Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  When I served in Borneo my hair was shaved off. One day when I went to get water I took off my hat. Next thing I knew a bullet was fired at me—I had been mistaken for a jap. I then went back to my unit at Labuan Island and refused to go out again.

  Included was a black-and-white photo of Albert—a handsome Chinese Australian man dressed in a khaki uniform, wearing that famous slouch hat curled up on one side with the strap at his chin.

  Afterwards Eddie took me in his HiLux to the edges of Pine Creek, where the low hills were blemished with rocky piles of upheaved soil, evidence of gold rush-era alluvial mining. We parked by the side of a track, a short walk from what Eddie said was the entrance to an old mine tunnel. ‘There are quite a few ghost bats down there,’ he warned.

  The mine’s entrance was covered ankle-deep in leaf litter. I was only wearing thongs on my feet; as I nervously crept up the path, dry leaves crunching underfoot, all I could think about was a local snake I’d seen at the Territory Wildlife Park. The death adder is highly venomous, with a nubby tail and squat body dissected by thick sand-coloured bands. The park’s description had read: ‘By partially burying themselves in soil, sand or leaf litter Death Adders can conceal themselves perfectly. The end of their tail is used as lure to attract unsuspecting prey to within striking reach.’

  ‘No snakes?’ I called out to Eddie, who was several metres ahead of me, already at the mine entrance. Death adders, ghost bats … why was everything in the NT so ominously named?

  ‘Snakes?’ He looked back at me. ‘No, I doubt it.’ He had socks and a pair of crocs on his feet, and stood a little bow-legged in his shorts.

  The mine tunnel was just high enough for me to stand in, around two by two metres and ten metres deep. Mining in that era had been crude and painstakingly slow, done with heavy picks, a methodical chipping away. The miners would have looked nothing like Eddie today, wearing their hair in the Chinese fashion of the time, the Manchu queue: completely shaved but for a circle on the crown that was kept long and plaited.

  When gold was struck, word spread, and Australia developed a reputation in China as the New Gold Mountain—a sequel to the Old Gold Mountain of California. Where the European miners worked on their own or in small groups and concentrated on high-yield gold territory, the Chinese worked in highly organised groups that more methodically covered every inch of goldfield. Their thoroughness and cooperation yielded higher returns than those of the European miners. The Chinese also lived more frugally and, as they worked harder and longer, their success stirred resentment among the other miners.

  Eddie beckoned for me to come deeper into the mine for a better look at the pick marks on the hard rock walls.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said, looking at something coiled like rope in the darkness.

  ‘What?’

  I pointed into the mine. ‘That over there. Isn’t that a snake?’

  Eddie lifted up his right leg. ‘There’s no snake here.’

  ‘No, over there.’

  ‘This? This is a stick.’ He kicked at it.

  ‘No, that thing over there that looks just like a snake.’

  He finally looked in the right direction. ‘Oh that … yeah, that’s a snake.’

  We stared at it, stupidly. It was slender and smooth with glistening limey-yellow scales, unravelling from its coil. Its bluish head slowly rose and jabbed the air. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed to have a cranky expression.

  Eddie said of countless visits it was the first time he’d seen a snake in the mine. ‘You willed that snake to be there.’

  Despite his assurances that the snake would give us no trouble, I strongly objected to his suggestion we tiptoe past it.

  We returned to his ute and drove up the old Stuart Highway. It was bitumen but barely two cars wide, no good if you were to face-off the 200-tonne road trains that hurtled down the new Stuart every day. That new highway—much like the rest of the 21st century—had bypassed sleepy Pine Creek.

  As we occasionally dipped into small potholes, I asked Eddie if Chinese people up this way ever had relationships with Aboriginal people.

  ‘I can talk about it now,’ he said, swerving around one unusually large pothole. ‘Before my grandfather was married he had a child with an Aboriginal woman. There was no women around the place. That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?’

  I turned to him. ‘And what happened to that child?’

  ‘Apparently he was the spitting image of Dad. Not that many people know about that, but I don’t mind talking about it now.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of,’ I said truthfully, looking out at all the dry shrub whizzing past.

  ‘It’s a fact. But let me make this comment. In twenty years, might be longer, the Aboriginals have declined.’

  ‘The number of them?’

  ‘No, the standard of what they achieve educationally. It’s sad. It’s gotten worse.’ Eddie pinned it on the drinking. When he was young, Aboriginal people weren’t allowed to drink or be supplied alcohol, he said. ‘Even giving them a drink, I could be in trouble.’

  He felt many Aboriginal people simply couldn’t handle their booze. ‘They go crazy—they want to fight. That’s where the domestic violence comes in.’ His words seem to echo those of the horticulturalist I had met in Central Australia.

  In Darwin a doctor had told me that compared to non-Indigenous Australians, a higher proportion of Indigenous Australians were teetotallers—that is, they abstained from alcohol. However among the population that drank was a higher prevalence of harmful alcohol use, when compared to the non-Indigenous population.

  Eddie was sad to see that. ‘It’s terrible to say but some of the young people, they’d rather buy a can of beer or bottle of wine than buy a loaf of bread.’

  We drove deeper into the bush, past a mountain of garbage with a halo of circling hawks, and pulled a hard right onto a faded track leading into a scrubby bit of bush. We parked at what looked like a random spot at the bottom of a low hill covered in gum trees.

  This was ‘Chinatown’, said Eddie, although a century had passed since it had any residents. A short way up the hill, he pointed at a small square of broken concrete, explaining it was once the base of a small temple or joss house. I stepped around it, imagining it joined to four walls and a roof, with a shrine and burning incense sticks.

  Better preserved was a nearby can-shaped pig oven, larger than a washing machine and made of rocks and stones. Eddie explained how a fire would be lit at the bottom while a trussed-up pig, marinated in garlic, ginger and soy sauce, was hung from the top over the fire. The oven was covered with a lid and the pig roasted for hours until oily beads of fat dropped from its crispy skin, and the immigrants would gather for a Chinese New Year or Mid-Autumn Festival feast.

  I stuck my head in the oven to examine the cement. Eddie said it was made from crushed-up termite mounds, which I thought was pretty cool. If the Chinese were to be given their own totemic Australian animal, what better than the hardworking, stoic, industrious, family-orientated termite? Every colony is established by a king and queen who, like a six-legged Adam and Eve, give birth to millions of babies over many years. Much like Chinese society, termites contribute to a close-knit society through rigidly defined roles: workers gather food, babysit the young, care for the queen and build or maintain the nest, while soldiers defend the colony. Among a third group, the reproductives, are those destined to one day say goodbye to the colony, fly out into the big bad world and begin their very own colony.

  I didn’t expect to be so moved by this humble evidence of Chinese life in the early days of Australian settlement. Pioneer heritage sites had always left me cold. Now that I was here, I wondered if I’d never been interested in those crumbling sandstone cottages and lanolin-smelling pastoral stations because I’d never had any personal stake in them—they’d always felt like someone else’s story. But today I was face-to-face with the story of my people, on my lands.

  This pi
g oven and that slab of concrete from the joss house were enough to transport me back to 1890 and conjure up an entire scene: the hills cleared of trees and covered in tents or huts made of whatever material could be found—native bamboo, grass, paperbark, corrugated iron, canvas, hessian and timber—and thousands of Chinese men noisily cooking, drinking, praying, chatting, smoking, groaning from the toll being put on their bodies, carefully counting their hard-earned money.

  If it weren’t for Eddie, I would never have recognised the significance of these ruins. It was one thing to read in a history book that my people had been here since the gold rush, but seeing the physical evidence for myself instantly obliterated any sense that Chinese immigration was a new chapter in the country. This seemed to fortify my place in Australia—if not in the land, then at least in the nation-state.

  In her 1996 maiden speech to parliament, One Nation commander-in-chief Pauline Hanson said, ‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’ and that ‘they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate’. She didn’t acknowledge that my people had been threatening white Australia in a tradition with an almost 200-year history—‘as Australian as vegemite, only older’, as David Walker and fellow historian Agnieszka Sobocinska describe it in their book Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century.

  An American friend once told me that when he first moved to Sydney, having been under the impression Australians were white, he was amazed by the number of Asian people on the city’s streets. He then had an epiphany: why on earth should this continent be populated by white over Asian people? Australia is surrounded by Asia and many, many miles from Europe.

  From the very first Macassan fishermen to step foot on this continent over three hundred years ago, the people of Asia have only been kept out of this continent by explicit government policy. We have just as much—or little—right as Europeans to be here.

  ‘It’s a pity in time this is all going to erode away, with the rain and that,’ Eddie said, looking at the oven.

  I found a wire fence in a rusting tangle on the ground and just one small, square sign reading ‘Heritage Site No 8’ (no explanation beyond that) erected by the National Trust.

  ‘I guess nobody really comes out here?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not really.’

  I asked if his kids knew about the history.

  ‘They’ve been out here. I’ve shown it to them.’

  ‘Do you think after … It’s a bit morbid to say—’

  ‘After I pass on, are they going to remember where it is? Probably not.’

  All the other Chinese families that once lived in Pine Creek, including the rest of the Ah Toy clan—Eddie’s nine aunts and uncles, their descendants; Eddie’s other children and their grandchildren—had drifted off to greener pastures: those with universities, hospitals, supermarkets, airports, cinemas and furniture stores, and job prospects beyond pulling beers at the local tavern.

  After the intensification of anti-Chinese sentiment throughout the late 1800s, the implementation of the White Australia Policy had a devastating impact on Australia’s Chinese communities. Times got tough as Chinese workers found their services were no longer wanted at the wharves or on the Overland Telegraph Line, and specific state taxes were levied against them. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 effectively cut off the number of new Chinese immigrants when there remained a shortage of Chinese women, which meant existing communities in Australia were quickly isolated and ‘swamped’ by continuing waves of British immigrants. Many Chinese, facing discrimination and with no pathway to citizenship, decided to cut their losses and return to China.

  This will forever be a dark mark on the history pages of the Labor Party. Having come down with a severe case of Yellow Peril, they advocated unsuccessfully for an immigration bill that explicitly banned people based on race. They complained of the Chinese acceptance of low wages driving down the value of labour, of their disinterest in assimilating and inability to speak English, plus their seemingly inexhaustible energy, frugality, business acumen and habit of sending all that hard-earned money back to China. Labor used the language of eugenics in discussions of the bill—‘Let us keep before us the noble ideal of a white Australia, a snow-white Australia if you will. Let us be pure and spotless,’ suggested one party member—and fuelled an ugly debate that went beyond maintaining Australian working standards.

  Such sentiments weren’t quickly forgotten by the Chinese Australian community. ‘That’s why Dad didn’t like them—he never supported Labor,’ said Eddie, as we headed back to the car.

  ‘And now, to think that Labor has Chinese people in it!’ I said. ‘Like Penny Wong.’

  ‘She’s quite sensible.’

  ‘Yeah, I like her.’

  Eddie pointed to an unmarked patch of bush that he said was once the Chinatown cemetery. I peered about but couldn’t see anything except a tall curtain of straw-like grass that had gone silver-blond in the harsh sun. Some eucalypts were spaced out from one another. It hadn’t rained in yonks, apparently.

  Eddie said there weren’t any bones in the cemetery. ‘You know how the Chinese would bury the dead there, and they would exhume the bones and take them back to China?’

  I said I hadn’t known of that tradition, and he seemed surprised. I asked, ‘So, back in the day all the old Chinese people wanted to be buried in their homeland?’

  ‘Yeah. All the graves are there but there are no bones.’

  Throughout the trip I had visited several heritage cemeteries, and found they were always organised into sections denoted by race and religion. Each group buried their dead differently. The Christians used marble gravestones decorated with cool grey-white doves, conch shells and cherubic angels. Visitors left stacks of pebbles on the headstones of Jewish graves. The most colourful graves were the Aboriginal ones, reminding me of Mexico’s Day of the Dead with lots of brightly coloured fake flowers, strings of lights and kitschy candles, tile mosaics of the Aboriginal flag and the Mother Mary, and mother-of-pearl inlays. Sometimes the dearly departed’s favourite things were placed around the grave—for example, next to the photo of a young man were his striped tie, baseball cap, old tape player and a bottle of Coke.

  In the Chinese sections, gravestones weren’t only engraved with the person’s name and the year they died, but also the Chinese province and village from which they hailed. Much like in Aboriginal cultures, ancestor worship is an important part of Chinese culture. At one heritage cemetery, over a hundred years old, where more than three hundred Chinese people were buried, an austere grey stone shrine read in Chinese characters: ‘Respect the dead as if they are still present’.

  With neither bones nor gravestones remaining in the Chinese cemetery of Pine Creek, nature had reclaimed the space. Still, I dedicated a moment to all those old people who’d died in this place. Had they died feeling frightened or homesick? According to historian Glenice Yee, while many Chinese returned to their homelands after their working stint, ‘just as many died a lonely death in the new land, often from starvation and sickness, totally disillusioned’. Were they disappointed that visions of fortune to be made had proven nothing but yellow specks of fool’s gold in their palms? Surely in their final hours they yearned for the home and family they would never see again. Throughout the passing years in Australia, the memory of autumn leaves yellowing in Zhongshan or water gently lapping on the banks of the Pearl River had probably remained steadfastly bolted to their hearts. As they exhaled their last breath, in a country where they never really belonged, perhaps they found relief knowing at least their bones might one day rest in the lands of their ancestors.

  But what about the generations of Chinese Australians that followed? For Pauline Hanson acolytes, patriotism is expressed defensively: Go back to where you came from! I could fling the words right back in their faces: Go back to where YOU came from! The reality is, most of us simply don’t have a place to go back to. Eddie didn’t know exactly where his fa
mily’s village was in China. Ah Toy wasn’t even his Chinese family name—for official records, his father’s parents had erroneously put their family name, Chong, as Jimmy’s given name and his Chinese given name, Ah Toy, as his family name; a clerical error that would inadvertently produce generations of Ah Toys in Australia.

  Like for Eddie, for many of us non-Indigenous Australians our ancestral village—whether in Ireland, China, Vanuatu or Germany—has faded from descendant memory. We cannot sing its songs. We cannot cook its foods. If you were to show us a photo of its waters or hills, we’d hold it in our fingers as a light-winged curiosity fluttered across our faces but no great yearning would surge in our hearts.

  Yet we live in an Australia alienated from the landscape. We huddle nervously in towns and cities where it’s a piece of piss to forget whose land this really is. In this wired-up, globalised economy you really can live without a firm sense of national identity or shared culture. We may pride ourselves on being global citizens, but what does that mean beyond ‘global consumers’? The whole notion of Australia fades in vitality when you can use an iPhone designed in America, made with German, Korean and Japanese parts, assembled in China and purchased on a recent holiday to Hong Kong. Australia never had much of a chance to assert itself as distinct before it was happily swallowed up by the crisscrossing lines of globalised travel, trade, pop culture and telecommunications.

  Because of this, non-Indigenous Australians have always known or feared that we are nothing but shitty, distorted photocopies of compatriots in our respective motherlands. A strong vein of cultural cringe is threaded through all that we do. We read British novels, watch American films, practise Indian spirituality and eat Southeast Asian food. We love Europe for its history even though we live in a country with the world’s oldest living civilisation, and we know more about the Jewish genocide in Poland than we do about those that occurred in our own backyard; we decorate our houses with images of foxes, cats and rabbits—feral animals that have decimated local populations of bilbies, bandicoots and quolls. We face out to sea because our minds are always someplace else.