by Monica Tan
Looking at the night sky over Goolarabooloo Country, I could see the stars that traced the outline of Marrala (Emu Man) with his head near Jina (eagle’s claw prints, or the Southern Cross). Two stars near what Western astronomy called the Hydra constellation are Naji sisters who emerge from the reef in Minyirr to pick yarrinyarri, when they are unlawfully touched by a reclusive bushman; later he is weighed down by remorse and, sitting in a meditation pose, changes himself into a rock wallaby. Each year, when these stars show themselves in the night sky, it’s the right to time to pick bush onion.
My own people, the Han Chinese, have one of the most romantic visions of the night sky. We call it Yinhe (Silver River) from a story that’s at least 2600 years old.
The story is literally of star-crossed lovers. The youngest and prettiest of the Goddess’s seven daughters, Zhinü, encounters on Earth a humble but kind-hearted cowherder, Niulang. The pair fall in love and have two children. Up in the heavens a day is equal to a year in the world of mortals, and when the Goddess eventually discovers the illicit relationship she orders her daughter to return home. In her anger she takes off one of her hairpins and uses it to scratch a silver river in the sky, to prevent her daughter and her love from ever reuniting. Every night Zhinü is visible as Vega in the sky, wistfully weaving on her loom, separated from Niulang and their two children. All the magpies in the world are so touched by their devotion that every year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, they fly into the air to form a bridge, and the pair are reunited for that evening.
I sat back in my camp chair. As I looked up at the stars, I was overwhelmed by gratitude for the opportunity to be here and experience Country. Walking this trail I had felt the soft lurujarri sands under my bare feet, eaten its mackerel fresh from the ocean, listened to the muffled booms of waves disintegrating on the shore and slept soundly under its paperbarks. I had left tracks in its sand; it had blown sea salt over my skin. We had become accustomed to each other’s scent and grown less afraid of each other. Country needed me as much as I needed it—I saw that now. The health and happiness of the custodians depended on the land, and the health and happiness of the land depended on the custodians. Separated, we were lonely.
The Goolarabooloo people have a word for this sense of connection: le-an. Your le-an is intuitive and emanates powerfully from your gut. The longer you spend out on Country acquiring its knowledge, the more your body and mind become attuned to its sounds, patterns, movements and energy flows—that’s your le-an deepening. When the ancestral beings sang the universe into existence, humans and Country were created simultaneously. They were notes in one musical score and, as with any song, the individual notes mattered less than their arrangement; their rai, or spirit, was made of the same essence. Le-an is the way in which humans and Country reconnect and become one, as they were in the beforelife and will be again in the afterlife.
I had been afraid I would never love anything the way Aboriginal people loved and knew their country—that their sense of connection and belonging would forever allude a person like me, trapped as I was between Aboriginal, Asian and European cultures. I’d felt a profound sense of loss that I was a perpetual foreigner, a person of no place, cut adrift. But the Lurujarri Trail had shown me that even if I could never be as intimate with the land as Aboriginal people, I could still learn from those who’d come before me, or whose ancestors had come to this continent long before mine. And with every lesson I learnt and step I took, I was being nourished and loved, completely, by the land.
I was fascinated to see my Chinese stepmother on Aboriginal-controlled land. She and my father had flown to Darwin, the Northern Territory’s capital, from Sydney for a long weekend over the final days of August. I had taken a circuitous route from Broome that included a detour to Derby and through breathtakingly beautiful parts of the Kimberley, then east back into the Territory. We met at a hotel deep in the savanna woodlands of Kakadu National Park, with its corkscrew pandanus and thousands of termite mounds.
My stepmother, Mary, was fifteen years younger than my 62-year-old dad, a classic Chinese beauty with very smooth, straight hair one imagined she had brushed carefully every evening since she was a child. A decade had passed since she moved from Beijing to Sydney. Aside from a trip to Uluru, she had barely interacted with Indigenous Australia. She’d come into this trip neither callused with racism nor teary-eyed from colonialist angst, unlike so many Australians who interact with Indigenous Australia.
Kakadu is roughly the size of Israel, and the traditional owners are the Bininj people in the north of the park and Mungguy people in the south. At a gunbim (rock art) site we joined a tour led by an interpretive park ranger. The gunbim was painted in red, white and yellow ochre, mainly in the X-ray art style that sees figures depicted with anatomically accurate skeletal features. According to the Bininj and Mungguy peoples, many of the older paintings—up to twenty thousand years old—were created by mystical, long-limbed Mimi spirits. It was from these spirits their ancestors learnt to paint. What they depicted were more than stories: they were Law. Among depictions of turtle, fish and wallaby species is a thylacine, while the 1880s arrival of hat-wearing, pale-skinned buffalo hunters is depicted with them standing stiffly, hands in pockets.
Despite the thirty-degree weather, Mary was dressed in long pants and a cream Burberry-style trenchcoat to protect her pale skin from the sun and mosquitos. She listened to the ranger with interest as he spoke about the twelve languages formerly spoken in the park, and the traditional owners’ complex kinship system dividing all people, plants, animals, songs, dances, ceremonies and the land into two moieties: duwa and yirridja. I picked up a tourist guide from the park that had said the calendar was divided into six distinct seasons: gudjewg/monsoon, banggerreng/knock ’em down storm, yegge/cooler but still humid, wurrgeng/cold weather, gurrung/hot dry, and gunumeleng/ pre-monsoon storm.
Mary was less fascinated by a sample of basket-weaving displayed in the park museum. ‘I can do that,’ she said, with a little shrug of her trenchcoat-draped shoulders, after I’d pointed it out. ‘When I was a little girl I used to have to weave many hats and shoe soles out of wheat.’
Like so many Mainland Chinese people she was middle class now, sure, but in Mao-era China everyone had been dirt poor. Mary’s father was the first in his village to own a bicycle in the 1960s; wherever he rode kids chased after him, delighted by the sight of this novel contraption, and shouted, ‘Foreign donkey! Foreign donkey!’
She told me about a property developer she and my dad knew, Mr Zhang. A real Mr Moneybags. During China’s Great Famine of 1959–61, he remembered eating nothing but sweet potato. During the winter, when there was nothing to harvest, his family would add water to dehydrated potato. Potato, potato, potato. Now, he hated them—couldn’t even bear being in the same room as one.
As I was primarily raised in air-conditioned shopping centres, the idea of living off the land had some novelty to it. I was prone to adopt a romantic view of the ingenuity Bininj and Mungguy people displayed, and their mastery of bush tucker and bush medicine: a view propped up by a complete lack of firsthand experience with the tiring and tedious work of traditional life.
But just two generations back, my own relatives had been in China—foraging, fishing, building, farming, weaving, carving out an existence from the landscape—as they had for thousands of years. In Kakadu, Mary was just a woman from one ancient culture coming to another. Because of that, she was able to cast a more discerning eye than me.
At Cahills Crossing we saw saltwater crocodiles. They were known to congregate there, so infrastructure had been built to allow visitors to view them safely. The crocs drifted lazily about in the water reminding me of overweight tourists in a hotel swimming pool, occasionally propelling themselves with their tail by swishing it back and forth.
Crocodiles exercise a sit-and-wait approach to hunting. Through routine lassitude they conserve energy and go months without food. Their agility and speed are only on
display when they have the opportunity to strike, which makes them all the more unnerving. It’s easy to anthropomorphise the crocodile as a slick Sicilian mobster who spends most of his time sitting nonchalantly at a diner table, puffing on a cigar, but who at any moment can have those who dared cross him beaten to a bloody pulp and chucked into a shallow grave.
The stories I’d heard about croc deaths were gruesome. One doctor in Darwin had told me about a father out fishing in Kakadu with his wife, son and daughter-in-law on a relaxing Saturday afternoon. He was alone on a boat, washing or emptying a bucket, when a 4.7-metre saltie jumped up, nabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the water.
Crocs’ victims aren’t executed with a snap of the jaws but are instead drowned or crushed to death. The body is then jerked or spun in a death roll so that croc-bite-sized pieces twist off and can be swallowed whole. As the crocodile only has a stomach the size of a basketball, unfinished chunks of meat might be stored in mangroves and are sometimes used as bait to attract fresh meat like turtles and mud crabs. It’s discomforting to think of a human rendered into something as lowly as fishing bait.
We went for a sunrise boat tour of the river, its water splotched with round, green lilies and filled with birds. I spotted comb-crested jacanas, whose exceptionally long toes allow them to tread evenly across lily pads, and elegant pygmy geese dressed in dark iridescent green. Rainbow bee-eaters provided fluttering splashes of colour. But my favourite birds here were the softly honking magpie geese. As their name suggests, they look like geese that have borrowed the smart piebald plumage of magpies. That morning they floated on the water and tipped like jugs being poured until their feathered tushies and orange legs were the only parts sticking out.
Later Mary and I were in the park museum, where we learnt that Kakadu was one of few UNESCO World Heritage sites listed for both its natural and cultural wonders. In a not-so-distant life Mary had worked as a local guide in China. As she was well versed in traditional Chinese culture I asked her if the Chinese imbue the landscape with spiritual meaning, in a similar way to what the Bininj and Mungguy do. She told me there are many sacred mountains in China—some connected to Buddhism, others to Taoism and still more to ancient animistic Chinese religions—that for thousands of years have drawn pilgrims and powerful emperors for worship. We spoke of the parallels between Bininj and Mungguy ontology and that gentle, ironic, nature-loving Chinese philosophy of Taoism, with its emphasis on balance, intuition and adherence to natural cycles.
Whereas what do most non-Aboriginal Australians see when we stand before a mountain? Maybe a photo-op, an athletic hike or, for the more industrious, a new mining site to blast the hell out of. The colony was born from a British culture that understood sacred churches better than sacred earth. For us non-Aboriginal Australians to feel that a rock escarpment or waterhole can be imbued with the spirits of ancestors and ancient creators requires a certain imaginative leap not all of us are able or willing to make.
I told Mary that for all the diversity of the Aboriginal nations I had travelled through, from Wiradjuri to Warlpiri, what remained universal and constant was this deep love of their land. They loved the land as though it was family and seemed to know every rock, tree and cloud.
She said before the great bulldozers of urbanisation tore entire villages down, Chinese people also had a deep kinship with the land. ‘When Chinese people moved overseas, such as the miners who went to America or Australia during the gold rush, they’d always bring a jar of soil from their home village.’
How wonderful was that? And back then you had to be extra judicious about what you packed. You were about to embark on a dangerous journey overland and over sea for months on end to a strange new place. You had no idea when or if you would ever return to your village, and there wasn’t an overnight FedEx service for your relatives back home to post you anything you missed. Yet a coolie would find room to pack a glass jar containing the earth that had sustained him—for they were almost always male—since he was a child: the same earth that had sustained his father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s father, and maybe a hundred fathers prior.
On the morning that I watched my dad and Mary’s rental car drive away, destined for Darwin airport, I headed to the Chung Wah museum downtown. It was adjacent to a small Chinese temple that in various incarnations had stood on the site since 1887. Inside the temple were pillars and beams painted red and decorated with gold-embroidered silk banners, and several shrines with Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian statues shrouded in clouds of incense. It reminded me of temples in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan: places where the Chinese diaspora lived and hadn’t seen the Cultural Revolution sweep through, and therefore retained more vestiges of traditional beliefs.
The museum—like many regional, volunteer-run efforts—was a cheerful assortment of bits and bobs. There was a yellowing mahjong set from the 1920s, pewter vessels from the temple, wooden moon-cake moulds, a wide-brimmed woven hat worn by a Chinese market gardener in the 1940s, and displays printed and hand glued onto colourful construction paper.
I was struck by a photo taken in 1893 during a local Chinese New Year procession. The Chinese participants were dressed in ankle-length fine robes. Carrying parasols and silk banners, they marched down a dirt road past a corrugated iron shack instantly recognisable as Australian. Another photo featuring a sixteen-year-old Chinese Australian girl called Dolly Ng Yuen, wearing a beautiful headdress with tassels and pompoms, had been taken on Cavenagh Street, Darwin’s Chinatown, in 1930.
I was enthralled by the world conjured up in this museum. In late 1800s Darwin, Chinese people outnumbered Europeans at least four to one—it was known as ‘The Orient in the Outback’. They first arrived in 1874 to work the goldfields south of the town, but after the gold rush they took up all the other jobs involved in keeping a colony alive and running. The Chinese residents grew the town’s rice, fruit and vegetables, and raised pigs. Darwin’s earliest buildings were the fruits of Chinese labourers who were skilled carpenters, stonemasons, cabinet-makers and boilermakers, while the Overland Telegraph Line and Darwin Port had been built, in part, by the Chinese. I was moved to see how difficult life had been for my people, but also by their resilience, indefatigable persistence, instinct for survival and propensity for hard yakka.
I wondered what Australia today might look like had Federation in 1901 merely united the colonies under the banner of the Australian Commonwealth, without enacting the Immigration Restriction Act later that year. Implemented through a discriminatory dictation test applied to non-British immigrants, it had swiftly curtailed the steady stream of Chinese people settling in Australia.
This was the first Chinese Australian museum I’d been to. And in this room, all the clichés of Australia’s past split apart: the blue-eyed Digger, fair-haired children in a schoolhouse of corrugated iron, European Australian men in dark woollen suits with starched white collars. Suddenly they were confused with images of my own people: silk-robe wearing, black-haired, yellow-skinned, pig-tailed men, women and children, in a dusty, dry Australian landscape.
I was amused to read, on one museum display, that so established was the Chinese community in Darwin, many Chinese Territorians reported their first taste of alienation or racism only after going to other parts of Australia. Take the story of Tanya Fong Lim, who moved to Sydney after Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin in 1974. Being labelled ‘the Chinese girl’ in her new school was a new experience for her. She said, ‘People kept asking me where I came from. And when I said “Darwin”, they’d say, ‘Yes, but where did you come from originally?’ It came as a bit of a shock to them that I was actually born in Darwin, and so were my parents and so were my grandparents.’
I wandered over to a row of dancing lion heads hanging from a ledge, their flap mouths frozen open like those of hunting trophies. Standing near a replica bridal sedan was an elderly and sweet-looking Chinese Territorian. He must have been pushing eighty and told me he volunteered in the
museum. ‘My grandparents were the first in our family to come out here from China,’ he said, in a broad Australian accent. He was tanned with crinkles around his eyes and sun spots on his balding head.
‘No way!’
‘Yup. And I married another ABC and her grandparents also come out here from China.’ (ABC stands for Australian-Born Chinese.) He told me that many ‘old’ Chinese families in Darwin traced their origins back to the gold rush and were related through marriage. He took me to a series of laminated yellow paper scrolls, hung on wooden handles and grouped by family dynasties: Chin Toy, Low Dep Chit, Yet Fah.
‘What does Chung Wah mean?’ I asked. I’d read in the museum that after World War II Chinese families returned to Darwin, only to find the local government had demolished Chinatown. The Chung Wah Society helped unite a community scattered throughout the city.
‘Apparently it means “Chinese society”? I don’t know, I don’t speak Chinese,’ he replied, looking faintly embarrassed.
Viewing Australia through a racial prism is often an exercise in cognitive dissonance. From appearances he was little different to the old fellas I’d seen riding rickety bicycles on the streets of Beijing. Except instead of a wrinkled, navy Mao suit, he wore a polo shirt with shorts. Only when he opened his mouth was it evident he was Australian, through and through. It was weird for me to meet a Chinese man so much older than me whose understanding of Chinese culture was just as patchy as mine. In his awkward fumbling in the dark for cultural knowledge, I recognised my own gaps.
