Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  She told me her husband had visited the Territory some thirty years ago, and he felt that the severe legal restrictions on alcohol had transformed these communities for the better. ‘I mean we still saw some drunk ones, but otherwise I was blown away. I have a newfound respect for them.’

  As she took another sip of red wine, I thought how easy it would be to make the case that if some Aboriginal people had terrible drinking habits, who did she think they’d learnt them from? But I didn’t want to throw her off. She wasn’t exactly a poster girl for anti-racism, but she’d taken an encouraging step in the right direction. Were our trips so different? We were both eager to learn more about someone else’s world while navigating a minefield of cultural faux pas. She was a good illustration of the transformative potential of travel.

  I asked her about the buffel grass, wanting her take as a horticulturist. ‘I know it’s a weed but I can’t help but find it beautiful.’

  ‘A weed is simply a plant that isn’t wanted,’ she said. ‘Every plant is native in one place and has the potential to be a weed in another.’

  I was reminded of the havoc that certain types of eucalypt has wreaked overseas. It’s a distinctly Australian plant—for hundreds of thousands of years, our continent hosted hundreds of eucalypt species with only a handful moving up into Asia as an endemic species. But after colonisation, humans took this fast-growing, swampland-draining, versatile hardwood across the oceans, and now it has become one of the world’s most widely planted trees—though not without problems. Take Portugal, where the eucalypt is the most abundant tree, covering a quarter of all forested land. Thanks to the natural oil in gumleaves, the country now suffers the sort of ferocious bushfires Australians are all too familiar with. And as a Portuguese environmentalist once said, unlike the gum forests of Australia theirs are deathly quiet: ‘Our fauna can’t feed on it; they can’t find refuge in it. Our insects can’t eat eucalyptus, so there are no birds. We should introduce koalas. At least there would be something cute to look at.’

  Australians are used to thinking of our country as being uniquely vulnerable to invasive species. The spread of foreign animals such as foxes, cats and rabbits, as well as pastoralism, has left Central Australia empty of many native animals that once roamed here: the desert rat-kangaroo, the bilby, the numbat, the western quoll. So it’s startling to remember that Australia’s native flora and fauna could behave as aggressively as the buffel grass does here.

  My drive to Mungo National Park had been child’s play compared to the two days I now faced on the Tanami Track: a notoriously remote, thousand-kilometre stretch of corrugated dirt-and-gravel road that heads north-west through isolated country. By road’s end I would finally leave Central Australia, having spent several weeks in the region, and find myself in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Along the track were a couple of communities, the first of which I hit three hundred kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. I passed two days in the lively, creative 759-person community of Yuendumu. It had a buzzing art centre where local artists sat cross-legged on the floor dabbing paint on canvasses in intricate patterns. Several Yuendumu artists had international reputations and through their art travelled widely.

  Once I left Yuendumu I was destined to pass through a 600-kilometre-long gap: no town, no store, no petrol station, no mobile phone reception. A phenomenally expensive place to break down—good luck finding a tow-truck driver who wants to make that journey.

  Before heading out into this long uninhabited stretch of the Tanami, I filled up my petrol tank plus two jerry cans, and prayed disaster had no plans to strike. Then I set off.

  It was warm enough for me to roll my windows down. This let plumes of dust roll in, but I was happy to feel the sunshine on my elbow. Waves of elation passed through me—how liberated my life was right now, on the road again.

  There were hardly any trees, mainly shrubs. Occasionally I spied birds as big as dogs sitting hunched and ominous on deadened tree branches. But the main feature of the landscape were countless termite mounds that mushroomed the further I went, eventually growing so tall that they looked like villages of mud huts.

  I’d knocked 250 kilometres off the Tanami Track when I passed the Granites Gold Mine Airport. I thought of Adam in his truck, driving through a lifeless tunnel city.

  After five hours of steady driving, I slowed at a vehicle-related roo death on one side of the road. A gang of scavenging birds were taking advantage of the fatality. I knew if I got too close they would immediately fly away, so I pulled over to spy on them through my binoculars. One bird of prey was bloodying his beak in the carcass while two smaller birds of prey played henchmen, keeping a pair of riffraff crows away. The fidgeting crows reminded me of a pair of impatient junkies; it was the definition of ‘pecking order’. Eventually a car approached, and the larger birds cleared out. The crows, however, desperately leapt on the roadkill with little regard for their lives.

  Thanks to my trusty bird guide, I was getting better at identifying birds of prey, a distinct type of large bird that feeds on flesh and has a hooked bill and sharp talons. Often the quickest way to identify a bird of prey in flight is by its tail: for the wedge-tailed eagle it’s in the name; black kites have the forked tail of a fish; the brown falcon’s tail is striped and rounded; and the nankeen kestrel has a thick band of black at its tip.

  I started up my car again. So far, I hadn’t faced any major obstacles. Most of the track was in reasonable condition. It was dusty and usually orange, sometimes red or white, and wide enough—just—for two trucks to pass each other. Whenever road trains passed me, the billowing dust kicked up by their human-sized wheels was so thick I pulled off to the side rather than risk crawling through it. The ground mainly felt compact and gravelly, but some patches were sandier, and there were some large dips and ruts that made me slow down. Of course, with a prodigious distance to be covered and only so much fuel and human energy to cover it, there’s such a thing as driving too slowly.

  Everyone in the Outback spouts their own tried and tested methods for driving these remote roads. A youth worker once told me that the faster you drive, the less teeth-chattering vibrations your car will suffer as it sails over sections corrugated as an iron roof. Another believed in swerving into sharp dips and hugging the road, rather than riding roughshod—ker-chunk, ker-chunk—over them. I took all this advice with a grain of salt, although occasionally it made good sense. Such as: when a roo gets in the way, don’t hit the brakes but squeeze gently and then run it over if necessary—otherwise you risk spinning out of control. Also, don’t keep skidding in soft or wet sand; instead find something to place under the wheel to create friction.

  At Yuendumu’s art centre I’d told one of the hippie volunteers about the road train that had kicked up rocks and damaged my windscreen.

  ‘When that happens you should put your thumb on the glass,’ he said and mimed the action. Ryan had said something similar to me back in Alice.

  ‘When I had my windscreen fixed in Alice,’ I said to the hippie, ‘the guy installing it told me that’s an urban myth.’

  ‘He’s not a scientist,’ said the hippie contemptuously.

  ‘No, but he is an expert in windscreens. Are you a scientist?’

  Another volunteer, overhearing us, shouted, ‘He’s nothing!’

  After another hundred kilometres, feeling I’d reached my day’s limit of nerve-rattling driving, I stopped for the night. I was more than halfway up the track, and what with plenty of fuel remaining I decided the next morning I would take a detour and spend a night at the immense Lake Gregory, or Paruku to the Walmajarri people—I’d heard it was an excellent place for bird-spotting.

  The calendar had just ticked past mid-July, the dead of winter, but as I was travelling north the temperature was quickly growing warmer. The nights I’d spent in Yuendumu were the first of my trip that weren’t hideously cold. I decided that tonight I would roll out my tent instead of sleeping in the cramped car. I set up in
a dry riverbed some distance from the road. There were still a couple more hours of daylight, so I explored the area and spotted a flock of Major Mitchell’s cockatoos the colour of pink fairy floss with sunset mohawks. Afterwards I watched the day come to an end from my camp chair while writing in my journal.

  By the time I was ready to cook dinner, a round, golden biscuit of a moon had slid up from the horizon, and I took it as an omen that all was well and would be well.

  The ranger in Mulan handed me a sticker that read: ‘I <3 the Kimberley Ranges.’

  I looked down at it. ‘Am I in the Kimberley?’ I asked with a jolt of surprise.

  ‘Yes, on the eastern edge,’ she said.

  After spending the night on the side of the Tanami Track, I had continued on my way and soon crossed the border into Western Australia. Another hundred kilometres later I’d taken my detour: a left turn that led me to the hundred-person community of Mulan. This pinprick of human settlement—in the midst of desolate, dry, silent land—makes a startling contrast to the dense and cacophonous urbanisation where most people live.

  Visitors to Mulan were required to apply for a permit from the local ranger. I arrived at the ranger’s timber house expecting an Aboriginal man, but was greeted by a tall, strawberry-blonde woman around my age with a friendly demeanour. She was the sole ranger on a considerable swathe of parkland, and I admired her constitution for such lonesome, remote work.

  I was so happy to hear I was in the Kimberley. For me, the Kimberley was imbued with a mythic quality. It’s one of those rare regions of Australia that has yet to be permanently altered by large-scale, invasive agriculture or the resources industry. Stretching all the way to the northern coast of Western Australia, it’s three times the size of England but only hosts a population one thousandth of England’s. If you broke down that immense landmass per capita, each person in the Kimberley could sit perfectly isolated on their very own thousand hectares, baking under the sun and humming into an indifferent wind.

  Two years earlier I’d interviewed a biologist who had discovered a new species of fish in the Kimberley and named it after the much-loved Western Australian novelist Tim Winton. The thirty-centimetrelong, gold and silver grunter is one of two species discovered by this scientist and his team within five minutes of reaching the Prince Regent River by helicopter. He and his team went on to identify twenty new species of fish over just nine months. This is likely the tip of the iceberg regarding unidentified biodiversity in the Kimberley.

  I planned to spend one night by Lake Gregory. From Mulan I drove for thirty kilometres through fields of eucalypts with very white, crooked limbs, standing quietly in a knee-high carpet of dried yellow grass. Strewn throughout the grass were hundreds of tombstone-shaped termite mounds made of brown mud. These mounds are ubiquitous in the Top End, occasionally reaching six metres in height and always the colour of the local soil: burnt orange, brown, yellow or charcoal grey.

  The day had nearly departed by the time I caught my first glance of the lake. Only a month had passed since I’d seen such a broad body of water, yet so accustomed had I become to the dry scrub that to me the lake glittered like a mirage on the horizon. Its waters were receding, and so it was buffered by a wide strip of mud the bluish colour of wet concrete. When I parked the car and went for a walk, the mud felt squishy and cool oozing between my toes.

  As the sun began its final descent to the horizon, a flock of ash-coloured brolgas suddenly took flight, in such numbers they filled half the sky. I watched them sail: long, graceful, feathered ships, headed for some place already clothed in stars to dock for the night. Through my binoculars I saw each was born with a red mask and circular cut-outs behind their cheeks. Their long, slender necks and bone-thin legs contrasted with a luxuriant layer of flight feathers, the tips dipped in black.

  I looked up the brolga in my bird guide, and beside the entry wrote ‘Lake Gregory 2016’. There was something nerdy and addictive about birdwatching, similar to collecting Pokémon cards. In the past two days I had added fourteen birds to my set, including a zebra finch, a grey-headed honeyeater, and one rare creature, the Major Mitchell’s cockatoo. In the pursuit of my targets, I had to attune myself to the movement, colour, sound and light of the land. There were parallels to hunting—except it was bloodshed-free and, thinking of Adam and his penchant for emu meat, didn’t lead to the delicious smell of roasting flesh.

  It already seemed like a former life that I was in Mungo, asking the Barkindji ranger if brolgas were real. Now, observing a flock of these wonderful, unhurried creatures, I felt embarrassed I’d been so ignorant, but also blessed that I had awakened to this world of birds around me. As members of the crane family, the brolga—which often turns up in Dreaming stories—seemed to me the Australian cousin of the white crane so heavily featured in ancient Chinese tales. I watched until each bird had disappeared over the horizon.

  The sun set like an egg broken over the cold, blue glass plate of the lake’s surface, the yolk pouring out in a hundred colours and smearing the sky and water. Soon after, scattered seeds of starlight sprouted one by one.

  I would have liked to have spent more time at Paruku. However, I had many kilometres left to drive and not much time before I was due at a town on the west coast called Roebourne. It lies just to the south of the Kimberley, in the neighbouring region of the Pilbara. Extensive tracts of the Pilbara have been claimed for industrial use by iron ore companies such as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

  Over the following four days, I covered 1625 kilometres. The Tanami Track ends in the Kimberley town of Halls Creek, where I saw many swollen boab trees shaped like bottles and hung with round, furry brown fruit. I had read the trees are spiritually significant to the local people and been used as ossuaries (a keeping place of human bones). The largest of them were hundreds of years old. I headed west on the Great Northern Highway until I hit Broome on a coast lined with picturesque beaches, then I followed the coastline south until I entered the Pilbara in the approach to Port Hedland.

  I expected to find a sleepy seaside village and a surfside cafe in which I could order a vanilla milkshake. But as I came closer to the town, the highway grew crowded with loud mining trucks and white SUVs bearing a neon-yellow stripe, the archetypal vehicle of the resources industry. The land was devoid of greenery and architectural charm, with crane-like machinery creating gargantuan piles of raw materials. Crisscrossing roads were bordered by overhead powerlines, cold and bare as deciduous trees in winter. Perhaps some people find this beautiful, I thought. Maybe they see money, power and potential. Port Hedland has been described as ‘the engine room of the Australian economy’. But to me, the roads leading there felt dystopian; this was Mad Max but without the leading man in steampunk attire—just fire, fuel, dust and machinery. I felt assaulted and dwarfed by a landscape so dominated by industry. Humans were invisible here.

  I decided to skip Port Hedland. I would find my vanilla milkshake elsewhere.

  I was headed to Roebourne, two hours from Port Hedland, to meet filmmaker and digital artist Tyson Mowarin.

  We’d first met a few months earlier at The Guardian office, which Tyson had been visiting to discuss a possible collaboration. When he told me he lived near a place containing a million petroglyphs (rock engravings), I wondered how I had managed to go my entire life without so much as hearing the word Murujuga or its English name Burrup Peninsula. I’d been to the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall and the Empire State Building, but I hadn’t known anything about this Australian site of natural and historical significance, one that every Australian citizen has a responsibility to protect. I mentally added it to the top of my list of places I wanted to visit on this trip.

  Now Tyson and I would be meeting on his home turf rather than mine. I was 3714 kilometres from home, as the crow flew—about as far as you can get from Sydney without leaving the country.

  It was the tail end of July when Tyson collected me one morning in his pick-up truck, from the holiday rental where
I was staying courtesy of friends-of-friends. We took the hour-long drive down the coast, talking all the way. He seemed like a serious and thoughtful person, and I liked serious and thoughtful people. He wasn’t only a filmmaker and digital artist but also a teetotaller and single dad raising an eight-year-old daughter.

  At the town of Karratha, we came off the highway and headed to the peninsula by driving through a three-kilometre strip of mudflats, disappearing under the shallow tide. The peninsula arrived as a series of low green hills, and soon after landing on it Tyson took a left turn and sent our four-wheel drive jumping on an unmarked gravel track. Ten minutes later we stopped at a spot on top of a hill and climbed out of Tyson’s car.

  We were surrounded by colossal mounds of squarish red rock. It was as if a single towering monolith had been blown to smithereens, and the rubble that showered from the heavens had landed in mountain-sized piles.

  ‘Doesn’t look natural, does it?’ said Tyson.

  I shook my head.

  It was an alien, industrial-looking setting, weirdly harmonious with the Woodside Pluto liquified natural gas plant constructed on a distant plain—a stupendous tangle of grey tubes and white cylinders. As we were on one edge of the archipelago, beyond the plant were miles of flat and shining azurite-blue water.

  Murujuga means ‘hipbone sticking out’ to the local Yaburrara and Ngarluma people. It was once the largest of a chain of forty-two islands and islets, laced by a coral reef off the coast of the Indian Ocean, before a causeway joined the island to the mainland in 1963. I could see a metal plaque attached to a heavy red-orange rock, sitting on the edge of where the road dropped off and led to the shallow valley before us. It read: ‘Hereabouts in February 1868, a party of settlers from Roebourne shot and killed as many as sixty Yapurarra [sic] people in response to the killing of a European policeman in Nickol Bay. This incident has become known as the “Flying Foam Massacre”.’ ‘The whitefellas say only ten or fifteen died, but we reckon more than eighty,’ said Tyson, flatly. His black polo shirt bore the logo of his digital agency, Weerianna Street Media.