Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  He asked about my travels, so I told him about my book and said I was heading south.

  ‘You should meet Eddie Ah Toy in Pine Creek. He might even take you out to the old goldfields where all them Chinese miners worked.’

  Just over a week later, on a day bursting with sunshine, I left Darwin and drove two hours south to the historic mining town of Pine Creek. The town lay on a small, two-lane detour off the Stuart Highway lined with gum trees and billboards advertising local businesses lettered in the style of a wanted poster from an old western. When I’d called Eddie that morning, he’d suggested I drive up to his family’s now-defunct general store. It was easy to find—Pine Creek was a compact town, made up of squat buildings whose corrugated iron roofs were striped with brown rust. The store occupied a prime spot on the short main street and bore a red-lettered sign: ‘Established 1935 Ah Toy’s Store’.

  There was Eddie, waving me in and opening the wire gate of his driveway. He wore a rabbit-fur Akubra and a maroon shirt tucked neatly into his shorts. We shook hands and he led me into the store. Inside it felt cool with the windows boarded up. The shelves were empty although there remained rows of plastic bags, stuffed round and fat as Chinese steamed buns, sitting on the floor. One wall was decorated with old beer and soft drink stickers.

  Eddie offered me a glass of water and pulled up two stools by a countertop. He looked around the store and apologised for the mess. ‘I’m a bit of a hoarder.’

  Some Chinese traits never die. While living in China I’d discovered a generation of old people in dire need of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I’d presumed this a side effect from surviving the lean times of recent Chinese history. But now, meeting a third-generation, removed-from-the-Motherland self-confessed Chinese hoarder, perhaps a longer view was required. Five thousand cyclical years of floods, famines, warring kingdoms and the occasional despotic ruler had perhaps embedded hoarding into our DNA.

  I told Eddie I had driven over a conspicuously named ‘Chinaman Creek’ near Manbulloo Station earlier that morning. I’d startled—wasn’t it a racist term? I had gone online and learnt that Chinaman creeks were all over the country. In colonial times, these were places Chinese people likely lived or ran market gardens. Along with broken pieces of soy bottles and Qing dynasty coins that occasionally turned up in building sites or were excavated by metal detector-wielding grey nomads, they were signs of Chinese occupation of the land—if you only knew to look for them.

  ‘Is that rude?’ I asked Eddie. Did I feel offended? I wasn’t sure.

  He didn’t understand my question. ‘Manbulloo?’

  ‘No, “Chinaman”. Is that a not-nice term? Is that a racist term?’

  He ruminated on this. ‘I suppose I’m a Chinaman.’

  ‘So am I, then!’ I said triumphantly.

  ‘No, you’re a—’

  ‘Chinawoman!’ I said, laughing.

  ‘Or Chinalady.’

  We settled on ‘Chinaperson’.

  Eddie was a small guy, fit and mobile for his seventy-eight years, with a shrewdness camouflaged by a blurring, friendly stutter. He was well known in town. For decades he had run the general store and owned several properties in Pine Creek. During the heady gold-rush era, the town had over two thousand Chinese miners. Today just three Chinese people remained in this half-white, half-Aboriginal town: Eddie, his daughter and grandson.

  Eddie said in 1890s Brocks Creek, NT, his maternal grandmother Linoy Wong was the first in his family tree to be born in this country. I was boggled by the mere existence of an ABC during that period. For me, an ABC was someone from my generation, whose childhood had passed in neon prints, bowl cuts and hi-tops—the 1990s, not 1890s Victorian-era Australia swathed in folds of stiff silk and satin.

  ‘She didn’t speak English. She could understand—’ said Eddie.

  My jaw dropped a little. ‘Whoa, wait. She didn’t speak English? Even though she was born here?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Eddie had a thoughtful look. ‘It’s funny how she kept that all that time.’

  Trying to imagine Eddie’s grandmother—an ABC who was born, lived and died on these soils without so much as a ‘g’day’ having dropped from her lips—seemed to break my brain. It indicated how insular those Chinese communities must have been, plonked at the arse end of nowhere.

  During that period, the immigration process became so established a Chinese man could walk off a boat, be received by a Chinese labour agent and directed to Chinese lodgings, load up on equipment at Chinese-run shops and be ready to make his fortune within days. Communities were so large that workers could associate with other Chinese from their own district or village: thus, the Sze Yap men lived, worked and played with other Sze Yap men, just as the Sam Yap men did with other Sam Yap men. Each ‘village’ could operate independently, with its own general store, inn, doctor, cook, carpenter, shoemaker, fishmonger, baker and butcher, as well as internal systems of governance, arbitration and punishment outside the domain of colonial courts.

  As the supply of British convicts slowed to a trickle throughout the nineteenth century, a demand for cheap labour remained. Boatloads of mainly southern Chinese, indentured labourers, were lured to Australia by exaggerated tales of excellent work conditions and mounds of money to be made. They were known as coolies, or kuli in Chinese, and as I had learned with the pearlers in Broome, usually spent their first year just paying off the price of passage—there was good reason the word meant ‘bitter work’.

  Eddie’s paternal grandfather wound up in Pine Creek as one of three thousand Chinese employed to construct a railway line linking the town to Palmerston. Those old folks were tough. With no forklifts to do the heavy lifting, the foundations of pioneer-era towns were forged in back-breaking fashion: lift this, grind that, plant here, hammer there.

  I asked Eddie, ‘Do you feel Chinese, Australian or a mixture of the two?’

  ‘I feel more Australian.’

  I cocked my head. ‘You never had a sense of a mixed identity? You never felt any kind of confusion about that?’

  ‘No, no.’

  It seemed all Chinese Australians I met from these ‘old families’ in the Top End said something of the sort and shrugged, noncommittal, when I asked them if they’d ever felt like a banana—‘yellow on the outside, white on the inside’ (okay, so just me then).

  ‘The Territory is a very cosmopolitan place,’ Eddie said. Then he changed his mind. ‘No, no, it’s very multicultural.’

  There was safety in numbers. Here, the story of Chinese Australia was both long and healthy. It had never withered on the vine as it had elsewhere.

  Eddie’s father was called Jimmy. During his time, Chinese people weren’t allowed to work for the government, join a union or be a member of social and sporting groups like the Buffalo Club, and were often turned away from the main hospitals. They could, however, own businesses and buy property; Jimmy opened the Ah Toy store when he was just twenty years of age. Throughout his life Jimmy was loved by the town, remembered for giving store credit to families in need regardless of colour or creed, and even learnt to speak some of the local language, Wagaman. He was eventually awarded a Member of the British Empire (‘a great honour’, emphasised Eddie) for his services to Pine Creek and the broader Australian community.

  ‘And I’m very proud too,’ Eddie told me. ‘You know, I was in local government for a long time, fifty-five years, and on school committees and the national trust. I was awarded Territorian of the Year in 2005.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘So it’s in our genes. Dad’s philosophy is if you live in a place you should do your best.’

  By the time Eddie was born, Chinese businesses in Darwin had begun to move outside of their ethnic ghetto and into the ‘white’ areas of town. First- and second-born generations of Chinese Australians were more assimilated. Not only did they swap pigtails for short back and sides, eschewing traditional Chinese dress for local singlets and bushman shor
ts, but in time they also began to forget their ‘native’ tongue.

  Darwin’s lord mayor, Katrina Fong Lim, is fifth-generation Chinese Australian—an affirmation of our people’s incredible trajectory in Australia. And plenty of streets in Darwin are named after prominent Chinese Australian figures: Lorna Lim Terrace, Yuen Place, Cheong Street (named after Ah Toy’s grandfather Cheong Ah Yu) and Alec Fong Lim Drive (after Katrina’s father, who had also served as mayor of Darwin).

  Eddie could speak a bit of the Chinese language Hakka, which he’d picked up while living with his grandmother during high school in Darwin. But he seemed wistful at how that language was fading out of his family.

  ‘Your kids don’t speak Chinese, ay?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s a shame. I say ho man to them or jo shin—good morning and good night. I try to.’ He crossed his arms and sighed. ‘That’s something Mum and Dad said: “We mustn’t speak Chinese in front of the customers, they might think we’re talking about them.” I regret that now, because we lost it.’

  His dad was a ‘stickler’ for celebrating Chinese New Year, though, and his annual dinner would draw back all the family from across the Top End to their home town.

  ‘He was pretty old-fashioned in his way and a very hard taskmaster. He taught me some bad habits as far as “work, work, work” goes.’

  ‘You think that’s a bad habit?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, really, in a way it’s one of the reasons why my wife left me, I think. Which is sad, after thirty years of marriage.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘That was the hardest thing of my life. I should have moved on, which I haven’t done. That was 1998. Terrible, anyway.’

  Pine Creek was named for the area’s termite-resistant cypress pines; few remained, for they had proved popular as a building material. Over the past century, the town’s population fluctuated depending on local mining activity—in addition to gold, there had been uranium, galena, copper and iron ore mines. At the moment the town was home to just 328 Territorians, barely enough to fill a Sydney commuter train.

  Eddie had some errands to run but promised to reconvene with me later. In the meantime I decided to check out the town.

  I walked over to the local museum. Hanging on the wall was a black-and-white school photo of nine-year-old Eddie in 1947, a little Chinese Australian boy with his hair just as neatly trimmed and combed over as it was today. He was born in this very building back when it was a hospital, and brought into the world by the Northern Territory’s first flying doctor, Clyde Fenton. The corrugated iron building had had at least seven previous lives, including in the 1930s as staff quarters for what Eddie had told me was a nearby ‘half-caste home’—a term, he added, not used anymore because ‘that’s racial’.

  Ever since the Ah Toy store shuttered its doors in 2015, locals shopped in the Lazy Lizard opposite the town park. The Lazy Lizard also served as the local tavern, caravan park and two-pump petrol station. It was a typical outback supermarket, selling limited fresh food at exorbitant prices. I picked up a shrivelled cucumber sitting alone in a plastic tub, and dropped it after seeing the mental price tag of seven dollars. The nearest big-brand supermarket was a one-hour drive away in Katherine.

  Next door in the tavern section of the Lazy Lizard, the afternoon heat was setting in and drinkers were gathering like flies. I headed for the attached swimming pool, and as I crossed the floor two men leered at me. I tried to look, without looking like I was looking. They were around my age, sweat-slicked and sunburnt, and stared at me as if faintly aware they had outgrown the loutishness of their youth but didn’t know what to do with their half-lit desires. Boredom caused them to smoulder.

  The pool was barely long enough for three strokes. I was beginning to suspect that between the croc-infested waters of the north and the waterless red centre, nobody in the Northern Territory really knew how to swim. Pools were just there to dunk your body in: escape pods from the blistering heat and humidity. I slipped into the water and drifted about with my arms spread along the curve of a pool noodle. Mosquitos skated on the surface of the water, which wasn’t really cold enough to be refreshing. Nobody else was in the pool area, and I felt strangely exposed.

  I thought about Eddie being a workaholic—a trait he not only shared with his father but also mine—and of something the owner of a caravan park I’d stayed at a few days prior had said to me. I’d mentioned how surprisingly multicultural Darwin was; the man had cheerfully agreed but added a caveat that newer immigrants weren’t ‘as good’ as those of the past. ‘The Chinese and Greeks came here to work. But people like the Sudanese? They came to collect welfare cheques.’

  Disinterested in putting my spoon into that can of worms, I had kept my mouth shut. Plus, I had no knowledge with which to contradict him. But his comment made me think, god, Australians are so obsessed with how hard people work! Look at the way we lump ethnic groups into ‘good migrant’ and ‘bad migrant’ piles based on willingness and aptitude for hard yakka. Not that Indigenous people and ‘white trash’ are excused from such condemnation. ‘Dole bludgers’ are a go-to punching bag for Australian tabloids. This contradicts our supposedly lackadaisical national character. Perhaps it’s a hangover from our pioneer days in which the settlers either worked till their fingers bled, eking out something that barely resembled a life on this unfamiliar and dry continent—or they perished. It was and still is the fire in our bellies: a terrible, existential dread that unless everyone held up their end of the bargain, ‘project Australia’ would collapse into a heap. And, with one spirited gust of wind, it would simply disappear into the red and menacing soil that always and forever threatened to engulf every township.

  I wasn’t entirely exempt from this national obsession. What pride I’d felt in the Chung Wah museum as I read of Chinese immigrants distinguishing themselves as hard workers—in the past, as now. Boy, if there is anything we Chinese have been good at in Australia, it is working hard. Mining, labouring, market gardening, tailoring, fishing, construction work: you name it, we could do it, and in half the time a white man would take and for half the cost he would charge you. The problem, though, is that while this garnered us respect from some sections of Australian society, it attracted resentment and feelings of insecurity from the rest. Damned if you did, damned if you didn’t. How quickly you could get kicked back into the ‘bad migrant’ pile, with Australia’s first attorney general and future prime minister, Alfred Deakin, saying in 1901 of the Japanese and Chinese nationals living in Australia:

  It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us … It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance, and low standard of living that make them such competitors.

  In the pool I leant back and sunk my head into the water, feeling my long hair grow heavy and wet. Fuck work, I thought, as I swam in lazy circles. Fuck playing the good migrant. I had worked crazy hard at The Guardian and made myself miserable in the process. So many of my selfies from this trip seemed to capture a change I hadn’t been conscious of till now: an open expression with a breezy smile, a brightness to my eyes—I was happy. All my former colleagues were right now in the office, typing, tweeting, making and taking calls, writing important stories to be read by important people, while I was here, doing nothing. Just counting all the mosquitos dancing half drunk in a wordless blue sky. You fucking spoilt, lazy, immature, irresponsibly childless, disgrace to the nation.

  When I went back through the pub, the men were still there. ‘Hiiiii,’ the taller one called out to me. He was tapping the side of his beer glass, his face red with drink. I grunted something back.

  I met Eddie’s spirited daughter, Amanda, where she worked behind the cash register at the Lazy Lizard, and she offered to let me camp out in her front yard. It grew long with yellow grass and had a rusted playground set. She told me she was inclined to let people stay there and all sorts had passed thr
ough her hallowed ground—bike-riding French backpackers, an English couple whose car had broken down. I was grateful for her offer and struck again by the generosity total strangers had shown me on this trip.

  As I set up my tent I could see through Amanda’s chain-link fence. Across the road, the local alcoholics had gathered in the public park. No problem there, turning up for their shift. All the middle-aged women looked big and soft as clouds, and the men’s shirts were stained and incorrectly buttoned up. Everyone squinted and had missing teeth. They sloped around, aimless, although every now and then their energy perked up when a fight broke out. Some of them spoke in a local language, although they mainly spoke English.

  I had erected my tent and was sitting in my camp chair, writing in a journal, when I heard screaming. I looked up and saw, on the edge of the park, a middle-aged man yelling with an unhinged fury at a large woman—his woman, presumably—some distance away. ‘Come over here!’ he screamed, his tall frame rigid with anger.

  Pillowy and conspicuous in her bright red T-shirt, she was sitting at a concrete picnic table with another man. She spoke in a low voice, her hands loose in her lap, calm but overtly so—a well-practised stillness with a frisson of fear. She seemed aware of the cyclone on the horizon, and silently hoping that it might simply go away.

  No chance. ‘Come over here! Come over here! Come over here!’ He screamed the words with arms hanging stiff as rods by his sides. He seemed to be staring down a tunnel with nothing but her in it.