Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  I was carrying a knife borrowed from the kitchen in a bucket with some tackle. I had optimistic intentions to kickstart my new fishing career.

  A group of children came down the path. They walked barefoot, and all their hair was wet and plastered to their heads. Having spotted me, some of them grinned.

  ‘Hello!’ I said. ‘Do you know how I can get to the beach?’

  A girl in a bright pink shirt offered to show me. ‘C’mon!’ she said, slipping her dove-like hand into mine. Without conferring, the rest tagged along like they were a bunch of helium balloons connected by string. They were full of exuberance and so generous with their affection—not a scrap of self-consciousness. You’d have to be pretty cold of heart not to fall in love with them.

  One by one they introduced themselves: James, Rowena, Melanie, Lee-La, Trevor, Julio. ‘Hi James, hi Rowena,’ I said, going around the circle. They looked to be between eight and twelve years of age.

  As I repeated each name, a cheeky smile dawned on their faces. Some put their hands over their mouths to smother laughter. Only one of the boys, who appeared younger than the rest, looked around the circle with a confused expression. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said in a small voice.

  The others hissed, ‘Shut up.’

  But the jig was up, and no one had the discipline to keep going. They erupted into a fit of giggles and immediately confessed their real names.

  ‘My name is Sally,’ I said. Hey, that was fun.

  ‘Sally, do you know how to speak Chinamen?’ a boy with a mohawk asked, as we continued up the path.

  I taught them how to say ni hao (hello) and, when my mind temporarily and inexplicably drew a blank on every other Mandarin word I knew, blurted out, ‘Niubi.’

  ‘That means “awesome”,’ I said quickly, and prayed they’d instantly forget. It actually means ‘ fucking awesome’.

  The children spoke a fusion of English, Kriol and local languages. In the old times their ancestors were polyglots, not only speaking their own language but also those of neighbouring nations.

  At twelve, Kallista was older and more thoughtful than the other children, and wanted to know more Mandarin. She and I traded kou for yawa (mouth), jiao for yiniburu (foot), shui for aba (water), and cai for mayi (food).

  Sal, the kid who’d asked if I could speak ‘Chinamen’, asked if I knew Jackie Chan.

  ‘Know him?’ I said. ‘He’s my uncle.’

  The path meandered up a hill, and the children scrambled lightly to the top while I trudged through the sand.

  Sal’s nine-year-old cousin James (or was it Sebastian?) was whip smart like his sister Kallista and shot me a look heavy with suspicion. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You ask him if he has a niece called Sally in Sydney, and he’ll say he does,’ I assured him, confident there was no way they could do that.

  All but James were suitably impressed. ‘What’s he like?’ someone asked.

  ‘He’s short in real life,’ I said.

  James wasn’t budging and continued to stare at me with narrowed eyes, scrying for lies in my face. ‘Where is he right now?’

  I didn’t skip a beat. ‘He’s in New York shooting a film.’

  ‘What’s his Chinaman name?’

  I used to know that. What was it again? No time, better make something up. ‘Chong Long.’

  ‘I still don’t believe you,’ said James.

  ‘I believe you,’ said Sal, nodding his mohawked head. He was looking at me so trustingly that I knew, then and there, I was destined for hell.

  The girls headed back to camp while the boys settled on another swim.

  I followed them as they clambered up the sand dunes that blocked the beach. The dunes ended abruptly with a wall of rock several metres wide that was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a sandy pink colour, nobbled and scratchy as sandpaper, with the imposing spikiness of a gothic cathedral. It was painful to walk barefoot on the spires.

  After a nervy hand-over-foot clamber down the rock turrets, I jumped the last section and my feet landed on sand.

  I faced the open sea, and what I saw made my heart sing: a wide circle of sand, protected by that thorny hedge of rock and stealing a hint of pink from the setting sun. We stood on the wet sand and looked to the sky. Banks of fairy-floss clouds fanned out, their woolly edges glowing gold.

  The boys were already turning into little ruffians but hadn’t entirely lost their peach-fuzz sweetness. Seeing the diary in my hand, one of them offered to draw me a picture. ‘Don’t stare my work,’ he kept saying, putting a protective arm around his drawing until he was finished. He had drawn a pointy Stüssy ‘S’, a classic schoolyard doodle, decorated with wavy lines, circles, triangles and zigzags. Putting the final stroke on his masterpiece, with a flourish he wrote: ‘from Sally’. Another boy jeered, telling him it should say: ‘to Sally’.

  One of the boys asked me if I got jalla. ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  All the boys cracked up laughing.

  ‘Do you know what jalla means?’ the boy asked. He had a buzzcut and a toughboy look.

  ‘No, don’t tell her!’ the other boys shouted.

  ‘Do you have jalla?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again, smiling to myself.

  They cracked up again.

  The toughboy was gasping for air with laughter, clutching his stomach. ‘Do you know what kaka is? That’s what jalla is—it’s shit! You said you have shit!’

  A figure appeared from the rock hedge and came striding down the beach. It was one of the walkers; I remembered him introducing himself as a retired film and media pilot. He was in his swimming trunks, silver hairs standing to attention from his barrel chest, looking every bit the ageing action hero.

  ‘Let’s go swim with the kartiya,’ said the toughboy.

  The boys zeroed in on the pilot, followed him into the ocean, and were soon splashing and jumping all over him.

  I was amazed that this word for whitefella, kartiya, was used here. After first reading it in Kim Mahood’s essay, I’d then heard it in conversation over a thousand kilometres away from where I stood now, at the Yuendumu art centre while chatting with a Warlpiri artist. I’d asked him if I would be considered a kartiya. Perhaps the term had been derived from a Warlpiri word for ‘white’ (kardirri), and clearly I wasn’t literally white in skin colour—or did it just mean a non-Aboriginal person?

  ‘No, you like us. You Yapa from China,’ he replied, using the Warlpiri word for ‘native person’. ‘Chinese, Indian—you been colonised like us.’

  I wasn’t sure if I felt like a colonised person, but I appreciated his reply and took it as a gesture of solidarity.

  He told me he was familiar with China, having visited when his work featured in a Shanghai art show. He had fallen in love with the city’s soup dumplings and made a good friend, a Shanghainese guy and Aboriginal art lover, who had promised to introduce him to Jackie Chan. (I wondered how many Chinese people were, at any given moment, out in the great, wide world chatting to a local in a sleepy countryside village—in, say, France, Peru or South Africa—claiming to be a relative of Jackie Chan.)

  ‘He’s got connections to the Chinese Communist party,’ the artist added about his Shanghainese friend, who was apparently ‘very rich’.

  ‘Everyone who is rich in China has connections to the Communist Party,’ I replied.

  After watching the boys have fun in the water, I decided I should swim too. The water was bracing and refreshing, cool but not cold. I sank low enough that the soft waves gently slapped my face, and rubbed fistfuls of wet sand over my grimy skin. Swimming further out, I allowed the crushing arms of the ocean to take hold of me and toss my body about. I propelled myself with long, even strokes, then indulged in the childish joy of duck diving.

  It felt so good. After all that time wandering the desert, I realised how much I’d missed this.

  Afterwards I walked back up the beach and gathered my fishing gear. I wand
ered over to where the rock wall curved and then dropped like stone steps into the ocean. What did I know about fishing? Next to nothing—but enough to guess that fish didn’t just hook themselves. I needed bait. Fairly quickly I spotted a crab gripping the wall of a rockpool. It was a beautiful thing the size of my palm, orange with turquoise-blue streaks on its side. I almost felt annoyed at it for I knew I’d now have to kill it. I’d never killed anything larger than a mosquito in my life.

  For a moment I just stood there, knife in my hand, geeing myself up, and both dreading and hoping it would just go away.

  Then I lunged for it.

  The tip of the knife connected with the crab’s shell but failed to penetrate. The crab scuttled away, but it was cornered in a rockpool where the water was draining out.

  I lunged again, and again the knife failed to penetrate.

  My stabs were too half-hearted. I found it extremely difficult to kill this thing so fervently trying to escape death.

  I was one beat too slow in delivering yet another feeble blow. The crab—no doubt profoundly thankful and amazed by my incompetence—ducked under a heavy-looking rock. Was there any point in me lifting that rock and trying again? Both the critter and I knew perfectly well I was incapable of executing the kill.

  Deciding it was better to end the charade, I gave up on fishing.

  I drifted up the beach and joined a row of my fellow walkers sitting on the sand. They were looking out to sea at a pod of humpbacks playing as the sun set. The whales had swum thousands of kilometres from the Antarctic to these relatively warm waters off the Kimberley coast—an ideal nursery to calve and care for their young. Through my binoculars, the whales were framed in a cinematic black circle. With incredible power their bodies exploded out of the water and then crashed down, splintering the calm of the ocean. Occasionally just the dark curve of a spine, slicked with water, would slide out and disappear moments later.

  As the sun sat on the lip of the horizon, the colour of the water deepened. Lines of white birds crossed my field of vision like airborne ballerinas. Larger black and white birds, with very angular wings, dive-bombed into the ocean. Meaty fish, maybe mackerel or salmon, were circling schools of whitebait and forcing them to the surface—meaning the whitebait simultaneously became prey to the birds. I laughed with utter joy at such a performance. It was hard to identify which party was better at fishing, but I knew for sure that I wasn’t in the running.

  I hadn’t expected to be so impressed by the beaches of the west coast. After all, I’m a saltwater person; I grew up by some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. So how come I was dumbstruck by this ocean? The template was the same: sand, sea and sky. Yet there was something different I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Perhaps it was the water—it had never occurred to me that something as vast and imperishable as the ocean might have a different personality elsewhere in the country. Around Sydney, waves spend longer in the open Pacific; by the time they ram themselves into the coastline, they are tall walls of roaring water that collapse dramatically into piles of ice-cold whitewash. But here in the Top End, the coastline is fringed by islands, local bays, headlands, reefs and gulfs; by the time they reach the shore, the waves have dissipated and roll sluggishly in. Here the water seems paler, calmer and warmer than the water down south. When the gentle waves sweep up and over the low slope of sand, they swish like a ballgown.

  But that wasn’t what had struck me—it was something else.

  I laughed aloud when it came to me. On the east coast, I’d never once seen the sun set over the ocean. Here the setting sun sat like a pendant on the shimmering deep blue evening gown of the water. It had a drama and pageantry not found in the meditative sunrise, with regal pink and molten gold clouds gliding across the sky.

  Is that what the Goolarabooloo people meant when they said here was ‘Sunset Country’ and the Naji spirit beings had headed for ‘Sunrise Country’?

  One of the other walkers, Lauren, was also from Sunrise Country and had seen plenty of them across the ocean of her home suburb of Bondi. She was around my age, with curly dark hair, and we spoke of a few awkward encounters throughout the trip.

  That afternoon she had set up camp, only to have one of the Goolarabooloo families pull up in a mammoth 4WD.

  ‘Is this your spot?’ she asked them.

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the men.

  ‘Uh, do you want me to move?’

  ‘That’d be best,’ he said, with a grave nod.

  Lauren got ready to move until they saw it would be a hassle for her, and relented.

  ‘Just for one night?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she promised.

  To me, she wryly described the incident as ‘a microcosm of the entire land rights issue’. She didn’t like the fact she was occupying someone else’s land, but damn was it hard to give up such spectacular ocean views.

  She also said that information wasn’t exactly being served to us walkers on a platter, and she’d dealt with this the only way she knew how.

  ‘So, are there any sacred sites around here?’ she’d asked Phil as he cooked damper scones over a fire. In her mind, she was just making small talk. Western culture teaches children that if you want to understand something, just ask. Questions are considered a sign of one’s curiosity or concern and quite often respect.

  Yet Phil looked uncomfortable. ‘Yeah,’ he said, turning over the scones.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  He cocked his head inland. That day we had passed many impressive red anthills.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘is it in the anthills?’

  He looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Nah.’

  There was an awkward silence.

  Lauren thought perhaps she wasn’t making herself clear. ‘So, where is it, then?’ she asked, more directly.

  He looked peeved and burst out, ‘Look, I can’t tell you.’

  That amazed her—the level of secrecy. I wondered if it was the same place Edward had told some of us about: an area where no one was allowed to camp or light fires. A powerful Bugarregarre snake lived there, and it was forbidden to say his name. ‘How do you know what the name is if no one is allowed to say it?’ a walker had asked Edward, in the same vein as Lauren asking Phil. Edward had said only the very old people were allowed to discuss the snake and its place. This snake was a symbol of one of the kinship groups whose responsibility was controlling social relationships. Members of the group had the power to control living snakes and, by extension, controlled society. I later read the last man to inherit this special power had died in a leprosarium called Bungarun in the nearby town of Derby. In fact, hundreds of Aboriginal sufferers had spent the end of their lives at Bungarun and were buried in its graveyard. The man who died had no living descendants and since then, alarmingly, no one had control of the snakes.

  I told Lauren that throughout my Australian travels I’d had several experiences similar to hers: evasive answers to my questions or brilliant stories that ended with ‘that’s not to be repeated’. Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia seemed as tangible to me as a solid gold watch or a wooden chest of letters and photographs. Like family heirlooms, these stories are passed down through the generations, and their keepers have to be careful about who handles such precious things. There’s also secret men’s business and secret women’s business, which are restricted by multiple levels of ‘security clearance’ that non-Aboriginal Australians more commonly associate with governmental spy agencies. Generally the only stories—or even versions of stories—shared with us are those few that have been ‘declassified’ by the powers that be.

  In the old days a person could be speared to death just for looking at a sacred object or place that was forbidden to them. I hadn’t heard any contemporary tales of capital punishment, but plenty about bone-chilling curses administered to those who failed in their caretaking of sacred sites or revealed secrets to those lacking in proper clearance.

  The actor Balang T.E. Lewis ha
d left his Ngukurr Country—Roper River, about three hundred kilometres from Katherine in the Gulf of Carpentaria—after his film The Naked Country was released in 1985. Elders had accused him of revealing secrets in the name of fame and put a death warrant out for him. ‘Bit like Salman Rushdie,’ he once told me in an interview, referring to the Islamic fatwa issued against the British Indian novelist in 1989, ‘but an Australian version.’ Eventually, however, the prodigal son returned. ‘I am lucky I sobered up an’ come home to face the music. I am still here.’

  After the sun dropped behind the west coast horizon, almost everyone picked themselves up off the sand to head back to camp. Only a young nurse called Andy and I decided to hang around for a little longer and savour the very last droplets of light.

  I felt incredibly relaxed, as if every nerve in my body was a door flung open. Just by being out on Country, I was getting stronger and healthier—in the body, yes, but more importantly in mind and heart. My life back in Sydney had been poisoning me. This time last year I would have been sitting at my computer in the office, elbow deep in fizzy news headlines and angry tweets.

  Andy and I took turns using my binoculars. She had thick waves of amber hair that matched a sprinkle of red freckles on her nose. She was mad for whales and told me that a few years ago she’d spent weeks here whale watching as a community volunteer for a survey. I could see how they were an easy animal to love, but after a while I grew tired of watching them and let her take over my binoculars.

  I said to Andy that an Adnyamathanha person had once told me even non-Aboriginal people had totems, even if we didn’t realise it. Perhaps the whale was hers.

  ‘This is definitely my happy place,’ she replied, her eyes still glued to the binoculars. ‘What I like the most about the whales is that nobody can ever own them.’

  The sky was still dramatically changing colour. I was enjoying feeling the sea wind brush against my skin and lips, and my feet half sunk in the wet sand, far too much to leave yet. That remarkable cliff wall stood sentry behind us, encouraging us to turn our backs on the rest of Australia and do nothing but relish the slow death of day.