures, such as Yolŋu and European, interacting in a way that’s healthy and beneficial to the country as a whole.

  But the seasonal processes that have dictated the life of Tapawal for thousands of generations of Ngarrindjeri people have been thrown out of kilter by whitefella ways. So much water has been siphoned away, with the Murray’s natural movements halted by dams turning off and on like a tap, that water flowing through here is less than half of what flows under typical conditions. Without enough water to flush out the sand and silt, Lake Alexandrina begins slowly drying up and exposes acid sulphate soils. Several times in the past few decades, the Murray has petered out to the point that the Mouth shut down and only reconnected to the ocean with the assistance of dredge pumps and excavators. Scientists dourly predict climate change is set to cause further stress to the water system.

  On this rainy day, the circumspect waters took on the grey hue of the sky. I wrapped my black sports jacket tighter and popped my hoodie up to stop the wind whipping my hair about. I sighed heavily.

  As a former Greenpeace activist, I suspect I’m prone to take a doomsday view of the future. But in this case greenies and traditional owners aren’t alone in speaking out about water mismanagement. So many farmers living in the Murray-Darling Basin are mourning the state of our rivers and recognising that their livelihoods are at risk. Short-term gains have been too heavily prioritised over long-term sustainability. And the signs are plain to see: rivers across the basin that decades ago gushed with clear water and teemed with native fish are sluggish and dry; on the riverbanks the roots of sickly trees show from erosion; and the reeds that were nurseries for aquatic animals and birds are dying or have already disappeared.

  There’s no silver bullet to save the Murray. Rather what’s needed is a balance between community action and technological fixes, between environmental protection and supporting an industry that feeds our nation, between the states and territories coming together and cooperating in good faith—and, naturally, between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ingenuity.

  I cast my eyes over the water and allowed its calming presence to fill my mind. I contemplated the distances the water travels to pour into this lake. Afterwards, seeping through a narrow channel between sandbanks, it’s pushed back by the roar of the ocean. The two waters—fresh and salt—swirl, a model from nature that could inspire us to set things right.

  It was lovely out here. I could feel my spirit mending, my soul growing stronger.

  ‘Mm, nice, I wanna fuck you.’

  I was sitting in my car with the door open, parked in front of the Alice Springs aquatic centre. Who’d said that? I looked around. I saw plenty of parked cars but there wasn’t anybody about.

  Then I spied a skinny kid in a bright yellow T-shirt and shorts. Perched on a bike, he sail
ed past behind my car. He was looking at me, insolently.

  Surely not.

  ‘Did you say something to me?’ I called to him.

  He rode over. ‘Hmm?’ he said.

  My eyes narrowed. ‘Just now, did you say something to me?’

  For a second, he said nothing. Then he tipped his nose into the air and sneered. ‘Yeah, wanna suck my cock?’

  I was dumbstruck. ‘Oh my god. Are you serious?’

  He looked at me without flinching, his eyes black and hollow. ‘Yeah, wanna suck my cock?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘I’m thirty-two. More than double your age. Do your parents know what you’re saying?’

  He didn’t reply, just kept staring at me. I felt a flicker of fear. Even though he was just a kid on a bike whose voice hadn’t broken yet, I couldn’t predict what was about to happen, and that made me nervous.

  Mostly, though? I felt sorry for him. Anyone who behaved like that had some serious shit going on in their life.

  He kept his bike steady with one foot in a pedal and the other on the ground. ‘Suck my cock,’ he demanded.

  My face scrunched up in disgust. ‘You know I’m new here. What kind of welcome is that to give someone?’ How could I show this kid that this wasn’t the right way to talk to a fellow human being?

  ‘C’mon. Suck my cock.’

  He reminded me of a pair of teenage boys I’d seen days ago while passing through a remote South Australian town. They’d been sniggering and throwing rocks at a lizard near some abandoned train tracks. Now, every time this kid said, ‘Suck my cock’, it was like a pebble hitting my face.

  I decided to take a different tack. ‘Where’s your home?’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t have a home.’

  ‘Where’s your,’ I wondered how best to rephrase my question, ‘place?’

  He hesitated, then begrudgingly answered. ‘South Australia.’ As I contemplated what to do next, he nodded at my car. ‘C’mon, how about I get in there and we can fuck?’

  ‘Ha!’ I jeered. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with me.’

  Ugh, was that the right thing to say? All these wrong turns. I felt shock, pity and paralysed by my inability to take control of this situation. For him, however, I suspected today was just another ordinary, rage-filled day spent treating a stranger with contempt.

  ‘C’mon, just suck my cock a little.’

  I grimaced, then pushed onwards. ‘What’s your name?’

  He hesitated again. ‘Sheridan.’

  For a moment neither of us said anything. Then I saw his hand go to his crotch.

  ‘Wanna see it?’ He began to unzip.

  Something inside of me snapped. I’d been walking on eggshells with this little shit, trying my best to reach him. But now I could see it was hopeless. He was determined to follow through with something truly disgusting.

  I quickly got out of the car. My keys had been sitting in my lap, and they dropped to the ground. I walked over to him rigid with fury. ‘No, I don’t want to fucking see your cock. “Suck my cock, suck my cock. Fuck, fuck, fuck,”’ I mimicked.

  He quickly backed away on his bike. ‘Fuck you, you fucking bitch.’

  ‘No, fuck you!’

  When he was a safe distance away, he stopped and turned to face me. He had one more pebble to throw. ‘Fuck you, I’m gangster,’ he said, making a gang sign.

  It was so lame I should have laughed, but I was so angry that I kept shouting and swearing as he rode away.

  Later I felt ashamed that I’d been unable to keep my cool.

  I arrived at the low-slung town of Alice Springs via the Stuart Highway. Like the thorax of a butterfly, this road splits the continent into two halves, connecting the south and north coasts. The highway begins at a crossroads town, Port Augusta, on the bottom edge of South Australia. I’d headed there almost two weeks after leaving Raukkan; I had spent a few days in Adelaide with a friend and gone camping in the Flinders Ranges.

  Just outside Port Augusta’s city limits, I had spotted a hitchhiker standing on a lonely, tree-less spot, where the buildings petered out and the desolation of the landscape began to hum. He was a rangy, young blond guy with a duffel bag, his thumb sticking out. He wore a thick hooded jacket and burgundy denim jeans. In the tossing wind and with so many trucks screaming past, I imagined it wasn’t a comfortable spot for him.

  Without thinking too hard, I screeched to a halt.

  As he jogged to catch up to me, I jumped out of my car and began rearranging my things to make room for him in the front passenger seat.

  ‘Where you headed?’ I asked when he reached me.

  ‘Woomera! You?’ He had a Continental European accent and pronounced ‘Woomera’ with a long ooh like the hoot of an owl. That wasn’t how we Australians said it, but for all I knew we were doing it wrong. The word means ‘spear thrower’ in the Darug language of western Sydney and is a clever nod to the village’s establishment by the Australian defence forces in the mid-1940s as a long-range weapons testing facility.

  ‘Perfect, I’ll pass through there,’ I said, squashing his bag on top of my boxes of cutlery and food.

  I pulled back onto the highway. Soon the sky opened up and there was nothing but tussocky grass and some distant lakes. Their shorelines were so devoid of hills and trees, they looked less like lakes and more like ginormous puddles that had appeared on the flat earth after a morning of heavy rain.

  My hitchhiker was called Thomas, a 21-year-old Belgian who had just finished his geology degree at a Melbourne university. While studying he had fallen in with a crew of locals he absolutely adored and had been gutted when the time came to say goodbye. ‘I wasn’t even that sad to say goodbye to my friends back home,’ he said.

  I nodded, feeling nostalgic for that intensity of friendship I’d experienced at his age.

  ‘Also, I started to do a bit of modelling,’ he added, somewhat abruptly. He told me of being scouted on the streets of Melbourne one day and pulled out a portfolio from the front pocket of his daypack. The main photo was black and white and featured him shirtless, pouting and angular. A not too shabby attempt to channel a Calvin Klein ad.

  ‘You look nice,’ I said.

  We settled into the drive and, after three weeks of driving solo, I took advantage of having someone in the passenger seat:

  ‘Could you pass me my water bottle?’

  ‘Could you change the music?’

  ‘Could you grab the end of my sleeve and help me take off my jacket?’

  Thomas was pliant and obliging—my requests a small price to pay for a free ride.

  ‘Could you take some photos with my phone out the window?’ I asked and nodded at my phone sitting in the car cup-holder. Thomas snapped away. ‘Oh, and a video,’ I said, hastily adding, ‘please. I want to remember what it felt like driving all these crazy long distances.’

  Thomas told me he was eventually headed to Darwin where he planned to pick up some casual work. I didn’t think much of his plan to hitchhike there and said so. ‘Listen, hitchhiking might be fine in Europe where there’s always a friendly village half a day’s walk away. But mate, you’re in Australia now. You can die out here. Anything worth seeing between here and Darwin can’t be found on the side of the highway. You have to go up some really remote tracks, and once you get stuck out there without food or water or phone reception, you’re fucked!’

  I had unintentionally slipped into a broad ocker accent. It seemed to happen whenever I began to bluster and brag about the fearsome Outback.

  Outside the car, the view became dry and bleak as if to illustrate my point.

  I knew I was talking in clichés. Australians love to shake our heads at stories of bumbling German trekkers or young French couples in two-wheel drives, stuck in some remote patch of country, having to be rescued by emergency services. But the truth is, most of us haven’t seen half of what these young backpackers have of our own country.
>
  Never mind, Thomas had his own stereotypes of Australians. ‘You’re all so lazy when it comes to walking. Even short distances, Aussies always choose to drive.’

  I didn’t disagree. ‘That’s because most of the country is empty so walking feels long and boring.’

  In fact, I liked walking and for this trip had contemplated a combination of hitchhiking and catching public transport, rather than driving. Eventually I’d concluded it would seriously complicate my trip and wasn’t worth the hassle.

  ‘How long were you on that corner before I picked you up?’ I asked him.

  ‘Three hours,’ he admitted.

  ‘Oh my god, see? There’s no way I’d want to spend half my day waiting around for rides.’

  Thomas had heard that truckies picked up hitchhikers and let them drive, which I thought sounded highly dubious. He added, ‘And they run down any animal in their way. They have to, for their own safety and truck safety. When they finally stop for the night, their kangaroo bars are covered in blood and ducks come to lick it all off.’

  Ick. There was something grotesque about that image.

  He mused over the differences between hitchhiking on our respective continents. ‘You know, when you hitchhike in Europe there are lots of young people on the road. But here it’s all old people and they get too nervous to pick up a hitchhiker. And when I saw you, I thought no way she’s going to stop—a Chinese girl with all this crap in her car?’

  ‘Ha! Showed you.’

  Thomas said while living in Melbourne, to his amazement, any time a flash car rolled down the street it was always a Chinese person sitting behind the wheel—often a Chinese person as young as he was. ‘What the fuck?’ he asked. ‘How are they all so rich?’

  ‘Chinese people are so rich now they buy apartments in Australia like you and I buy a new pair of shoes,’ I said garrulously. The only thing Australians like doing more than trading tall tales of hapless European backpackers is trading tall tales of nouveau riche Chinese. Did you hear? They all shop for real estate via helicopter and turn up to house auctions with Gucci handbags full of cold, hard cash.