Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  Someone as talented as Tyson had limited choices in a place like Roebourne. He had less access to the mainstream arts industry and corporate sponsorship than people in our capital cities. At the same time, Tyson seemed wary of city life—he loved the bush. And not just any old bush, but his bush, his Country. That’s what happens when you have two thousand generations of Ngarluma life in your bones. ‘I know this fella that lived in Roebourne for a few years, but eventually he and his family moved back to Perth because his girlfriend couldn’t find a decent place to have a cup of coffee—I thought that was the dumbest fucking thing I’d ever heard,’ Tyson said drolly, as we climbed back into his truck.

  I laughed at how stupid it sounded, but also wondered if coffee was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. That woman probably missed a whole host of distracting city playthings: multiplex cinemas, whisky bars, yum cha, literary festivals, yoga classes, Saturday markets, dinner parties and, most of all, lots of other white people. Tyson had his Country; she had her town.

  We got back in Tyson’s pick-up truck, and it didn’t seem to matter where we drove on the peninsula, the visage of a chemical plant appeared around every corner like a caped villain, flare stacks spewing fire and gassy fumes.

  At the nearby peak of a low hill, we parked the car. Before us the land spanned out as a flat plain, then rose again in a series of hills. There was another one, roaring and burping: a giant liquefied natural gas processing plant. Beyond that, two hundred kilometres out to sea, Woodside machinery was extracting five trillion cubic feet of dry gas that for millions of years had been trapped underwater and underground in the Pluto and Xena gas fields. The gas was then piped through to the facility before us and shipped to Asia.

  ‘Meanwhile we can’t even get gas in our homes, we have to buy it in bottles,’ said Tyson, with crossed arms, shaking his head.

  Elsewhere on the peninsula were Rio Tinto’s iron ore leases and railhead, a port, salt production, a liquid ammonia and fertiliser plant, and a quarry—all jostling for space with the rock art.

  ‘They had to use a diamond saw to cut the petroglyphs out,’ Tyson said.

  Since 1980, thousands of rocks had been relocated and many more carefully traced, cast, photographed, logged in records by archaeologists, then promptly destroyed and turned into bedrock. Rock art advocate Rebecca Hossack, speaking on ABC radio in 2013, claimed she talked to an electrician who witnessed ten thousand petroglyphs crushed for road fill. She accused Australia of hypocrisy—we’d been ‘vociferous’ in signing the UN declaration against the destruction of cultural property when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, ‘and yet here in our back garden we are doing something so much worse’.

  Among the salvaged rock art, 1700 pieces had been transported to a nearby ridge. Tyson pointed at the spots where the rock art had been dumped: women’s rocks over here, men’s rocks over there, and the animal rocks in between. He told me his people believe the rocks and their carvings have lost some of their special meaning. ‘They’re still sacred and important but,’ he struggled to find the right phrase, ‘a little less so.’ (Woodside say that in 2010 they worked with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and senior Aboriginal law holders to rehabilitate the site.)

  ‘I think I get it,’ I said. ‘It’s like taking the ruins of Pompeii and chucking them a few hundred kilometres west in a nonsensical jumble.’

  ‘Yeah, or Stonehenge.’

  Hossack had likened the piecemeal destruction of the archipelago’s rock art to ‘putting your finger through a giant spider web’. In her opinion, to remove one rock was ‘tantamount to destruction of the whole’; they could not be viewed as individual works, or even as sites or collections—they were a connected body of work stretching across the islands and spanning epochs.

  That uniquely hard rock and its indestructible memory, into which the Yaburrara people carved, has left us with something incredibly rare: an uninterrupted record of a group of people over tens of thousands of years. In those symbols are expressions of their religion and worldviews, customs, history and knowledge of the land, possibly reaching back to their arrival some fifty thousand years ago, right up to that terrible day in 1868 when the settler militia murdered most of the remaining traditional custodians.

  And now Australia’s resources industry, with the permission of our government, has pulverised parts of this million-stone chronicle into dust.

  How imperious the Commonwealth of Australia must be, I thought, that it could decimate a people and then continue that act of destruction by smashing their rock art—carvings that had survived so many turnings of the millennia and dramatic climatic changes.

  I slipped into an existential funk, disturbed by the notion that even after fifty thousand years of order, an invader can sweep in and completely upend a culture’s reality. What a distressing experience it must have been for the traditional owners to have the Law underpinning their existence challenged so profusely by the colonisers. Was it the equivalent of waking up one day and being told the Earth was flat, ‘e’ no longer equalled ‘mc squared’ and the forces of gravity had been reversed?

  Roads ran from the factory to the main highway, and for a few moments Tyson and I watched gleaming Toyota HiLuxes scurry busily like white ants in a neat line. They carried workers, many of whom had flown in from Broome, Perth or further afield.

  ‘Do you think all the miners know whose land they’re mining on?’ I asked Tyson.

  ‘They wouldn’t know anything.’

  My plan was to head inland and camp a few days in a couple of national parks. Before I left, Tyson gave me the contact details of his aunt in Broome. ‘She’s married to a guy who is Malay and a blackfella—you’ll probably find that interesting,’ he guessed correctly.

  The quickest route from Roebourne to Millstream Chichester National Park was via a road privately owned by Rio Tinto, built to provide them maintenance access to their railway. It was unsealed, and before driving it I had to watch a short video at the Roebourne visitor centre and apply for a thirty-day permit. Every day the railways moved tonnes of iron ore from inland Pilbara to the seaside ports at Dampier and Cape Lambert, where it was loaded onto ships for delivery to the rest of the world. The 1400 kilometres of track made it the largest privately owned railway in the world, or so I learnt from the training video.

  The dusty road curved alongside the railway, and a couple of times I was overtaken by long trains presumably carrying iron ore. I stopped to watch one and noted it took three minutes to pass by.

  In the landscape nothing was taller than the green bushes growing on the side of the road, giving me a clear view to the distant mountains. Some were gently sloping, while others were ridged or flat-topped. They were all covered in a fuzz of green desert grass and spinifex, but beneath you could see the Australian red of iron ore.

  I’d now spent a few weeks driving with the windows rolled down, and the interior of my car was covered in dust. You could see my fingerprints where I’d touched the screen to switch tracks on a CD. Outside, the back window of my car was also covered in red dust, except where an anonymous passer-by had scribed ‘clean me :)’ with their finger.

  It’s only ninety kilometres from Roebourne to Millstream Chichester National Park. With that, my trip meter clicked over to eleven thousand kilometres—I’d driven an average of two hundred kilometres per day.

  The park is a green oasis set in a bed of hard rock, in the lands of the Yinjibarndi people. It has several spring-fed natural pools, drawing water from an underground aquifer held in porous dolomite like a sponge.

  I headed to Python Pool, just a short walk from the main road and lined with a pair of tall rock walls sloping to make an ‘M’. In the middle of the ‘M’ I saw a strip of rock bleached white—traces of a waterfall that probably ran in the wet season.

  I wasn’t alone. A mother was with her three exuberant young kids who were making as much noise as they could, skipping and jumping on the dusty ground to
wards the water’s edge. ‘Shush, stop it,’ said their weary mother, strands of her blonde hair sticking to her face. Alas, the children weren’t to be reined in quite so quickly. That sheer rock wall curved around a body of very dark, still water, and to the children’s delight was a natural amphitheatre. Their shouts pinged off every surface. The oldest kid yelled, ‘Cooee!’ and the younger kids followed suit, oblivious to the peace and quiet that fled like a flock of startled birds.

  Their beleaguered mother kept trying to quieten them, until one kid paused his play to ask, very innocently, ‘But why?’

  By then she had plonked herself on a rock and had her head resting on one hand. ‘Because it’s a sacred spot,’ she said flatly. By her intonation I assumed she didn’t know or care if that was true, but I thought it quick-thinking of her to pull out that card.

  I headed to a lookout, where I was lucky to see a Sturt’s desert pea growing spectacularly out of the stony earth. Each flower had several shiny black snouts from which long triangular petals, red and bright as chilli, unfurled horizontally.

  Other than some scraggly snappy gums, the mountains looked bald to me, covered in spiky spinifex that resembled a vast gathering of echidnas. I thought back to how Tyson had told me of his visit to tropical north-east Arnhem Land, which is thick with vegetation and relatively flat; being from arid country, he felt claustrophobic. Not surprisingly, I was feeling homesick for river country in the interior of New South Wales, with its carpets of waist-high golden grass and its wise old red gums. I thought they provided the perfect amount of cover, in contrast to the ridiculously impenetrable jungles of the tropical north. In my part of Australia you were offered real privacy: good, solid trees you could set your camp next to, with room to park your car and enough cover that no one would know you were there. Everything here was so exposed—no use trying to hide between spinifex bushes when you were anything larger than a blue-tongued lizard.

  I drove for another couple of hours further inland to Karijini National Park. Eager to go for a hike, I settled on a section of the tightrope track up the steep ridgeline of Punurunha (Mount Bruce). The rumbling of trains echoed across the plain. Even in WA’s second-biggest national park, I couldn’t get away from the clanking hubbub of the mining industry. The mountain is part of the Hamersley Range, containing eighty per cent of Australia’s identified iron ore reserves and one of the world’s major iron ore sources. The banded iron formations of the Hamersley Province are the thickest and most extensive rocks of this type in the world, deposited 2400 million years ago when the continent was turbulent with volcanic activity.

  The rocks along the track were long and sharp-edged, shaped like giant crystals. As I traced the thin mountain ridge, to the left I saw miles of open, flat, untouched stone country, splotched with spinifex and stunted mulgas. To the right was Rio Tinto’s Marandoo mine site, which the WA government excised from within national park boundaries in 1991. I wondered how useful it was to designate land as national park when a cashed-up mining company could draw a chalk line around the bits they needed. Karijini National Park: home to the Banyjima, Yinhawangka, Kurrama and Rio Tinto peoples.

  A platform overlooked the mine, beside a sign that explained how the ore was processed, transported and delivered to Rio Tinto’s port on the Burrup. Iron ore is a key component of steel production, but it was hard to sit there in the middle of the desert, when I hadn’t seen a building taller than six floors in almost two months, and envision the Pilbara’s red rocks winding up as all those highways and highrises erected across Asia.

  In another section of the park, I was surprised when the land abruptly plunged a hundred metres. The gorges were formed when, according to the traditional owners, ‘the earth was soft’. A drop in sea levels tens of millions of years ago caused the land to dry out, and over time the rivers—created by great serpents called Thurru—chiselled through cracks in the rock, carving out the gorges of Karijini. The rivers now flow north-west across the coastal plain, always striving and searching for the quickest route to the ocean, pining for a reunion.

  While most of the Pilbara is hot, flat and baking, at the bottom of these thin, deep splits it is wet and cool. Ice-cold waterholes grow paperbarks, figs and ferns. These plants are relics from around sixty-five million years ago, when the climate was tropical and rainforests flourished; over time they retreated and became isolated sanctuaries. Bird life is also concentrated in these oases, with spinifex pigeon and zebra finch fluttering in and out of them each day for a drink.

  I slipped about on cold, wet rocks in places where the gorge became so narrow it was only wide enough for one person. From this place of shadow, I found it hard to remember that the world above was an arid plain filled with sunlight and sky. But that’s Australia for you: a country of extremes, where even the vastness of the horizon can all of a sudden be tipped sidewards and hem you in between steep gorge walls.

  After two nights at the park, I drove to its north-eastern corner and walked a track that would lead me to Fern Pool. I went down a long metal staircase that wound along the side of a red rock gorge and then clambered over a section of slate. Eventually I came across a tourist-free bit of mermaid-blue water; it was too small to be the main pool but was so pretty I decided to stop awhile. The creek was lined with paperbarks and a thick fringe of reeds as tall as me.

  The traditional custodians believe the Thurru still lives in these watery hidey-holes—Little wonder, I thought, if they all look as magical as this—and everyone is supposed to take care not to offend them.

  I quietly knelt down, my knees pressed into the damp riverbank, and spoke in a self-conscious whisper. ‘Hi, my name is Monica Tan. I come from Sydney on Eora Country. My Chinese Malaysian parents are Ven and Kim, but our ancestors come from Fujian province in Southern China. I promise I am only passing through your lands.’ And, having learnt of a local practice from a display at the park’s visitor centre, I scooped up a handful of water and held it to my mouth, slurped, and sprayed it into the air.

  Earlier in the year, I had gone to Perth to interview Yamatji actor and television presenter Ernie Dingo. He told me about how in the summer of 1976, he and the Noongar/Yamatji musician Richard Walley had performed what is believed to be the first contemporary welcome to Country for non-Indigenous Australians. We spoke about traditional welcomes and acknowledgements of Country, and he compared the latter to a ‘knock on the door’: a simple, courteous way to alert traditional owners or the spirits of the land of your presence. He said that traditionally, if you were visiting the sparse mid-west Country of Western Australia from which his people hail, to perform an acknowledgement of Country you first headed to a vantage point, such as a hill, and lit a fire. ‘That plume of smoke would indicate that you had been sitting there,’ he said. ‘That’s just like the knock on the door.’

  At the time of our interview I was already formulating my road trip, and I sought his advice on how I should acknowledge each place I travelled.

  He said, ‘When we go for a swim in a waterhole that we’ve never known before, we get some sand and rub it in our hands. Then we say our name, where we come from and what we’re doing in the area. So wherever it is that you’re travelling, just say: my name is so-and-so, I come from such and such, or your family name, I’m daughter of so-and-so; I’m a visitor, I’m just travelling through and I accept your blessings.’

  Throughout this trip I had done as he’d advised. Sometimes, when I’d been nervous about my safety, I had even asked for protection. But generally I kept it to a short, respectful, verbal assurance that I meant no harm and would soon be on my way.

  I got back on my feet and continued up the track, which was crowded with healthy green trees. I passed one particularly impressive specimen with several muscular bone-white trunks reaching this way and that like a many-armed Hindu deity, and hundreds of tendril-thin roots reaching towards the earth. It was odd to see such a robust tree in the middle of the desert. And unlike in the hot and deathly stillness of
just about everywhere else in the Pilbara, plenty of birds and insects were flitting and buzzing about.

  Looking at a shrub, I noticed a nest. Upon seeing how elaborately it was constructed, I corrected myself: this was no nest, rather a bower of the eponymous bowerbird. I had never before seen the bird or its bowers, only their illustration in my bird guide. I was astounded that a bird was capable of such designed beauty. The bower was made with sticks placed upright but curling so that together they were shaped like two powerful ocean waves facing each other and poised at the moment before collapse. The ground at both ends of the bower was covered in white decorative items: stones, shells, bones, and bits of glass and plastic.

  Moments later, I met its maker. He was the size of a magpie but spotted and brown, with a splotch of lilac on his neck that somehow flared independently of the other feathers. He strutted back and forth in the vicinity of his construction, making all sorts of un-song-like, crunchy, raspy, mechanical noises. I peered around for a female bird, for why else would he put on such a display? I should not have been so surprised that a bird with such exquisite taste in architecture would be a flamboyant dancer. It was all very postmodern. He’d fan his wings out low, in the shape of a stiff tutu, and the next moment be hunched over so that they were up and spread wide like Count Dracula’s cape.

  Later I read that both the performance and the striking—albeit impractical and vulnerable—home are only for the purposes of seduction. Once mating has taken place, the female is solely responsible for egg incubation and chick-rearing. She’s even denied use of the love-palace he built. According to Morcombe, a male bowerbird will leap onto any female tempted to go between the bower’s strong walls, leaving her no room to f lap her wings and escape. Next she must build ‘a little cup-shaped nest in a tree’. For weeks she tirelessly feeds their chicks while below her lover has moved on to other tail feathers, mating with several females over one breeding season. On the other end of the spectrum are the many monogamous Australian birds—magpies, wedge-tailed eagles, cockatoos, corellas and brolgas—that mate for life or extended periods.