Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  A very new country occupying the homelands of a civilisation with a 60,000 year history poses a considerable challenge. Australia still has one of the highest immigration rates in the world, and each new wave of immigrants adopts the colonial mindset of the first British invaders: an unease with the Australian landscape and a failure to integrate into Indigenous Australian culture.

  Unlike those Chinese immigrants in Australia of the past, the jar in our hands has no soil from the motherland and we have no address to send our bones back to.

  ‘The old people wouldn’t have seen this as their home,’ I mused to Eddie, feeling vaguely sad as we climbed into his truck.

  But his mind was on a different track. ‘I think that’s probably how they smuggled the gold back—with the bones.’

  I laughed. ‘Really?’ Chinese people! Pragmatic as they were sentimental, to the very end.

  ‘That’s what they say.’

  On my last trip to Arnhem Land I had flown into its central hub, Nhulunbuy. This time I was staring down the barrel of a lonely 729-kilometre drive up Central Arnhem Road, only a short section of which was sealed. Having now driven many remote Outback roads, I was keenly aware of the difference that quality made over quantity. I’d probably cover the first 150 kilometres of sealed highway in an easy-as forty-five minutes. After that, when the road turned into corrugated dirt, with plenty of bulldust and gravel scattered about like loose marbles, my speed would reduce to a painful sixty to seventy kilometres per hour. All up I was committing myself to at least ten hours of white-knuckle driving.

  Having farewelled the Ah Toys in Pine Creek, I had spent a few days camping on my own in nearby Umbrawarra Gorge Nature Park before I set off from Katherine for Nhulunbuy. It was the pointy end of a Tuesday afternoon, and the sun was coming in at an angle. With the road hemmed in on both sides by magical old-growth forest, barely touched by agricultural or industrial development, its surface was puddled with white sunlight and dark shadows. I found it difficult to make out the bumps, rocks and potholes, and the branches that stuck up like spikes in a trap. Enough people were passing by to be hailed for help if I needed it—still, it would be a long and expensive tow-truck ride back to a repair shop.

  I was heading into Yolŋu Country in the north-eastern corner of the NT, a region famous for its isolation and as a stronghold of Aboriginality. The Yolŋu are leaders and innovators in self-determination. They have inalienable freehold title over these lands, except for a small section excised for a bauxite mine.

  As a tourist it was the most heavily regulated region I’d visited so far. To come here I’d had to submit multiple permit applications with detailed travel plans, and to comply with strict restrictions on which areas could be accessed.

  Yolŋu Country is one of those rare places where every square metre of land feels strongly nourished and animated by Aboriginal society. This conveys a sense of what the rest of Australia might have been like before Europeans wrested control of the land and its people. The Yolŋu people’s relationship to the land remained mostly intact throughout the turbulence of colonialism. They are reputed in Australia for their rich art, the health of their languages, their pristine land and their contribution to Aboriginal land rights, and for producing the 1990s rock band Yothu Yindi, singer-songwriter Gurrumul, and actor David Gulpilil.

  On my trip, Yolŋu Country was one of the few destinations I had been to before. Two years ago I’d come here for work and stayed at a hundred-person ‘homeland’ called Mäpuru. It was surrounded by miles of misty stringybark and pandanus forest, accessible only by air or a dirt track that was at least a twelve-hour drive from Darwin. Annual wet season floods cut it off from the rest of the world.

  Many Yolŋu live in similar tiny settlements dotted throughout the bush: connected to their traditional Country, disconnected from mainstream Australia. That separation provides a relatively high degree of control over their lives and land. They are free to be themselves, practise their culture and manage the influence of mainstream Australia.

  It will be a long time before I forget stepping off a light plane that had taken me to Elcho Island, just off the Australian mainland, in 2014. I found it disorientating to be surrounded by Yolŋu men, women and children with very dark skin, speaking a language I didn’t understand and for whom English may be their fourth or fifth language. There, I was a balanda or ‘non-Yolŋu person’—I felt like a foreigner in my own country.

  Or is it my country? Officially, every part of Australia falls under the custodianship of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander group and is therefore someone else’s country. Yet it rarely feels that way to me day-to-day on the street, like it did for me in Yolŋu Country. The instant decentring of the European perspective forced me to question long-held assumptions. What language should we be speaking in this country? What does the picture of a ‘typical’ Australian person look like?

  There’s a slogan often shouted at rallies for Aboriginal rights: ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’—the amazing thing about Yolŋu Country is that it makes this phrase feel less like a prayer and more like reality.

  I had returned to Arnhem Land to learn about the Yolŋu people’s long trade with the Macassans. The most commonly told story of Australia begins with Captain James Cook planting a Union Jack on the east coast on behalf of the British Empire in 1770. It is a story that, like all national mythologies, has tidied up a messy reality: in fact, the first documented landing by a European was that of Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon on the western side of Cape York Peninsula in 1606. And for many Aboriginal Australians living on the northern coast, encounters with Macassan fishermen—not Europeans—ended their long isolation from the rest of the world.

  By at least the 1720s, the Macassans’ four-month-long visits had become annual. These trepang-hunting fishermen essentially established a sustaining bilateral trade relationship with northern Aboriginal Australians, connecting these First Australians to the global market’s supply chain. Some estimates suggest that a quarter of the Chinese trepang market was supplied by northern Australia during the nineteenth century. The practice went on for at least two hundred years, if not longer—a period that rivals the continent’s European colonial history in length.

  On the road, there was no way I’d make it to Nhulunbuy—the 3000-person regional hub and largest town of north-east Yolŋu Country—before sunset. Apparently there was a campground called Mainoru a third of the way up the highway. A road sign told me Mainoru Station was seventeen kilometres away while Mainoru Store was nineteen kilometres, with arrows pointing in different directions. I wasn’t sure to which I was headed. Some little grub had spray-painted on the sign: ‘IS A FAG TAKES UP THE ASS FROM’. The two people’s names had been scrubbed away, but no one had bothered removing the rest of the sentence.

  The land was swooning in a woozy pink dusk. At this time of day I wanted to have my tent set up and be kicking back in a camp chair, wondering what I’d done so right in my past life that I deserved such a sweet existence. Instead I was muddling my way to this campground, and I’d probably have to drive in the dark.

  I heard another car approaching and decided to hail it down for directions. It was a jumbo van with enough nicks and scuffs to prove it had seen plenty of Outback trail action. When it pulled up beside me, the passenger window rolled down. An older woman with a toddler on her lap looked at me with a tranquil smile, a hint of curiosity crinkling her brows as if I were some odd but non-threatening bird—a look I’d grown used to. I asked about camping for the night, and the man in the driver’s seat, presumably her husband, replied, ‘Follow us.’

  With that, the van shot off. They were driving much faster than I had been, although the road seemed to improve in this section. I struggled to keep up while maintaining a gap—the van was blowing parachutes of white bulldust that hung around like smoke and drifted into the forest. The sun was now invisible behind the tree line, and everything was turning purple. As the road became harder to see, I p
rayed I would avoid a twilight tailspin just metres from the finish line.

  We pulled up to a low building with a turning circle and gated fence. The old man stuck his arm out the window and pointed to it.

  I waved and said thank you. They looked to be getting on their way, veering back towards the main road, but must have changed their minds. The van was parked, and passengers began to disembark: a young man, an auntie, a little boy, two teenagers—and so it went, on and on, family members piling out as if from one of those absurdly puny circus cars from which a hundred clowns emerge. They stretched their legs and some of them looked at me curiously, including the young boy who was shirtless and barefoot.

  ‘Hello!’ he said, giving me a toothy grin and toying with a lock of hair, nervously.

  ‘Hello!’ I said back.

  ‘Where you from?’ asked the old man. He didn’t smile but still seemed friendly.

  ‘Sydney.’

  He nodded. ‘You here for work?’

  I still didn’t have a good answer for that. ‘Not really. Just travelling.’

  ‘You can stay here tonight.’

  ‘What are you guys planning on doing?’

  ‘We go to Nhulunbuy tonight.’

  The town was nearly five hundred kilometres away. I was amazed they were attempting such an epic drive this late.

  A middle-aged white man emerged from the store. He wore a polo shirt tucked into a belted pair of khaki shorts, the sort of formal bush-wear a politician might don while touring regional Australia. When he reached the gate he said he was not the owner, rather, just a guest helping out. He seemed to know the place quite well. Inexplicably, he looked annoyed and spoke curtly. ‘How many of you? Them too?’ He nodded towards the family without looking at them.

  ‘No, just me.’

  ‘Hey,’ said the old man, ‘can we buy a torchlight?’

  ‘What’s wrong with your headlights?’ asked the white man.

  I was astounded: both at how he implicitly understood why they needed a torchlight, and that the family were going to drive through the night without working headlights.

  Strangely, he still hadn’t opened the gate so that I could drive in. And then I realised he was deliberately keeping it shut so the family wouldn’t enter.

  After more back and forth, he relented and opened the gate for all of us. ‘Be quick,’ he said sharply to the old man.

  I got back in my car and drove slowly through the gate, mindful of where some of the Yolŋu family were walking, including the little boy who followed his grandfather in. The kid had picked up a stick and was using it to poke at creepy-crawlies in the dust, oblivious to the tense exchange that had just passed.

  I didn’t know what to think. As a former serf of the retail industry, I knew what it was like to want to close up shop when you were done for the day. Everyone needed downtime but when you were one of a handful of stores on a remote bush highway, you probably had passersby banging on your door at all hours. On the other hand, the man’s defensiveness seemed positively colonial. I couldn’t shake the uncanny sense I’d stepped back to a hundred years ago when the settlement still had a frontier moving into the most remote corners of the country. There, small nervous groups of balandas lived in whimpering outposts on what was still, squarely, blackfella territory. And one of the first things balandas always did was erect a fence and barricade the door.

  I spent that night sleeping uncomfortably near a noisy power generator. The next morning I went to take a shower and found myself in a long queue of cane toads. They were phenomenally ugly—covered in warts, utterly humourless, staring at me with an unimpressed expression from the grass, inside the shower cubicles, atop the wash station. They were everywhere.

  I pushed off from the campground and hit the road as birds roused the sun. Two hours passed and the scenery hardly seemed to change: columns of stringybarks and termite mounds set against a blue sky iced with spurts of cloud, and a dirt road with no end zooming like an arrow towards the horizon. There was nothing but bloody bush to look at. My eyes began to go fuzzy. This was worse than watching paint dry—not only was it mind-numbingly monotonous but it also required my unremitting attention. Maybe it was like watching paint dry while balancing a jug of water on your head.

  A few animal encounters helped break up the tedium. I stopped when I saw on the side of the road a feral buffalo, or gatapaŋa as they are known here. It was the size of a tractor with a wet, grey nose and a pair of very thick horns that curled at their tips. The first eighty pioneers of this species arrived at these shores in the mid-1800s, imported for meat from Asia to Melville Island and the Cobourg Peninsula. Since then they had gone feral with 150,000 gatapaŋa ravaging the Top End, each weighing up to 1200 kilograms. They cause soil erosion, chew through native vegetation, and pollute critical swamps and springs that out here are like water-system nerve centres.

  This gatapaŋa did not seem at all intimidated by me or my car. It stared me down as if contemplating philosophically: To charge, or not to charge? That is the question. Then, very much in its own time and with a look that said, Manymak, okay, you lucky this time, missy, it turned away. Eventually, all I could see was its enormous mud-covered backside receding into the bush, its tail swishing to-and-fro nonchalantly.

  I kept driving and saw plenty of feral cows. I’d just spotted a pair jostling aggressively, when I startled—I’d caught sight of my shadow in the car and what appeared to be a gun pointing to my head. I whipped around. Of course, no one was there and certainly no gun.

  I thought, What if I die on this trip? My final words might be what was written in my journal, and of late that was something about how flatulent I was feeling. And maybe that was fine, really, because as my siblings knew all too well, flatulence was one of my defining features.

  On and on I drove. I had wild thoughts. I imagined myself as Queen of Australia and how I’d give all the land back. I wouldn’t even discuss it with the people first, I’d just hand back every inch of this brown continent. I’d say to all the traditional owners: ‘This has been hanging over our heads for over two hundred years, and it’s just never felt right.’

  I even considered how it could be executed. I could give back all Crown and public land within ten years and put a 99-year expiration limit on all other leases, after which ownership would revert to the traditional owners. Then I’d go about dismantling my own rule. It would be the end of ‘Australia’. Every non-Indigenous Australian would immediately become an alien, and we’d have to negotiate our right to remain in the country with individual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, and accept living under their rule. We’d have to adapt to their world, rather than the other way around.

  Stringybark, stringybark, anthill.

  Stringybark, stringybark, anthill.

  I thought about that some more. Good for some, but a lot of people would flee. Imagine that—a mass exodus of Australians back to their ‘mother countries’: pale-faced families standing in long lines at the airport, watery-eyed and dishevelled in shorts and thongs, clutching hastily packed suitcases and their dog looking miserable in a crate. What reception would they receive in the UK, in India, Lebanon and China, when they turned up on those foreign shores without the correct paperwork? Oh, what irony after their decades of treating asylum seekers so poorly.

  Stringybark, stringybark, anthill.

  Crunch!

  Ugh, big stick.

  Stringybark, stringybark, anthill.

  Then again, before it got to that point there would probably be a military coup. I’d be dethroned, if not killed, and the handback would never happen. Generations later, nothing would have changed, and Australians would remember me as ‘the tyrant Queen Monica’ who had failed, spectacularly, at doing something utterly unhinged.

  That was the thing, I thought—you couldn’t rush change. There was a right time for everything. Whenever a defining moment or leader of change appeared to burst onto the horizon, hurtling history into a new epoch, behin
d it were many years of grinding work to convince people and communities this was the correct course.

  I wondered how the different Indigenous nations would respond if wholesale, no-strings-attached land handbacks were offered to them. Back in Sydney I once joked with a Gomeroi friend that when the nouveau riche Chinese had finished buying up all the land in Australia, I could negotiate on their behalf to give it back. He’d said, ‘I love this idea, but we aren’t greedy so you guys can keep some too.’

  In Nyunggai Warren Mundine’s book In Black + White: Race, Politics and Changing Australia, the Bundjalung provocateur and former Labor Party president wrote of attending the 2012 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues in New York, and feeling frustrated at discussions of sovereignty he called ‘highly theoretical’. In one, delegates argued that the foundation upon which Europe made land claims during colonisation was built on a Christian edict that, in a single stroke, the contemporary Catholic Church could overturn and send former colonies crumbling. ‘What then?’ Mundine asked. ‘Are you going to expel millions of Australians and Americans who don’t have indigenous ancestors from their countries? Where will they go? And how will these new sovereign nations function? How will their economy work after they’ve expelled ninety-seven per cent or more of the population? How will they defend themselves, provide essential services?’

  Throughout his career, Mundine has advocated for adapting Indigenous Australian life to a postcolonial reality, often in a manner that rubs leftie-activist types up the wrong way. In his book, he emphasises the way his ancestors not only used the land for ceremony and sacred tradition but also as an economic asset: to hunt or harvest food; build shelters, boats and tools; and source goods to trade with neighbouring groups. Mundine argues that under current circumstances, a true expression of the Indigenous Australian value system—in spirit rather than a slavish adherence to the letter to their law—incorporates multibillion-dollar resources projects on Indigenous Australian land, and unleashes through business ventures the ingenuity, creativity and power of Indigenous people.