Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  I asked about the freak hail storm that had recently swept through this town. I’d seen photos and videos posted on Facebook: trees had come down over cars, and a river of ice had flowed down Todd Street Mall. Ryan’s cousins told me it had been utterly bizarre—the entire city had come to a standstill.

  ‘Desert people get super excited when it rains,’ explained Ryan, who’d been in Sydney when the storm hit.

  In Alice, rain is a brief and infrequent interruption to long periods of dry. As desperately thirsty plants and animals take a refreshing drink, it transforms the land.

  ‘When it rains here everyone goes out for a drive,’ said Ryan. ‘Then I moved to Sydney and found when it rained, my flatmates would just get grumpy and complain. But me?’ He mimed pressing his nose against the window in a marvellous impression, his eyes lit up in wonder.

  After an hour we left Monte’s and headed to another bar. As we walked the guys gave me a bit of background to Arrernte territory: their land covers much of Central Australia, including Alice, and can be subdivided into dialects so distinct they’re arguably languages in their own right.

  ‘Luritja riffraff,’ snorted Chris derisively, as we passed half a dozen scamps loitering about on pushbikes in the street. Chris was Alyawarra Arrernte, and he was deliberately needling Ryan whose grandmother was Luritja.

  Ryan took his cousin’s bait with a smile. ‘We’re only home to some of this country’s top scientists, political leaders, artists, thinkers—not to mention the nation’s greatest warriors with the finest physiques.’ He pointed at his buff body and pulled a duck face.

  We tried a bar on Todd Street but a beefy bouncer told us there were ‘too many guys’ in there already. Eventually we wound up at The Rock Bar, not far from Monte’s, having walked a full circuit. It was a small bar with an all-black facade and two large windows facing the street. Inside, paintings of rock luminaries Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Gene Simmons and David Bowie were hanging on the walls. The bar was plastered in beer ads, and behind the bartenders a glowing fridge stocked with beer bottles was the brightest object in the room.

  It was sweaty and noisy—also a bit of a sausage fest—and the patrons, mostly in the vicinity of my age, seemed more working class than those in Monte’s.

  Another thing about the crowd and about Alice more generally: I’d been surprised to discover how multicultural the town was. In just half a day I’d seen Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Sudanese, Zimbabweans, Americans, South Americans and Europeans, as well as Aboriginal and Anglo Australians. The stereotype of the Outback is that it’s racially monochrome, but I was learning that since the early days of the gold rush, mining and major infrastructure projects have drawn people from all over the globe to the most remote corners of Australia.

  Chris bought a round of shots, and the Baileys sloshed about as he passed the glasses back to us over the heads of three rows of patrons. The floor was sticky, and a DJ played shitty commercial music. It was already midnight, long past my usual bedtime on this trip, and everyone in the bar was halfway to hammered.

  More of Ryan’s family had joined us—his cousin Jennifer and her young aunt Amy (no relation of Ryan’s), although Jennifer called her ‘Mum’ as is customary for her people. Together we clinked our shot glasses and threw back the drinks, although I only drank half of mine. It was strange—I was usually quite a good drinker. In Sydney I loved nothing better than to drain ice-cold glasses of white wine on a Friday night after a week of intense work. I’d feel my tongue loosen and let my inner extrovert take the wheel. But now I had no raging weekend mad dogs to release. After all this time in the bush, with consistently early nights and dawn rises, I seemed to have lost the appetite for alcohol.

  Ryan nodded at an Aboriginal guy with a black moustache sipping his beer with some friends at another table. ‘Danny Glover,’ Ryan said to us. All night he and his cousins had been playing a game where they spotted strangers and associated them with a celebrity.

  ‘Nah, nah, Richard Pryor,’ replied Chris, and everyone laughed.

  The women and I were chatting when Jennifer suggested we go outside for a smoke. I didn’t smoke but agreed to tag along, happy to take a breather from all the sweaty, drunken bodies.

  We elbowed our way through the crowd and emerged to an outdoor section at the back of the bar, where patrons sucked on cigarettes between slurping plastic pints of beer.

  I asked the women what dating was like here—my usual ‘in’ with women I’ve just met.

  ‘The NT has the highest ratio of men to women in the country,’ said Jennifer. She had a wide, open, pretty face and her dark hair was dyed sandy blonde.

  ‘Clearly I should move to the NT,’ I said.

  ‘But you don’t want to date any of them.’

  While Jennifer looked a few years younger than me, Amy was probably a few years older, with long brown hair and lips painted fire-engine red. I suspected the beaming smile plastered on Amy’s face was a happy side effect from the drinking. ‘The men here are terrible! Don’t mess around with them. Although you’re only passing through so it’d probably be okay. Otherwise it isn’t a good idea because everyone would know.’

  ‘Don’t shit where you eat,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ she replied, although with her slurring it was more like ‘essshhhackly’. Amy had first moved to Alice as a baby thirteen-year-old from remote Central Australia. ‘I can proudly say I’ve never fucked anyone in Alice Springs.’ She jabbed her elbow into my side and winked. ‘Darwin, on the other hand!’

  Back inside we joined the guys on the dancefloor. Everyone in the bar was letting loose, laughing, drinking, dancing. Jennifer seemed less inebriated than everyone else. As she danced among the madness, straight-backed and dressed in a tan turtleneck sweater that complimented her figure, she wore a cool, sardonic expression.

  A young man in a chequered shirt and denim jeans sidled up to her shyly. His hair was styled into stiff peaks using cheap hair wax. ‘Howyadoin?’ he managed to say, his eyes glued to the ground.

  ‘Good, thanks,’ she replied politely.

  He nodded and his eyes flickered up to her for just a second, before they settled back onto an evidently comforting spot on the floor. He cleared his throat. ‘Howyadoin?’

  She erupted into giggles and whispered to me, ‘Oh my god, that guy can only say one thing! I like country guys, but I’ve never met anyone that country.’

  I was about to respond but the words died on my lips because I noticed Amy was staring at me peculiarly. She took a step closer to me and, over the din, shouted, ‘Your English is soooo good!’

  I smiled wryly. ‘Well, I was born here.’

  She was standing so close she had me backed into a wall, and she still wore that huge, stupid grin. ‘I’m so sick of foreigners who can’t speak English!’

  ‘Technically, I’m not a foreigner,’ I said, but it fell on deaf ears. She was looking at me as if I were a dog reciting Shakespeare.

  ‘Look, look, I’m Aboriginal and your English is better than mine!’

  It was close to 2 a.m. and I was feeling unsure and unhappy about the prospect of driving to a campsite. Ryan and Chris, also in town temporarily, were staying together in a hotel room. To my immense gratitude, Ryan nudged Adam to come to the rescue.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ I said, accepting his offer to sleep on his spare mattress.

  ‘No worries,’ he said.

  I turned to Ryan, who pulled me onto the dancefloor. I half-shouted over the music, ‘Teach me some Arrernte!’

  I repeated after him until I felt I’d remember it the next day:

  Werte—‘Hey, welcome.’

  Unte mwerre—‘How are you?’

  Mwerre antherre—‘Well, thanks.’

  Ryan put his hand on his chest in mock appreciation. ‘Ooh, Monica, you keep speaking like that and I might fall for you.’

  I shook my head, smiling. Charming bastard.

  The guys were looking at a roughneck
hanging off the end of the bar, dressed in a daggy cut-off denim vest. ‘Shannon Noll, but missing his little—’ said Chris, pointing at where the former Australian Idol’s triangle goatee would be on his chin. If you squinted, perhaps the man could pass for Nollsy minus the chin muff.

  Everyone exploded with laughter.

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ve got it,’ said Ryan between gasps. He pointed to another patron—a pale white guy in a hoodie. ‘Mark Zuckerberg!’

  I crashed at Adam’s that night and explored Alice the following day. Adam had kindly offered to let me stay a few extra nights while I figured out my next move. His son was staying with his mum over the weekend, so I slept the night on a spare mattress on the floor of the boy’s bedroom, surrounded by Lego pieces and toy cars.

  Central Australia is renowned for its art. The region’s dot-style of art was first transferred onto canvas in the Papunya community, 250 kilometres north-west of Alice, and quickly became synonymous with Aboriginal art more generally. Some of the country’s most famous painters have come from here, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, with works selling for millions of dollars.

  At the Araluen Arts Centre on the western edge of town, I saw paintings that blew me away, including those by the region’s arguably most famous painter, Albert Namatjira. Now that I’d seen for myself the red rocks and thin white saplings that star in his keenly composed, sensitive watercolours, the works seemed to take on a deeper meaning. I noticed that many paintings were by artists who shared surnames: Kngwarreye, Tjakamarra, Mpetyane, Napaltjarri. The notion of the artistic ‘lone genius’ is at odds with the spirit of Central Desert communal life, so artistic dynasties aren’t uncommon; stories, designs and painting traditions are passed down through the generations.

  Back in the town centre, many of the commerical galleries I visited that lined Todd Street Mall covered every inch of their wall space in paintings, sometimes sloppily hung, and piled up their bargain bins with unstretched, colourfully painted canvases. Most of the art being sold in Alice originated in the tiny Aboriginal communities that dot the remote desert. The town acts as an artistic hub, and a journalist friend of mine once described the mainly non-Aboriginal gallerists as pimp, benefactor and manager rolled into one for their Aboriginal painters. That said, when I profiled some Central Desert painters while at The Guardian, they gave me the impression that, in contrast to the carpetbaggers rampant in the 1970s, their relationships to their art centre managers and gallery curators were mutually beneficial. I also kept in mind it was hard to get a sense of how pervasive such feelings were.

  In a cafe on Todd Street, I ordered a piece of chocolate cake and used the town’s free public wi-fi. I overheard a young family at the next table chatting in American accents. It reminded me that last night Ryan and his cousins had mentioned an American base called Pine Gap, half an hour’s drive out of town. They said all the Americans lived in big fancy homes and celebrated Halloween, and whenever you asked them what they did out at the base, they’d say, ‘I’m the janitor’ or ‘Just some grounds-keeping work’. Access to the base is heavily restricted, but on my phone I googled photos and saw a series of white domes hidden in the Central Australian hills, like oversized Kool Mints.

  The base completes round-the-clock US control of spy satellites and plays a ‘significant role’ in supporting intelligence and military operations, as revealed in the 2013 Snowden leaks. That means the base has been contributing to US military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and drone operations in other parts of the world. The location’s remoteness is no accident—it offers a place relatively absent of signal interference and can’t be reached by spy ships passing in international waters.

  But not everyone in Alice has appreciated the giant target sign painted in their backyard—why should they get involved in someone else’s war? The Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp in 1983 not only became part of a long-running campaign against the base but birthed an unexpected feature of Alice: it has a healthy lesbian population, one of the highest outside the rainbow pockets in Australia’s capital cities.

  Glancing out the window I saw a group of young Aboriginal people wearing Everlast tracksuits cross the street. A woman in her early twenties had a baby in a stroller and a couple of little kids trailing behind her. It reminded me of something a grey nomad once said to me about visiting Australian country towns: ‘You see babies pushing babies.’ All of a sudden I was feeling my age. In the city to be thirty-two, single and childless is perhaps a little late in the day, but in the countryside you’re so over the hill you are nothing but a speck in the sky.

  I had mixed feelings about being single. It was one of those things I mostly didn’t think about, and then I’d fall for someone who inevitably didn’t like me back and suddenly I’d be tearing my hair out and cursing the universe and everyone in it for my perpetual loneliness. I’d never had a long-term relationship; the longest I’d dated someone was three months. I’d never been in love, not really. And it wasn’t uncommon for me to go long periods without sex—in my early twenties I’d let five years slip away between encounters. I’d stopped analysing why, having long ago settled upon the simplest of explanations: it was bad luck, plain and simple. Having so much good fortune in most other aspects of my life, it seemed almost greedy to demand more.

  I wandered into Red Kangaroo Books with the leisurely sense of being a holidaymaker, browsing titles on history, nature, the Central Desert and local languages. Eventually I settled on buying two books. The first was Whitefella Culture by Susanne Hagan, which is slim enough to be a stapled-together pamphlet, with a bright orange cover. Inside it’s written in plain English and illustrated in the style of an aeroplane safety manual. It uses common scenarios to demonstrate how Central Desert and whitefella cultures diverge and the best ways to navigate differences. For example, from the chapter ‘Being Friendly’:

  The new whitefella thought Joe and the other artists would smile at him and ask him questions. He thought they might ask him about his trip and how soon he and his family would be coming. That is how white people show friendliness when they meet someone new. It’s a bit different in Aboriginal culture. Aboriginal people don’t like to hurry into meeting new people. They like to wait awhile and see what the new person is like. Then they know more how to act toward that person. And Aboriginal people think it is rude to ask lots of questions, especially to strangers.

  I found its matter-of-fact style disarming. And by inverting the dominant gaze, it shows how through the eyes of Central Desert peoples, whitefella ways can seem bafflingly peculiar, such as their penchant for direct eye contact, separating work and family, using praise as a form of encouragement, and stinginess with their personal belongings.

  The second book was Michael Morcombe’s comprehensive Field Guide to Australian Birds. I was tired of being unable to name all the colourful birds I kept encountering. Each of the 850 species listed in the book is depicted in a beautiful illustration and a compact yet evocative description that verges on literary. I looked up the comical bird I’d seen on the drive to Raukkan. It was the ‘purple swamphen’ and part of its entry read: ‘clumsy, leg-dangling, crash-landing flight. Great variety of sounds: harsh, abrupt “kak, kak” rising to sharp, grating “kiark, ki-aark”; also querulous, grating “qua-ark” and loud, harsh squawks of warning when with small chicks. At night often gives wild shrieks and boomings, perhaps basis of bunyip stories.’

  I had been birdwatching just once in my life, with a friend of mine (who was not into birds) and his friend Daniel who was the enthusiast among us—also known as a ‘twitcher’. One morning we went out bush together, and like the Yoda to my Luke Skywalker, Daniel mentored me in the ways of the twitcher: how to identify a bird, such as by observing its size, colour, markings, tail and body shape, as well as how to adjust your binoculars, and ideal times and conditions. I found his unbridled passion for these feathered creatures to be contagious. Daniel spoke of the ‘black-faced cuckoo shrike
’, ‘Australian ringneck’, ‘singing honeyeater’ and ‘rufous whistler’ like they were old friends whose personalities and habits he was deeply intimate with. At times he need not even see the bird or hear its call; rather, hearing the flap of its wings was enough for him to identify the ‘budgerigar’ or ‘crested pigeon’ in question.

  I headed over to Woolworths, a couple of streets back from Todd Street Mall, and on the way from a nearby camera store I purchased a $200 pair of binoculars. A fair bit of money, but I figured a worthy investment into my new life as a twitcher. As I wandered through the supermarket aisles, I called Adam to find out what he was doing for dinner.

  ‘No plans,’ he said.

  ‘Great! Let me cook for ya. Do you like salmon?’

  He hesitated but said, ‘I’ll eat whatever.’

  ‘It’s cool if you don’t like that, I can cook whatever.’

  ‘I don’t really like seafood.’

  Of course, we were a million miles from fresh salmon. I considered my alternatives: a couple of T-bone steaks? Lamb sausages? Then I spotted what I felt confident was the perfect meat to cook for a Central Australian.

  Having bought groceries for the coming week, I drove back to Adam’s house, a stone’s throw from Todd River. It was pretty much a river by name only: if you saw it with water more than three times, you were considered a local. Currently the riverbed was a long sand-filled trail, lined with gum trees that had powder-white trunks.

  I unlocked Adam’s front door with a key he’d given me, then walked in lugging my bags of groceries. I found him in the kitchen texting on his phone. I dumped the bags on the countertop and said gleefully, ‘Hey, guess what? I have kangaroo steaks!’

  His face fell.

  ‘Oh no!’ I said.

  ‘It’s just that usually I like it fresh.’

  ‘Shit.’ I stared at my sad steaks in their styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic. ‘This is like you saying, “I’m going to cook you Chinese”, and then breaking open a packet of two-minute noodles.’