Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  A five-minute walk later, I emerged at the main pool where a dozen other tourists were gathered. It was almost as large as an Olympic swimming pool, penned in by a tall vegetation-covered hill and a rock ledge with two small waterfalls. At the start of the track I’d seen a sign notifying tourists that the pool is a ‘special place’ and a ‘significant Aboriginal site’. It asked visitors to respect the pool by not jumping from the waterfalls, and advised them to avoid making loud noises and to use the ladder provided to enter the water quietly.

  No such luck. Among the tourists at the pool was an old man running a dive-bomb competition with two adolescent boys. I watched him take several steps back from the water to give himself a decent run-up, then leap off the wooden platform. With a giant ‘WOO!’ he went cannonballing into the water.

  Two young women were stripping down. ‘I love your bikini!’ one squealed to the other. The one with the nice bikini began yelping about how freezing the water probably was.

  The tourists weren’t the only animals making a racket. At first I assumed birds were responsible for all the squawking, but it was a colony of bats that had roosted in an enormous tree drooping over the pool. Using my binoculars I could see in glorious detail their furry bodies and leathery wings, hanging upside down like miniature folded-up umbrellas. Apparently they fed on the fruits of a rock fig clinging to the gorge walls.

  The old man’s wife, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a sun-sensible, long-sleeved paisley shirt, stood on the wooden platform in the shade looking on with a watery smile. Her obnoxious husband seemed giddy with delight that he’d found more rambunctious company and was working hard to keep the lanky teenage boys entertained. ‘Watch this!’ he told them. He mimed holding a shotgun and pointed it at the bats. ‘POW-POW!’

  We all watched as the bats kept on squawking, paying the fool no attention.

  He seemed disappointed. ‘They’re really not bothered by us, are they?’

  I had forgotten to bring my swimsuit so quickly undressed and slipped into the water, hoping no one would notice I was in my underwear. Surprisingly the water wasn’t at all cold like the bikini woman feared, and I swam away from the tourists to a small set of waterfalls, almost as warm as a shower. I stood under the water so that it massaged my head, shoulders and arms. When I went entirely through the water, I found a cave dripping with green ferns and hair-like moss. I sat on a rock happy to be away from everyone else. With my fingertips I touched soft tendrils of green moss and felt depressed at the way the tourists had treated this church like the pool of a flea-bitten motel. I wondered how they would feel if someone pulled out a deckchair at an Anzac memorial, plonked themselves into it and slapped on a bit of coconut oil.

  I believed there should be holiday spots where you could scream with joy; likewise I understood that mining had become part and parcel of the modern economy. At the same time, I thought, Isn’t it not just reasonable but vital to regard certain places as sacred? And that as sacred places, they are elevated from our base daily needs and wants.

  Such places in Australia are sacred, first and foremost, because they are sacred to the traditional custodians. If a Christian was to enter a Buddhist temple, she would follow the lead of the believers, first taking off her shoes, then respecting the silence with which those around her burnt incense. And when a Buddhist walks into a Christian church and sees believers kneeling at the pews, quietly murmuring words of prayer, that feeling of holiness and spiritual power translates. When we treat places and traditions as sacred, over time they become sacred to us as well. Is that cultural appropriation? Or do the ancient laws of these lands rule supreme, applicable to everyone who walks this country?

  What would happen, I wondered, to us non-Indigenous Australians?

  I thought of a quote from Kurrama elder Peter Stevens I’d read in the park’s visitor centre. It had chilled me to the bone. ‘Law and culture never change. You can do what you like in this land, but whatever you do, this land never change. They think they can do anything with it … but in the end, maybe this land might turn on us. One day he got to turn on us.’ The words seemed particularly ominous in the context of Australia’s addiction to coal, while the clouds of climate change were closing in and darkening our horizon.

  I slid into the water and ducked under the falls to swim over to the wooden platform. It was time to get back on the road.

  In the first hour of the day-long drive I faced to reach Broome, I passed through stunning country studded with giant orange peanut-shaped rocks. I was no longer surprised to see them defaced with graffiti. I suspected the words ‘Milo 4 Missy’, written in white spray-paint, were destined to outlive the author’s romance—then again, maybe the mining companies would get to these rocks first.

  After that, the scenery became an interminable stretch of unbroken, unmusical spinifex country. I tried to keep all my senses open and not fall into ‘tunnel vision’, as Tyson had warned me city folk were apt to do when driving country roads. But the longer I drove, the deeper the desert penetrated my brain as a low, dull thrumming. The unrelentingly flat horizon was cutting me in two, and the hot, dusty air of the Pilbara blew through my car like a hairdryer. My palms began to sweat. When I hit hour nine on that long drive north, my vision began to blur, turning discarded tyres into perentie lizards and mammoth semitrailers into sparkling dots. Those road trains seemed to have force fields that sucked my car in. In my dreamy state, I had to steel myself to grip the wheel and stay on course.

  I pulled into Broome as the heavy hem of the night sky dropped over the horizon. Fine-boned adolescent wallabies, barely visible, kept skittering dangerously into view. With my windows rolled down, the warm night air drifted in. It had the tropical scent of frangipanis and the briny finish of the sea.

  Broome is spread across a fishtail-shaped peninsula in the Kimberley region, along a coastline speckled with thousands of islands and ringed by shallow reefs teeming with sea life. I felt there was something ramshackle and balmy about the town that I liked. Elsewhere in Australia, the first few days of August remained in the depths of winter, but here, even in the evening, the weather was temperate. And judging by the residents and visitors I saw walking its streets, Broome reminded me of Hawaii—a melting pot of Asian, black and white cultures.

  I had been to many Chinatowns around the world. But as I headed to the caravan park where I planned to spend the night, I drove through the first Chinatown that I had ever seen whose buildings were made of corrugated iron and streets lined with palm trees. A century ago it must have been crowded with bazaars, long soup shops, pearl dealers, brothels and emporiums. Now tourism is its main industry: hostels have replaced boarding houses, restaurants and bars replaced gambling dens.

  Broome is synonymous with the pearling industry. The largest species of oyster in the world is found along its shores, growing up to thirty centimetres in length and weighing up to five kilograms. From the outside, the fan-shaped Pinctada maxima is no beauty: the surface of its shell is rough and chalky to the touch, and a drab, dishwater grey. But after you crack open its tightly shut lips, you find that inside it is coated in smooth, hard, radiant, very white and very thick mother-of-pearl. Some grow silver pearls, like luminescent moons locked up in underwater jewellery boxes.

  Many saltwater nations on the north coast have cultural links with pearl shell. (Saltwater refers to those Indigenous Australian nations or clans situated by the ocean, with other geographically based identifiers including ‘freshwater people’, ‘spinifex people’ and ‘desert people’.) According to Bardi and Djawi Elder Aubrey Tigan, here in the Kimberley those iridescent shells belong to Aalingoon (Rainbow Serpent) who ‘came down here … and lives beneath the sea. He comes every full moon, when it’s a big tide. As he floats on his back … the scales fall off his back and turn into goowarn (pearl shell) as they drift down to the seabed below.’ This belief aligns with those of other ancient cultures: during the Chinese Tang Dynasty, scaled dragons were depicted clutching or chasing a
flaming pearl, while the Gnostic text from Syria, Hymn of the Pearl, tells the story of a boy asked to retrieve a pearl from a serpent in Egypt.

  Trading pearl shell began in Australia long ago, first with inland nations where the shell was associated with water, rain and life. Incredibly, a 22,000-year-old pearl shell fragment was found in a West Kimberley rock shelter having travelled two hundred kilometres from shore. Later, Macassan fishermen from present-day Indonesia made annual voyages to northern Australia in search of trepang (sea cucumber), pearl and turtle. And finally, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards divers leapt from European pearling boats, called luggers, to collect shells lining the seabed of Broome’s Roebuck Bay.

  After a night at the Broome Vacation Village, I called Tyson’s aunt Caroline and she suggested I come over. She lived not far from the town’s famed Cable Beach, in a suburb consisting of tidy, one-storey brick bungalows. I found hers on a quiet cul-de-sac made shady and inviting with flourishing tropical trees.

  A woman with a soft, friendly face opened the door. ‘Monica?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s me.’

  Caroline stepped onto the porch, and we looked at each other awkwardly for a moment. She didn’t seem to know quite what to do with me—not the first time on this trip my presence alone was baffling.

  ‘So, do you want to chat inside or outside?’ she asked doubtfully.

  ‘I really don’t mind.’

  ‘I suppose inside might be better—it’s cooler.’ She opened the flyscreen door and led me down a short hallway into a kitchen and dining area. Framed photos of children and grandchildren stood upright on a cabinet. ‘This is my husband, Ismail,’ she said, pointing to a wiry man in the kitchen preparing a meal. He looked up at me and, smiling, asked how I was. ‘And this is Ismail’s mother, Tina,’ Caroline added. An elderly woman with a frizz of curly grey hair and owl-like spectacles was sitting at the dinner table.

  ‘Take a seat,’ said Caroline, pouring us glasses of water.

  I talked about my book and how I’d met Tyson, hoping this would adequately explain why a strange Chinese Australian woman was in their home. ‘Tyson mentioned to me his great-grandmother was married to a Chinese pearler?’

  ‘His name was Timothy Lo Sum Chai,’ said Caroline. ‘He went to Onslow on a pearling lugger. He loved it in Australia, so he just jumped off and stayed rather than going back to China.’

  The luggers were handmade wooden vessels up to nineteen metres in length. They rode low in the water with canvas sails that harnessed the galloping winds. Over a century ago, fit, young Asian men like Timothy Lo Sum Chai—with an eye for adventure and dreams of making their fortune—were a common sight on the streets of Broome.

  ‘I was surprised on the drive here to see street names like Taiji Road, Fong Way and Bin Sallik Avenue,’ I said. Not only surprised but also impressed. For all of Sydney’s visible multiculturalism, it has few street names or suburbs without Anglo names. It sends a subtle signal that only British Australians warrant honouring, even though a Mahomet, Ying or Moowattye may be just as deserving.

  ‘That’s a relatively recent thing—it wasn’t always like that,’ said Caroline. She recalled many years ago meeting her father’s captain from his days in the army, a man called Jack So. ‘When he drove around Broome he had tears in his eyes. He said, “There are no street names honouring my men.”’ His soldiers were more or less all former pearlers enlisted from Broome.’

  Caroline was a Ngarluma woman who had grown up in Onslow, a coastal town further south from where I’d visited in the Pilbara. Her mother-in-law, Tina, was Yawuru from her mother’s side, and Tina’s father was a pearler from Borneo, Malaysia. Tina’s husband, Ismail’s father, had also been a pearler from Borneo before he passed away thirteen years ago.

  ‘Did your mother know all the tribal ways?’ I asked Tina. ‘She grew up bush?’

  ‘Yeah, and she spoke Malay. Fluently.’

  I calculated Ismail’s racial makeup, and with a small jolt of surprise said to him, ‘So, you’re actually three-quarters Malay!’ Come to think of it, he definitely looked Malay. But it wasn’t exactly the most politically correct thing to say. The last group to tally up racial makeup were Australian government officials attempting to breed Aboriginality out of the country.

  ‘People don’t believe me, but we got Irish in us too,’ said Ismail, his eyes twinkling. I had to admit that with his dark skin he didn’t look the slightest bit Irish.

  ‘Ismail’s only got about that much,’ Tina mimed a pinch with her fingers, ‘white in him from my great-grandfather.’

  I said to Ismail, ‘Imagine if you went to Ireland and met someone who looked just like you.’ I liked the idea of the grinning, brown-skinned Ismail standing on a rain-slicked pavement in Dublin, face-to-face with his grinning, pink-skinned distant Irish cousin.

  ‘I’d love to go to Ireland to meet Mick Flavin, the country music singer,’ Ismail said. He was mad for country music.

  Malay, Irish Australian and Yawuru—it was terrific that such a stir-fry mix of countries and cultures could coalesce in a single human being as it did in Ismail. I found it uncanny to meet a family with both Aboriginal and Asian ties: they spoke with a blackfella accent, said Aboriginal English phrases like ‘speak lingo’, loved to go fishing, could cook beef rendang and had family in Malaysia—and in the case of Ismail, at least, joked about ‘slopes’ with self-deprecation.

  They blurred the racial categories to which I was accustomed. It was a refreshing change to be put off balance by their hybridity—usually it was my hybrid Chinese Australian identity that startled those I met.

  I reminisced with Tina and Ismail over visits to Malaysia: those afternoon walks through the steamy jungles, eating pungent, sweet durian, the rubber plantations and family reunions made challenging by language barriers. Something felt good about having this in common with a blackfella family and the way it sat outside the domain of British colonialism. We could put the burdensome pack of history down, breathe easy for a moment, and just speak as guileless children of the Asian diaspora.

  I knew that throughout Australia’s past, blended Asian and Aboriginal Australian families weren’t uncommon. Throughout the nineteenth century, young Asian men, and rarely women, immigrated to Australia for work. Most of those men returned to China, but some married into white or Aboriginal families. As a consequence, it isn’t unusual to meet Aboriginal people with Asian surnames.

  ‘The Asian people like the Malays, the koepangers, the Japanese, the Chinese, they all mingled with the Aboriginal people on the pearling boats,’ explained Ismail, cheerfully. Koepangers were those recruited from Kupang on the Indonesian part of Timor.

  Although the ten-person lugger crews differed in culture, religion and language, they became close-knit families during their weeks out at sea, working from dawn to dusk in gruelling conditions. A century ago in Broome, no one would have blinked an eye at meeting Aboriginal people who could speak some Japanese, Chinese or Malay, with them having taught their Asian coworkers English in return.

  How exciting to learn of Asian-Aboriginal relationships characterised by friendship, romance and cooperation. Quite unlike that of my generation, best characterised as one of displacement when Aboriginal public housing in Sydney’s suburb of Redfern was being knocked down to make way for apartments catering to Asian uni students.

  However, throughout the first half of last century, Australia had a markedly different attitude to all the dusky-skinned babies being born in Broome. The town—or ‘Mongrelia’ as it was called by one newspaper in true tabloid fashion—was even highlighted during parliamentary discussions in the lead-up to the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, framed as a doomsday look into what the country should expect if non-white immigration was to continue. The act became the first major piece of legislation for newly federated Australia and halted almost all non-white immigration into the country. Across the nation, population numbers in Asian communities plummeted. Ironically Broome�
��s well-known Asian flavour was preserved thanks to the town’s master pearlers, who petitioned for exemptions from the regulations due to their industry being so heavily reliant on cheap labour from our neighbours to the north.

  I asked Tina if she knew much about the pearling industry during her dad’s time.

  ‘Back then they wore the full diving dress with the big helmets,’ she said.

  In town on a display, I’d seen photos of the lead-weighted boots, baggy, rubberised, canvas suits, and fishbowl helmets, that could total over eighty kilograms—impossibly bulky, yet worn by divers while collecting pearls. It was incredibly dangerous work; before World War I, up to a third of indentured divers were dying on the job or from related disease and injury.

  ‘Did your father ever get the bends?’ I asked.

  Decompression sickness, or ‘the bends’ as it’s commonly known, has symptoms that are the stuff of nightmares: the feeling of insects crawling all over your skin, paralysis, and itching, mottled or marbled skin. And of course, if the bends doesn’t get you as you surface from the ocean’s depths, there are still sharks, rip-tides, whirlpools and cyclones to contend with.

  ‘No, but my cousin Sali’s husband took the bends,’ said Tina. ‘Just looking by the way his eyes were sticking out of the sockets, we thought he was going to die. It was scary.’

  In 1913—in response to grumblings about Broome as an Asian hotspot blighting white Australia—the federal government hired twelve divers from the British Navy to work for the pearlers. Many died within a couple of seasons. That was the last time a white man put on the hard hat. It was such a difficult and dangerous profession, and for such little pay—‘the life incompatible with that a European worker is entitled to live’, noted a royal commissioner later.