Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  She, on the other hand, avoided his gaze. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted back, clearly trying to sound nonchalant.

  ‘Just fucking come over here!’ he screamed.

  She glanced at him but quickly turned back away, as if his look had been corrosive as acid. ‘Why? Why do I got to go over there? I’m talking to my uncle here.’

  The man screamed again but this time strode over with long, fast steps until suddenly he was almost in striking distance. In a panic she got up and moved away, just in time, so that the table stood between them. He screamed yet again, and something cold and bitter slithered in the pit of my stomach.

  The uncle said something I couldn’t hear.

  The man seemed to cool down and said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay.’

  More words were spoken. Eventually the woman relented and followed the angry man out of the park, her tender shoulders hunched over—a woman who walked everywhere, yet went nowhere.

  Eddie had told me that when Australia’s policy of forced child removals was in full swing, Aboriginal families around here would smear charcoal on their light-skinned children in the hopes this might be enough to prevent them from being taken away. In many cases, it wasn’t.

  In a 1997 national inquiry into the Stolen Generation, survivors often refuted suggestions they had been neglected by their biological parents. They contrasted familial love with the horrors of foster care: canings, beltings, solitary confinement, endless church services, a lack of clothing, a lack of food, and many reports of sexual abuse. Girls were taught to scrub, launder and cook, in preparation for a life of domestic servitude. Boys were trained as agricultural workers, with one survivor removed in the 1930s reporting, ‘When anybody come to pick up a worker they used to line us up and they’d make you flex your muscles. If you were big and strong they’d pick you—like a slave market. I was sent out at eleven. I worked there for seven and a half years, never got paid anything, all that time.’

  As Stolen Generation survivors emerged from institutionalised care, traumatised and cut off from their families, they would often engage in self-destructive and addictive behaviours, suffer in their mental and physical health, and find themselves in and out of prison. Having been deprived of a stable, loving family home, they often were unable to develop stable, loving family homes for their own children. And so the perpetrators of the Stolen Generation created a heartbreaking chain of intergenerational trauma.

  I couldn’t forget one submission I had read from the inquiry, by a woman placed in the Parramatta Girls’ Home in the 1960s when she was thirteen:

  That’s another thing that we find hard is giving our children love. Because we never had it. So we don’t know how to tell our kids that we love them. All we do is protect them. I can’t even cuddle my kids ’cause I never ever got cuddled. The only time was when I was getting raped and that’s not what you’d call a cuddle, is it?

  A deep melancholy came over me as I sat opposite the park and watched those damaged people drink in a dedicated day-by-day, bottle-by-bottle effort to muffle their pain.

  Of course, intergenerational trauma isn’t a problem unique to Indigenous Australia, even if the ongoing impacts of colonialism increase the acuteness and pervasiveness of their suffering. My mind swirled with the many dysfunctional families I knew—black, white and Asian, in the country and in the cities, my own family—scarred by some combination of divorce, domestic violence, sexual abuse, alcoholism and mental illness.

  We were so alone in this world.

  That evening I went to a local pub for dinner with Eddie, Amanda and her teenage son, Blaise. I assumed the bartender was Aboriginal, but her accent revealed her to be Maori. She knew the family’s drink orders off the top of her head. ‘Yeah, well, there’s only seven people in this town and three of them are here,’ she said, when I expressed my surprise. Her cheerful sarcasm seemed quintessentially New Zealander.

  ‘The three most important people in town,’ corrected Amanda.

  We took our drinks to a laminate table with four chairs, then ordered from a window looking into the kitchen. We were chatting when our food came out. I had ordered for myself the country pub classic, chicken parmy, and to share there was a plate of oysters topped with chilli mayo.

  Blaise was in his final year of school. He was fine-featured like an Asian pop idol and seemed good-natured and well spoken—not glued to the phone like most teens. Every morning he took an hour-long bus ride, one way, to reach school in Katherine. Next year he wanted to work in the fitness industry and planned to move to Brisbane where his adult siblings lived. The family doubted he would ever return to live in Pine Creek. So there you had it, the end of the line for Pine Creek’s illustrious Chinese Australian heritage.

  ‘Can you believe you’re this family’s fifth generation Chinese Australian?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m only half,’ he said, with a small smile.

  ‘We’ll still claim you,’ I said firmly.

  Amanda looked at me. ‘You know when I see an Asian person I have these stereotypes in my mind—you know, that they’ll speak with an accent or what have you—because I assume they’re not Australian.’ She was talking about her impressions of me when we first met. I liked how she was straight-shooting.

  But I was baffled by her comment. Here, of all places? ‘But there’s such a long history of Chinese Australians in the Top End. I assumed you’d be more used to ABCs.’

  ‘But I know all the ABCs up here,’ she said, sipping on her soda water. ‘I’m related to most of them. So if I see an Asian I don’t know I assume they’re not Aussie.’

  I mulled on that as I chewed a mouthful of chicken. It was strange realising our concepts of an ABC were so different.

  In Sydney, the ABCs of my generation were so numerous it was impossible to know them all, let alone be related to them. We were all born to a second wave of Chinese immigrants who had migrated post–White Australia Policy from the 1970s onwards. Our parents didn’t wear Akubras and drive Toyota HiLuxes: they spoke English with thick Chinese accents, their fridges were full of pickled vegetables in jars, and their plastic-lined drawers permanently smelt of Tiger Balm. Of course, as children we never saw our place in history. And even now, in Sydney, any trace of our gold-rush forebears was so faint, so forgotten and disconnected from direct ancestry, that it was hard to feel like anything but pioneers in Australia’s Chinese story.

  But the earliest chapters of that story remained visible in regional historical towns like Pine Creek, whose golden years had come and gone. Those chapters hadn’t been buried beneath layers of more recent history as they had in the cities.

  Throughout my childhood, meeting an ABC significantly older than me had been so unusual that I still remembered the first time it happened, when I was seven. He was a postal worker, and I already recognised—with a sense of impending doom—the irony of being weirded out by a man in his forties who looked Chinese yet spoke in an entirely Australian accent. To this day, I remain unsettled by a vision of myself in the future as a Chinese amah, cracking open a cold stubby, with a three-tonne LandCruiser parked in the driveway.

  That said, meeting Eddie had helped on that front. Maybe it wasn’t so weird after all.

  Eddie spoke about how his father had gone back to China at least five times and visited their ancestral village. ‘I remember it was called You Gum Boo, near Hong Kong, but a bit north on the Mainland. He met about nine cousins, and it made him really happy to have found his roots.’

  ‘Have you ever been?’

  ‘I’ve been to China but I’ve never been to the village.’

  I took out my phone, offering to look it up on a map. As a former journalist, I liked solving mysteries; plus, I could read and type some Chinese. Unfortunately the family didn’t know how it was written in Chinese, and the internet didn’t offer much on any place called ‘You Gum Boo’ spelt in English, so eventually I gave up.

  Afterwards, Eddie and Blaise headed home while Amanda invited me to
a leaving do for her colleague at the Lazy Lizard. As we crossed the park, Amanda bristled at the sight of some young people drinking. She called out one of them by name. ‘You’re not supposed to be drinking there.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re going home,’ the young fella said.

  ‘You’d better clean up after yourself.’ She turned back to me. ‘Otherwise they just leave all their cans about. I know all of them because I went to school with their parents, so they’re like my nephews.’

  As we approached the pub we saw an older, petite man with a salt-and-pepper beard talking to a tall and dashing white couple—tourists, I assumed. Something about their shining teeth and the way their clothes, casual yet fashionable, hung so attractively off their trim figures signposted they weren’t from this one-horse town.

  Again, Amanda addressed the diminutive local by name. ‘You know you’re not meant to do that!’

  He looked up at her, then abruptly scampered off. I was amazed at how quickly he had departed—all we could see of him was his backside fleeing into the night.

  Amanda frowned and motioned for me to keep walking. ‘He was trying to get them to buy him beer.’ Pine Creek had strict purchasing limits on takeaway alcohol, enacted through the NT Liquor Commission but Amanda said it was the Aboriginal community who had called for it.

  Inside the pub, the alcohol was flowing. Amanda introduced me to her workmates, a mixture of locals and young European backpacker-types. Everyone was busy drinking hard liquor and beer, flirting with one another and playing pool. I wondered what was so different about this drinking session compared to the one I’d seen in the park earlier that day. Was it that most of these people were white? That they were young? That they were laughing and smiling, not crying and fighting?

  A group of us sat around a wooden table in the outdoor section of the pub. I found myself seated next to a plumber in his early twenties who said he worked in a family business. He was from Katherine and only in Pine Creek for one night, having just finished a job in a satellite Aboriginal community.

  ‘What was that like?’ I asked.

  He arched his eyebrow. ‘Have you been to an Aboriginal community?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and wondered where this was going.

  ‘So you know how horrible it is, then,’ he said, leaning back.

  Not wanting to concede, I said, ‘They’re all different.’ And they were all different, albeit more in degree than in kind. Different in their degree of isolation. Different in their independence from mainstream Australia. Different in their sense of place, language and cultural practices. Different in the frequency with which chaos erupted and dysfunction ruled.

  His white skin was flushed pink from work in the sun. ‘We saw two guys, on the street, openly smoking bongs. Everyone is either drunk or stoned and all their yards are filled with rubbish.’

  He didn’t seem vitriolic against Aboriginal people, just incredibly frustrated. It was an almost textbook response by non-Aboriginal people who interacted with these communities. They were baffled, annoyed, saddened and most of all frustrated by the lives led by some Aboriginal people, which to them seemed illogically self-destructive and without direction, purpose or meaning.

  The plumber also hated these remote-area jobs because they usually meant spending an entire day either digging a hole or watching one being dug. Small parts of the job were a two-man operation; otherwise, he and his colleague took turns in the digger and sleeping under a tree.

  I let the conversations of the young people wash over me as I slowly sipped my beer—more out of politeness than any real desire.

  A fit Aboriginal guy with a squashed boxer nose took a seat opposite me and next to Amanda. He said he was originally from Port Hedland, which was ‘shit’, and I agreed with him on that point.

  ‘I’ve been to Roebourne,’ I said. ‘I know some Ngarluma people there.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ he said, then turned to Amanda. ‘She’s been to where my people are from!’

  He said he didn’t know Tyson. Now he lived here in Pine Creek with his mother’s side of the family.

  I nodded. ‘So, what do you do for a living?’

  I immediately regretted asking.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  I didn’t know why I’d said it—I’d already learnt it wasn’t something people out in the country ever asked. Whenever I did happen to mention I was a journalist, country people just nodded blankly and had no follow-up questions. Out here, most people had jobs, not professions. Nobody found discussions about how you earned your dough interesting. But it was a difficult habit for me to break—in the city I’d found, at least among white-collar professionals, your career defined you and shaped your interactions with strangers.

  I noticed, though, he hadn’t said it in a way that was ashamed, but with a small smile acknowledging that not working was considered socially unacceptable.

  ‘How do you like that?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say.

  He looked down at his glass. ‘It’s great. I get to spend time with my family, with my nan.’

  ‘I’m kind of doing nothing right now and you’re right, it’s great.’

  He looked back at me. ‘I mean, I am a worker. I’m just not working right now.’

  ‘What do you do for money?’

  ‘You don’t need money here. I just live with my mum and nan.’

  ‘Do you look after your nan?’

  ‘Sure do. I’m very close to my family.’ He asked me, ‘What do you like doing in Sydney? Are you into club music or what?’

  I almost laughed because it seemed like such a stilted way to start a conversation. But of course, it wasn’t. Out here it was standard stuff for party conversations. I almost didn’t know what to say; I mumbled something about listening to a lot of hip-hop lately.

  ‘That’s cool, I like all kinds of music,’ he said, nodding slowly. He changed tack. ‘You’re cool, Monica, you’re smart. Earlier today when a bunch of us saw you in the pub, we thought you were a Chinese girl, you know,’ he mimed looking tiny and meek, ‘that you couldn’t speak English. But listen to you? You sound just as Aussie as us!’

  I was a bit stunned by that but recovered enough to say, jovially, ‘With Amanda here, I would have thought you’d be used to ABCs.’

  A sentimental look came over his face. ‘The Ah Toys are a really good family. Growing up I was always at their store, and they always treated me right.’

  The relationship the Ah Toys had with their blackfella neighbours resembled nothing like the awkward dynamic between Aboriginal locals and fly-in, fly-out whitefella workers residing in remote Aboriginal communities, which was often rife with resentment and uneasy formalities.

  The Ah Toys had history in this community—not sixty thousand years of history, but history nonetheless. With one Aboriginal family in Pine Creek, the Ah Toys could trace four generations of friendship, spanning a century. It began with Eddie’s father, Jimmy, and a Wagaman man called Don. Every day after school Eddie would play cricket, barefoot, with Don’s son Lennie Liddy, on what used to be a dirt track just in front of the family store. Then Jimmy and Don’s grandkids and even their great-grandkids continued that tradition of friendship. It was one of the charms of small-town life. The Ah Toys were, if not part of the mob, at least part of the furniture of Pine Creek.

  ‘Amanda is like our aunty,’ the Ngarluma man said, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘You mean “sister”,’ she replied, with an arched eyebrow that made me laugh.

  I continued to take note of the differences between these bushie ABCs and us concrete jungle ABCs. They drove utes; we drove fuel-efficient smart cars. They knew how to catch a mean barra; we knew where to find a decent Korean barbecue open after midnight. They weren’t afraid of snakes; we weren’t afraid of Sydney peak-hour traffic. But what we shared—besides an unnatural fearlessness when it came to investing in the Australian property market—were family histories where poverty was always just a blink awa
y.

  The next day Eddie took me to the building that housed his family’s old bakery, which had stood in the middle of town for over a century. Alongside was the house his father grew up in. Its thin concrete floor had cracked in parts like a slab of chocolate, but the cypress-pine frame held up well to the sheets of grey corrugated iron, streaked with red rust, that had been nailed for walls. The floor and walls were polka-dotted with sunlight escaping through holes. I was surprised to find it was quite cool inside.

  Eddie said, ‘I think my grandfather was about forty when he got married to my grandmother, who was just a young girl of twenty. They had these ten children and all lived in this place. Imagine that! Only well water, no town power, no TV in those days. There was nothing.’

  It had several rooms but provided hardly enough space for twelve people, at least not by today’s standards. Eddie pointed out a disintegrating wood stove propped up on cinder blocks, and a rusting mint-blue Coolgardie safe where long ago the butter was kept cold. There was an outhouse, and they’d lit their house with hurricane lamps—town power in his grandfather’s day was as much a reality as the national broadband network was in Pine Creek today.

  Eddie had never lived in this house. By the time he was born, his father had another home in Pine Creek. But he was no stranger to living like sardines in a tin. During World War II, he and his extended family were evacuated to Adelaide and crammed into a four-bedroom house. They shared one toilet between nineteen family members. ‘Two of my uncles on my mother’s side were in the army, Uncle Herb and Uncle Chew, and then Uncle Shin was in the air force, one of dad’s brothers,’ Eddie said.

  At the Chung Wah museum, I’d flipped through a World War II honour roll of Chinese Australian ex-service personnel, recruited to stave off advancing Japanese forces howling down on Darwin in sixty-four air raids. If there was a rule preventing non-Europeans from serving in the Australian forces, it was patchily applied: some Chinese Australians were fobbed off, others reluctantly accepted, and still others conscripted when recruit numbers became lean. And of course, in Broome I had learned there had been men like Tina’s father who had been deliberately conscripted due to their race. Chinese Australian enlistment wasn’t without its complications, as I’d learnt from the story of Sapper Albert Que Noy’s story in the museum display: