Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  I was beginning to wonder if my fantasy of handing back the land didn’t come from a place of respect and integrity, but rather from a pervasive feeling of frustration. Reconciliation felt too hard and too messy. Indigenous Australians suffered too much in our world, and their numbers were too small for there to be hope that non-Indigenous Australia might change and incorporate their worldview into our own. Some Indigenous activists feared that reconciliation was nothing but a Trojan Horse designed to sabotage their resistance to absorption into the mainstream.

  Ours was an abusive marriage marked by incarceration and power inequality. We had no common goals, and we didn’t share the same values. It was simpler, better, for both parties to get a divorce. But if Indigenous people got to keep the house, where did that leave the rest of us but kicked to the kerb with no place to go?

  Stringybark, stringybark, anthill.

  Trying to keep my mind from slipping into a stupor, I played Yothu Yindi’s album Tribal Voice on my car speakers. The band’s biggest hit was 1991’s ‘Treaty’, sung in both English and Yolŋu, and accompanied by both traditional rock instruments and Yolŋu instruments such as the yiḏaki (didgeridoo). The song was composed by Yothu Yindi in collaboration with balanda musicians Paul Kelly and Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett. It’s more than a clarion call for Aboriginal self-determination: it proposes that great meaning emerges from the meeting of Western and Aboriginal worldviews, like two long-separated rivers joining and running as one.

  The idea that both parties could be better together still seemed radical to me. History seemed to show us otherwise—Indigenous people had suffered so much since colonisation, and non-Indigenous people rarely saw value in integrating their concepts into our worldview. But perhaps there was another way to be, over the horizon.

  The road changed colour. Sometimes it was chalk-white, then yellow and sandy or pink as salmon. In areas rich with bauxite, it took on an almost Agent Orange hue. The bush continued to stutter out lean stringybarks like bars keeping me prisoner. (And as I was planning to drive back out on this road, I knew I would curse every pothole and stray rock again in a week’s time.) At least I knew that beyond the haunted forests visible from the road, this land was fringed by mangrove-covered tidal flats and plenty of clean white sand beaches that, like the edges of a bathtub, sloped gently up from turquoise waters.

  My mind was muddy with delirium when a horse bolted in front of me.

  I swerved and my car slipped. For a second the universe lurched to the right. I regained control of the car and squeezed the brake, coming to a stop several metres ahead.

  The young horse had been nothing but a blur of chestnut, ribbons of blond mane streaming behind it. I stared into the bush, but there was no sign of it.

  I had been on autopilot, my eyes so steadfastly glued to the road that I’d failed to take notice of what was happening on either side (‘tunnel vision’—I could hear Tyson tsk-tsking me). Spooked, I was sure I’d missed hitting the horse by inches.

  Earlier that morning I had hit a medium-sized bird with the hunched shape of an elderly man leaning on a walking stick. I had been driving at the speed limit of 130 kilometres per hour, and the instant I saw the bird I was gripped by dread—I knew I was going too fast to stop in time. From my rear-view mirror I saw the car had clipped it and sent it into a heartbreaking tumble, a stream of tawny-orange feathers flying into the air. I had no intention of hitting anything that large again.

  I took a few deep breaths. When I felt calm enough to drive, I restarted my engine.

  After a pit stop at Nhulunbuy I headed to a remote campground a friend had tipped me off about. ‘Paradise on earth,’ he’d called it. I veered off the main road onto a dirt track that headed to the sea through dense coastal retja (monsoon vine forest). Bats swooped down from the sky and wallabies tore away in fright.

  This was Yirritja land. Of the two moieties Yirritja and Dhuwa, every Yolŋu person belongs to the moiety of their father, and is required to marry someone from the other moiety—that is, their mother’s moiety. Kinship law is further complicated by clan groups and three-tiers of generations: grandparents, parents and children.

  This Yolŋu system of governance, known as gurruṯu, encompasses not only human beings but the entire Yolŋu universe—including the land, sea, ancestral beings, plants, animals and elements, as well as clan groups—all split into the two moieties. Rights and responsibilities are distributed and a social protocol written along the lines of the gurruṯu’s internal structures. In the people’s fidelity to the gurruṯu, order is established while ego, greed, pettiness, chaos and individualism brought to heel.

  Much of this I had been taught by an impressive, young Yolŋu filmmaker, Ishmael Marika, based at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala. We’d met in 2014 during my first trip to Yolŋu Country, and subsequently stayed in contact. At the centre he had shown me a pair of painted panels, twelve-feet tall, lit dramatically in a darkened room. They were created in 1962–63 for a Methodist mission church, with designs sacred to the clans of the Yirrkala region: eight from the Dhuwa moiety and eight from the Yirritja. Ishmael explained to me, ‘Church people used to think our culture was evil. But in our view, this is our bible and church—it give us discipline and respect to the other people or to other nations.’

  The panels, painted by eight artists from each of the two moieties, including members of Ishmael’s family, communicated Yolŋu sacred Law to the broader Australian public. Beyond their artistry, they are a political declaration of sovereignty emphasising the connection of the Yolŋu people to the land. The panels are regarded in mainstream Australian history as the first significant statement of Aboriginal land rights, and came at a critical time. In early 1963, Prime Minister Robert Menzies gave the tick of approval to a bauxite mine in an area excised from the Arnhem Land reserve—without consulting the Yolŋu people.

  On the road to the beach, I thought about those panels and how fortunate I’d been on my travels to see so many significant pieces and sites of Australian history, in such remote corners of the country. The pleasure of seeing them was increased by the knowledge of what vast distances they had required me to traverse.

  Through the endless hours of driving, I’d been holding my breath, terrified that each time I veered into a dip and the whole car shuddered I had pushed the poor thing one step too far. With every strip of heavily corrugated road I imagined all the teeth-chattering vibrations loosening screws, nuts and bolts. Surely, at some point my abused RAV4 would collapse into a heap of metal with me sitting on top, a useless steering wheel still in my hands.

  I almost cried with joy when I reached Ngumuy Beach. I parked in the small turning circle at the end of the track. From out the window I could see it was an incredible beach: a quick breath of sand taken between the stanzas of pronounced burnt-orange rock headland. An ocean accompaniment was playing on an infinite loop—first, the muffled explosion of a well-travelled wave connecting with the land, then the giggling, girlish champagne fizz as it collapsed and spread out on the sandy shore. The other side of the sand was barricaded by sprawling forest that stayed lush and green by sipping at permanent water soaks.

  There were only two camp spots in a clearing, just a few metres back from the intimate beach. One was large enough to host two families and set deeper into the retja, while the smaller, nicer spot had ocean views but was occupied by an imposing troopy. Shame—I had hoped to have the beach to myself.

  Still, I decided to introduce myself to whoever was driving that monster truck. Not something I usually did, but to access the beach I had to cross through their camp so it seemed rude not to say hello. I just hoped they were the quiet type.

  ‘Hello?’ I called out.

  A man stepped into view. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  Whoa.

  ‘Hi,’ said the handsome man.

  Perhaps I’d caught him off guard, for he didn’t smile. In fact, he seemed to close his mouth as if he didn’t want to interrupt
me. I felt as though I should have prepared something to say and had disturbed him for no good reason.

  Just say something.

  ‘Just these two spots then, eh?’ I asked. He looked around my age or a few years older, well built without being brawny. His ash blond hair had probably seen some sun.

  ‘I think so.’

  I nodded. Shit, I’ve forgotten how to speak. Breaking eye contact, I looked to the ground and wondered when I’d last showered.

  ‘Are you driving on your own?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup. All on my own.’

  I snuck a glance at his set-up. He’d pulled up a camp chair next to a cheap fold-out table and a circle of rocks around some half-burnt logs. A small shovel was standing erect, planted next to the fireplace. No tent, so I guessed he slept in the troopy.

  When was the model-like leggy brunette girlfriend going to drop out from the back of the troopy? Handsome men like him always had a model-like leggy brunette girlfriend hovering about somewhere.

  ‘Are you afraid of buffalo?’ I asked, grasping at straws for conversation.

  He frowned. ‘The buffalo?’

  He was standing bare-chested with his arms crossed. He’d make a good television policeman, I thought.

  ‘All those big-arse buffalo roaming the jungle! I can’t stop picturing their pointy horns gouging my tent in the middle of the night. I asked a guy in town about them. He said the Yolŋu believe the danger times are at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. And if you see one, you’re meant to run straight into the ocean.’

  He stared at me and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Then I said to this guy, “But there are crocs in the ocean!” And he said if you see one of those, you’re meant to run up a tree. Also, keep a log burning on the fire between the ocean and your tent, and watch out for snakes.’

  God, why isn’t he saying something?

  ‘In short, get ready to do a lot of running,’ I said.

  B-boom, fizz went the ocean. Somewhere, far off, a bird cried out.

  ‘He also said don’t worry about them too much, or you’re just inviting them to appear—but, ha-ha, too late for that!’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  No girlfriend had materialised. I guessed it was just him and me then.

  I coughed. ‘I probably sound a bit crazy.’

  ‘Well, you’ve made it this far,’ he replied, cool and polite.

  He introduced himself as Samuel. He was a remote-area health worker based a few hours out of Darwin. It was common for remote-area contracts to involve rotating shifts: three months on, three months off. Much like with fly-in, fly-out mine workers, the assumption was that your real life was somewhere far, far away, so you could only be convinced to work in Nowheresville with the promise of plenty of time off. He’d spent the past three months travelling through the NT.

  The sun had ducked behind a low bank of cloud and would not be seen again today. ‘Well,’ I said, chewing my lip, ‘guess I’d better go and set up before it gets too dark.’

  ‘Come by for a beer later, if you want,’ he offered.

  Our camp spots were separated by vegetation: a childlike scribble of roots, branches and vines, tendrils thick as skipping rope, growing vertically, diagonally and horizontally. The area had two wooden platforms that looked wide enough for me to put my tent on.

  I chastised myself for that mortifying display. And god, how retrograde was my fetish for conventionally good-looking, Anglo, true-bloody-blue Australian alpha males? (And from whom my affection was rarely returned.) For a non-white woman like me, being with a man like that seemed to offer instant membership to Team Australia; a seat next to both the ruling patriarchy and ruling racial majority. Was that attraction an unconscious expression of hatred towards my own culture? I thought it no coincidence that since learning to accept my culture and with exposure to Australia’s Indigenous cultures, I’d had a few romantic escapades with Asian and Aboriginal men. But old habits die hard.

  By the time I unpacked my gear, the night was sinking like an deep purple balloon deflating over the Earth. By the feeble light of my head torch, I sat cross-legged on the wooden platform and ate forkfuls of undercooked pasta, thinking dumb things like, If marriage were based on looks alone, I’d marry him tonight. Perhaps I was on a secret-camera reality show. I could already hear the voiceover: ‘Two single people meet on a magical beach in remote Arnhem Land. Will sparks fly? Find out on the season premiere of Babe Island.’

  I was still feeling stupidly giddy when I heard something. It wasn’t the bright swish of wind or a bird launching off a branch, but a rustling that was steady and rhythmic. It could only be a creature moving through the forest towards my campground. I shone my head torch in the direction of the sound and waited for two pointy horns to slide out from the wall of vegetation. What was I meant to do again when I saw a buffalo? Run into the ocean? Stand still like a tree? Ack! I couldn’t remember.

  But I was wrong. No swaggering buffalo appeared. A very long snake slithered from the thick carpet of leaf litter. It was far bigger than the one I’d seen at Pine Creek—at least two metres in length, so probably a python and likely non-venomous, although I had no desire to test that assumption. In the dark it looked olive or grey, with stripes.

  I thought of how the Maḏarrpa clan in the homeland of Bäniyala have a Dreaming story about a lightning snake called Burruṯtji. I’d seen depictions of this story at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre. He is found in the continuously shifting sandbar of Baralatj, an area of floodplains, south from here, that drains into the northern section of Blue Mud Bay. Come the beginning of the wet season, the rains flush out the stagnant dry season waters of Baralatj and push them over the sandbar towards the ocean. As Burruṯtji tastes the fresh water, he rises up on his tail and spits lightning towards the cloud-filled sky. Fresh water mixes with sea water, and the lands of the Dhuwa and Yirritja moieties are submerged as one. All manner of life is revived in a time of turbulence, energy and fertility.

  I fumbled for my phone to take a photo of the snake. When the flash went off, the creature froze and its rustling stopped. It raised its nose ever so slightly, as if to say, How bloody rude of you.

  Neither of us moved. A tense Mexican stand-off.

  Eventually, convinced I was nothing but a nuisance, the snake continued on its way. It was swallowed up by jungle on the other side of the campsite.

  I hopped down from the platform and returned to my neighbour’s camp spot. Somehow I had the sensation that snake was slithering under my clothes, on my skin. The man (whose name I’d forgotten) had a fire going and was leaning back in his camp chair, one foot casually resting atop the planted shovel. He now wore a fitted T-shirt and a pair of glasses. He was only visible as a well-drawn silhouette, cast by the half-light of the fire and the polished moon on this clear night.

  He looked at me, again without smiling, and asked, ‘Would you like a beer, Monica?’

  There was something oddly formal about the way he said my name. After all, who else could he be talking to? There was no one but us and the odd python for miles.

  ‘That’d be awesome.’

  I put my mug of tea on the ground, and he passed me a cold can of cider from his car fridge. Having convinced myself he was some combination of gay, married or plain not interested, I was feeling calmer and more myself compared to earlier, when I’d been in the grips of lust-induced hysteria.

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot your name,’ I confessed.

  ‘It’s Samuel,’ he said.

  We spoke about his work in remote communities. He’d seen it all: alcohol abuse, unhealthy diets, cigarette addictions, child neglect and domestic abuse—the worst of which was a father who had been raping his daughter. Samuel said the NT had some of the most stringent mandatory reporting requirements in the country, and that was a good thing. He didn’t approve of welfare and mining-royalty dependency and said that nobody in these communities ever did anything with their lives, except for
a few motivated individuals who did everything.

  ‘I started out wanting to make a difference, but now I’m not so sure what good I’m doing,’ he said. ‘It would be better if this job was being done by someone in the community. They’d know the culture and language and could integrate the care with local bush medicine.’

  I added, ‘And they’d actually live there all the time instead of the community bringing in FIFO workers.’

  ‘Yeah, instead of right now: where’s Samuel? Sitting on a beach.’

  I asked if all the garbage in Aboriginal communities annoyed him. He said he couldn’t understand why, if someone loved their country so much, they’d leave all that rubbish everywhere. Once he had asked an Aboriginal guy, who replied dismissively, ‘That white man things’—even though he’d been the one to drop it. It really did frustrate Samuel.

  I smiled. ‘You know, I have a theory. In the end, what gets to burnt-out balandas in Aboriginal communities isn’t the domestic violence or the drinking or the depression in the community. It’s the rubbish. The rubbish is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.’

  Personally, I have a high tolerance for rubbish because throughout my childhood my parents regularly took me back to their home town in rural Malaysia. And as an adult, I’d spent four years living in China including visiting many areas which remained impoverished. In those rural areas, rubbish is everywhere. In places where plastic culture remains relatively new, one realises that tidily disposing of trash is a social responsibility that has to be inculcated. Doing so takes time and resources. After all, in the not-so-distant past almost all objects were reusable, organic and sustainable; only with the advent of plastic did such words come into existence. In Australian cities, for decades we’ve been trained like dogs to ‘do the right thing’—altogether unlike the residents of these remote Australian communities. Also, many of these places don’t have rubbish collection services.