by Monica Tan
Samuel’s other clientele were the grey nomads. He said a lot of them pushed their no-longer-young bodies too far on the hiking trails. ‘I feel sorry for them. They work their whole lives, and now they want to travel and enjoy their retirement, but they’re too old to do lots of the walks. That’s why I travel now, while I’m still fit enough. Even if lots of people say I should be more serious: get a mortgage, work more, get married—you know, settle down.’ Changing topics, he asked, ‘What do you like to do for fun in Sydney?’
Dang, people out here love their hobbies. ‘I don’t know, I worked too much,’ I said.
He didn’t respond. I was noticing he liked to let my words settle. And he spoke economically as if every word was a small sip of water on a long walk through the desert. I wondered where this was going. He was cordial and not flirty but attentive—gentlemanly, you could say.
It was late and I didn’t want to impose. ‘Let me know if you want to go to bed.’
‘Oh no, that’s okay.’
We spoke about fishing, and I said I didn’t want to leave the NT until I’d caught a barra. It seemed to almost be a rite of passage for fishermen in the Top End.
Barra-fever has been immortalised in the lyrics of a Slim Dusty song, ‘Plains of Peppimenarti’, which I’d heard playing in a Katherine supermarket and been written for his Ngangikurrunggurr friends living in Peppimenarti, a small community in the Daly River region of the western Northern Territory.
‘We should throw a line in the ocean tomorrow,’ Samuel suggested and stood to find a good spot.
Not one puff of cloud blemished the sky. Every inch of beach was highlighted with ice-blue moonlight, and all the edges of the land had sharpened.
Samuel’s eyes narrowed—he was inspecting a wing of rock unfolding from the end of the beach. He seemed the sort for whom self-worth rested on getting such practical things done; it probably gave necessary backbone to otherwise shapeless days. The rock ledge looked a precarious place from which to fish, but perhaps with some luck we could scale its rough surface and send our hook over the noisy whitewash.
All of a sudden, he turned to me. ‘Shall we go down to the beach?’
‘Why not?’
Our feet squeaked on the sand. My mind was clear as the night sky, and the same tides that agitated life under the sea seemed to pulse through my body. I walked a few steps behind Samuel, who was gazing out to the horizon, and heard him say without turning around, ‘How can you go back to Sydney after all of this?’
We came to a spot that was roughly the centre of the beach. Without conferring we folded down until we sat side by side on sand that was bright as paper.
Even though I knew here on our little beach we were penned in by an ocean lined with crocodile teeth, and by that steamy jungle infested with pythons, scorpions, spiders and sandflies, I felt perfectly safe. There was no way anything with sharp teeth or horns could attack without first being seen from a million miles away on the moonlit sand.
I could barely make out the dark horizon of water merging into the black night. Here we sat at the edge of Australia, looking out to the rest of the world that in the 1700s came rushing into the Yolŋu universe. A funny thing about the ocean: was it the bottomless ditch that protected us from foreign contact? Or the blue bridge that connected us to it? With Australia’s south-east dominating our national story, novelist Arthur Upfield once described this northern region as ‘Australia’s backside pointing at the Asians’.
Behind me lay a continent that was still mostly silent and sparsely populated. At the time of Federation, those qualities were a sore spot for a young and desperately insecure white Australia. After all, ‘if white had replaced black because black was not developing the continent, why should yellow not replace white on precisely the same grounds?’ wrote historian David Walker in Anxious Nation, wryly using ‘the blunt language’ of the late nineteenth century in his exploration of colonial Australia’s long fear and fascination with a rising Asia.
I looked over at Samuel, who was laid out lengthways on the beach, sipping his beer. His face was turned to the water and bore his usual serious expression.
I had picked up a few small clues he might be interested in me: he was attentive, he had asked how old I was and, the clincher, whether I had a significant other. Sitting on the cool sand with my legs stretched out, I looked up to the night sky and basked in this moment alone in a secluded paradise with an easy-on-the-eyes stranger.
Beaches are, by their very nature, romantic. They are soft, cool and wet. A place for lovers. And at that point, I just thought there was no way I was going to crawl back into my tent frustrated I hadn’t tried anything. My mouth felt soft, and I was smiling when I said something of no importance, and my hand reached out to rest on his.
It was as if some spring door had snapped open. I could almost hear the restless rattle of the cage—for although I had still been mid-sentence, he bolted upright.
He put his mouth over mine, and with that two solo travellers discovered sometimes it really is quite nice to have some company, every now and then.
The next day I drove around Yolŋu Country with Samuel in his Troop Carrier. At 2400 kilograms, it was a heavyweight car—a real tank, a bush-bulldozer—that showed me how relatively underprepared I was for danger and disaster in my Toyota RAV4. In suburban Sydney where streets were pinched in by parked cars, and the horizon masked by trees, buildings and hills, the RAV4 had felt like a big car. Upon purchase I had quickly ‘blessed’ it by scratching it on stone walls as I backed out of my mother’s narrow driveway. But out here in open country, the titanic sky seemed to weigh down on my little RAV.
Over these past couple of years of going bush, I’d experienced a few close shaves on the road. The most heart-stopping had been on a very remote dirt track, drowning in puddles the size of swimming pools after some unseasonal rain. I had driven at least three hours from the main road when I got bogged in mud. For twenty minutes I skidded and sweated cold bullets as the wet brown slop came up to the bottom of the car door. Then, by some miracle, I edged onto firmer ground and came unstuck. I was still facing another three hours of similar driving, and from there didn’t risk heading straight through the pools and kept at least two wheels on the dry bank—which was studded with thick, sticking-up branches, rocks, termite mounds and small shrubs.
‘You could have gotten a flat tyre!’ said Samuel, after I told him about this from the passenger seat of his car. He shook his head, his face full of disapproval.
‘And yet, I didn’t.’
‘I hope you’ve learnt your lesson.’
‘The only lesson I’ve learnt is that no matter what I do, everything turns out great,’ I said. I knew my flippant attitude would needle him. He could be a bit uptight. ‘I bet if I’d been more prepared, something actually bad would have happened to me.’
‘Yeah, and you would have been able to get out of it!’
After four months on the road, I’d become accustomed to sharing it with blustering five-cabin road trains and four-wheel drives hauling caravans the size of a Hong Kong studio apartment. The way Samuel’s troopy was able to steamroll through the bush without any care impressed me. Samuel, on the other hand, was amazed—but not impressed—by the fact that not only had I tackled so many rough and remote roads in a humble RAV4, but also done so without a SAT phone, car snorkel, toolkit, air compressor or puncture repair kit, or even a proper spare tyre as my car was designed to only carry a saver tyre; Samuel carried two spares.
I liked other features of his set-up that were less about survival than convenience. What I called ‘luxury items’ included his axe, car fridge, canvas garbage bag that fitted around one spare tyre, solar panels, LED strip lighting, cast-iron camp oven, and pull-out drawers installed under the mattress in his troopy. He was always considering what upgrades could be made, and next on the list was installing a whirlybird through the roof to suck out heat.
It’s customary when a pair of Outback nomads meet an
d spend time together, for them to eventually give each other long and detailed tours of their set-ups and custom-made fit-outs. I’d seen elaborate tents that unfolded from car roofs and self-assembled with the push of a button, and pull-down flaps revealing fully kitted mini-kitchens. One nomad I’d met had jacked up his ute with $20,000-worth of installations, including heated water for showers, a top-of-the-range stereo system, a coffee machine, and a fuel tank big enough to cross two state lines without a pit stop. It was a ritual I took immense pleasure in, though it inevitably highlighted how simply I was travelling (‘my car, my tent, my junk’).
Samuel and I were exploring the western side of the Arnhem Land peninsula, thick with open eucalyptus forest and laced with rivulets that perpetually split like veins. These forests teem with native frogs, reptiles, birds and mammals. Australia is in the top five nations for its number of flora and fauna extinctions, but north-eastern Yolŋu Country is a happy exception to this decline, with wildlife here relatively intact. There are turtle nesting areas and seabird colonies of international significance, and both the endangered northern quoll and gove crow butterfly can be found here.
The area isn’t without ecological threats, though, including the invasion of the evocatively named yellow crazy ant, the gatapaŋa, the spread of weeds, commercial fishing—and visitors, like Samuel and me, scarring the earth with monster trucks.
‘What’s that over there?’ he said, bringing said truck to a stop and peering through the bush. ‘I might have a Captain Cook.’
‘Huh?’ I asked.
He winked at me. ‘Captain Cook, a look.’
‘Ha! Teach me to speak Australian.’
‘It’s ’Strayan,’ he said. ‘By the time you go back to Sydney you’ll meet all your friends in a pub and say, “Man, I’m dry as a dead dingo’s donger.” And they’ll all wonder what the hell you’re going on about. Then you’ll say, “I need meself a Richard Gere.”’
‘Richard Gere,’ I mused aloud. ‘A beer.’
‘There ya go.’
Samuel had an impressive bank of colourful Aussie rhyming slang that he dropped regularly in conversation. Later I collected all my favourites on a back page of my journal:
Make like a tree and leave
They’ll charge you like a wounded Brahmin
I’m so hungry I could eat a horse and chase the rider
It’s windy enough to blow a chain off a dog
Banging like a dunny door
Hard as a cat’s head
That last one made me laugh: ‘A cat’s head is hard,’ I said.
In the words of Samuel, it was hotter than a flat screen in a pawn shop. Thankfully we’d stumbled upon a tranquil stream to cool off in called Wathawuy. As it was the dry season, the water was barely deep enough to come up to our chests and just wide enough for two, but so clear you could see straight to the bottom. At least there was no danger of a saltwater crocodile launching from the water like a surprise missile attack.
The surrounding walls had a similar crumbly texture and white colour to the ochre I’d seen on the Lurujarri Trail. Every so often the level of the stream bed dropped in a set of tiny waterfalls, over which delicate golden orb-weaving spiders built sticky, intricate webs.
As we waded about in the cold water, Samuel and I pinged softly between the walls of the stream. Together we followed the natural current of water, then were swept into a small eddy that gathered near a submerged rock. Bubbles slid along the edges of our skin. Samuel positioned himself onto the rock, which was flat and smooth as a bench, leaning back against the stream wall and stretching out his legs. He pulled a face and complained about feeling sore from his workout the day before.
‘How on earth did you do a workout? I can’t imagine we’re close to a gym right now,’ I said. I held on to one of his brown arms like he was an anchor and let the rest of my body drift about in the wavering water. He had thick shoulders and coarse, tanned skin.
‘I just lifted tree logs.’
I found that image profoundly funny.
Remembering how unsatisfactorily I had answered his question about what I liked to do for fun, I asked about his hobbies—besides working out in pre-colonisation jungle gyms.
‘Camping, four-wheel driving, fishing and drinking beer.’
‘Drinking beer? You can’t count that.’
‘Why not? I sure practice it a lot and I’m pretty good at it.’ He thought for a second. ‘Actually, I’m not that good at it,’ he said, looking sheepish.
Later, he showed me a photo on his phone of his troopy. His steed made of steel stood proudly in front of an epic Northern Territorian backdrop of craggy mountains and sweeping sky. He was thinking of getting the photo custom-printed on some pillowcases and a duvet cover. ‘What do you think of that idea?’ he said.
I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic. ‘I think that’s an awesome idea,’ I said with a grin.
He nodded, satisfied it was the right way to go.
He was a long-time subscriber to Australian 4WD Action magazine and, when it became clear I was uneducated about the finer points of four-wheel driving, asked me with surprise, ‘Don’t any of your friends have four-wheel drives?’
‘No.’
‘People in Sydney do own four-wheel drives,’ he said.
‘Not the kind of people I know,’ I said. ‘They all live in the inner-west where none of the roads are wide enough to own a four-wheel drive. If you tried to drive this troopy down the street I used to live on, you’d take out everyone’s side mirrors.’ Come to think of it, I knew more people who couldn’t drive at all than owned a four-wheel drive.
‘Well, there you go,’ he said. ‘But you like camping.’
‘I’m transitioning.’
‘Good for you.’
Later that afternoon, we continued our explorations and came across a prime fishing spot. A full-bodied stream funnelled into a gap, tumbled down a staircase of rocks, then abruptly turned left where it widened and the water became flat and calm again. A firm patch of ground jutted into the water like a natural jetty and bore a warrior paperbark with a thick, solid trunk. It stood alone, having stamped out any other saplings, with arms shooting rigidly towards the sky so that its leaves guzzled all the precious sunshine.
Samuel stood under it, sipping a tinnie and looking into the turbulent water. ‘I’m going for a swim first,’ he said.
‘Are you crazy? There could be crocs here.’
Having to maintain constant vigilance to the presence of salties as I travelled the Top End was a real pain-in-the-arse. I’d been warned never to use live bait and always fish at least ten metres from the water’s edge or off a bridge out of reach. The most terrifying piece of advice: never return to the same fishing spot twice in a row or at the same time every day, because salties are clever enough to spy on your habits; just as you let your guard down, they snatch their opportunity to turn you into fresh carpaccio.
Despite his threat to jump in, Samuel’s feet were still firmly planted on dry land, with his head tilted down staring at the waters. Rather than repeat my warning, I changed tack and said, ‘If you really want to do it, do it already.’
‘Well, now you got me scared,’ he said, looking up at me.
I shook my head, amused. ‘If a dude had been here with you rather than me, you’d both be in the water by now.’
One of few people to survive a crocodile wrestling match was Australian environmentalist and philosopher Val Plumwood. In a gripping essay, ‘Being Prey’, she documented one rainy afternoon in 1985 she spent alone in a red, four-metre, fibreglass canoe exploring the isolated backwaters of Kakadu National Park. Initially, she wasn’t perturbed by the sight of a crocodile in the water, believing ‘an encounter would add interest to the day’—until the creature began to strike her canoe. On the verge of capsizing, she saw the degree to which she had underestimated the situation. She was shocked to realise she was, quite simply, prey—juicy and nourishing.
She tried to l
eap into the lower branches of a paperbark, only to be seized at the groin by the ‘red-hot pincer grip’ of the crocodile. She described the roll as ‘a centrifuge of boiling blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped’. She was death-rolled three times before she took advantage of one of the intermittent rests and scrambled away. With fat, tendon and muscle visible in a wound on her left thigh, she knew she was gravely injured. Yet she found the willpower to limp for hours through the bush, drawing on formidable navigation skills, and reached the edge of the swamp where she had the best chance of being found. She was discovered by a ranger who had noticed her absence and gone out to search for her.
Plumwood was an ecofeminist and sophisticated critic of how the human world, through agriculture and industry, had brought the natural world to heel—and how we viewed its existence as solely to maintain the health, safety, longevity and pleasure of our species. Over centuries of perfecting this master–slave dynamic, with few exceptions we live presumptive of our transcendence from the animal realm. Crocodiles joined a short list of animal outliers. That they’re still occasionally able to kill a human challenges our place as supreme top predator and our authoritarian control over the natural world. This is what makes them so terrifying and so subversive.
When Plumwood encountered that crocodile and in a split second saw herself through its ‘beautiful, flecked golden eyes’, her immediate reaction was one of stunning denial: she was a human being. In our anthropocentrism, humans are always accorded more dignity than raw meat home-delivered on a canoe-platter. Alas, such ‘desperate delusion’ split apart as Plumwood hit the water, and she glimpsed the world for the first time as if from the outside looking in: ‘an unrecognisable bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, indifferent to my life or death’.
