by Monica Tan
Samuel turned to me, dejected. ‘Shall we call it a day?’ The sun was fading, and it was time for him to concede defeat. He picked up the esky while I scooped up the tackle box and we trudged off, wordlessly, back to the car.
He turned down a path too early. ‘Hey, I don’t think that’s the way!’ I called out. He ignored me and continued to trudge on. I went the correct way and had to wait for him by the locked car as he bush-bashed through, stomping in irritation. He fished his keys from his pocket and we climbed back into the car, still in silence. I paid no attention to his foul mood; to me it was nothing but the squalling of someone else’s baby.
Before starting the engine, Samuel took off his sunnies and put his glasses back on. A change of clothing revived his attractiveness in my eyes.
‘You look so good in those glasses,’ I said. ‘You’re like Superman. A Crocodile Dundee Superman without your glasses, then you’re all sophisticated Clark Kent with them.’
He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Why are you buttering me up like this?’
As we drove, the crowds of gum trees and lean cathedral termite mounds dissolved into charcoal night. Samuel switched on the headlights so that a few metres of dirt track were thrown into white relief. He also had the radio on, which was hissing warmly with the distorted sounds of a footy match. The car rattled as it navigated the corrugated track. His car wasn’t quiet like mine, and I liked its clanking, metallic groans; strangely, it made me feel like I was in something reliable from the era when machines were built to last.
I still felt annoyed at Samuel for spoiling our afternoon with his peevishness. I was reminded of something a friend once wrote to me: how at the centre of Australia’s championing of the Bushman isn’t triumph over nature but ‘doomed endurance’. ‘I’ve always seen the Bushman as a tragic figure of heroic failure,’ she wrote. ‘The Swagman committed suicide after a botched robbery (“You’ll never catch me alive!”), Ned Kelly was hanged, Burke and Wills starved because they refused Indigenous help, the Diggers were slaughtered at Gallipoli—I guess I’ve always seen having a stoic attitude in the face of inevitable failure as being at the centre of that version of white masculine Aussie culture.’
But Samuel seemed to undermine that myth with his petulance. Perhaps that myth had always failed to account for male petulance, uncontrolled anger and an ego easily bruised.
It was Samuel who finally said something. ‘The way you were fishing—I swore you were never going to catch anything!’
I looked out the window. It was pitch black now, and all I could see was my faint reflection.
‘You know I snagged two lures in the tree?’ he said.
I said, ‘It’s amazing the way those hooks will catch nothing underwater but they seem to want to hook on to everything when they’re on land. I snagged my lure in a tree in Kakadu National Park.’
‘Showing me up like that! Why are you even with me? What kind of man can’t catch a single fish?’ he muttered, more to himself than to me.
‘Those fish did not see me coming, ay?’ I said. ‘They lookin’ at me thinkin’, Pfft, this girl don’t know what she doin’. And then, I hook myself a 58-centimetre barr-aaah.’
Samuel laughed at that.
He reached round to the back pocket of his seat. After a rustling sound, he pulled out a plastic zip-lock bag holding a half-eaten packet of Sakata seaweed rice crackers. He offered it to me first—a peace offering, I guessed. The crackers were on a plastic tray, which only fit in the bag because Samuel had neatly cut it off where the crackers stopped. For some reason I was moved by this evidence of his fastidiousness.
‘Me, eating seaweed—imagine that,’ he said and popped a cracker into his mouth.
‘You can get this Asian snack that’s just sheets of flavoured seaweed,’ I said. ‘It’s very tasty.’
I was locked in a grey room.
On the other side of the door, someone violently turning the handle.
The door was made of metal, and its agitated jangling was extremely loud and a little frightening.
When I came to, with a feeling of disorientation I realised it was nothing but the sound of the ocean. Funny how waves could pound the beach all night but only one wave intercepted my dreams and sucked me out, just as I was on the cliff edge of waking.
I was still at Ngumuy Beach. Several days had passed since Samuel had left for the town of Nhulunbuy, about a 45-minute drive away. On the morning of our third day together I’d asked about his travel plans and he’d kept his answer vague. When I mentioned it again later that afternoon, he snapped that he didn’t like making plans—‘so stop asking’—and said he was going to Nhulunbuy for a few days to watch the footy and run some errands. ‘And,’ he added, ‘to be perfectly frank I’m planning to meet a female friend from Darwin this weekend. We’ve never slept together but I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
Right, of course. What had I been expecting? He’d already made it clear he wasn’t interested in ‘settling down’. On the other hand—why not? Why not maintain the hope that someone, someday, might make a grand gesture—or even just a gesture! Of any kind. Not a commitment, just a commitment to the potential of commitment.
But no. How stupid of me. And in the meantime, there was no point in asking why I was always just a bit of fun, on the side; some guy’s pit stop to another destination. You could only blame fate for that, and you might as well enjoy the pit stop too.
It felt like a slap in the face, but I’m a cool girl, I don’t make a fuss. I’d shrugged and left it alone. Shortly before he drove off, we took a holiday snap of us together on the beach, looking suntanned and happy. We swapped numbers, and he kept the door open to the possibility we might see each other in Nhulunbuy.
I unzipped the flap of my tent and stretched. It was good to sleep on the solid earth again instead of in Samuel’s troopy.
I walked down to the beach. It had just struck dawn, and the sun rose above a column of clouds, pouring its light over an eastern section of the water. That bit glowed with a white-gold sheen, while the western part stayed dark and gloomy. This reminded me of a Turner painting in which his depiction of evanescent light pulls the eye to one corner and captures that fleeting moment when the almighty allows itself to be oh-so-briefly seen.
I felt the sunrise in my mind as well as before my eyes. I loved waking with the sun. It made transparent how every day was fresh and unwritten and yet, in its basic form, identical to the day before. It was so quiet I could almost hear the thousand tiny breaths and the thousand tiny heartbeats of all the birds and critters and fish I shared this beach with. They were all stirring, as I was, and the boisterous day was beginning. It made perfectly good sense that we had circadian rhythms tuned to the rising and falling light of the natural world. Wonderful life emerged from those perfect circles.
There is a Taoist phrase, ziran that refers not only to ‘nature’ but also to ‘letting things take their course’. Taoism believes that all things are mutually interdependent in an unfathomably complex process. As in a kaleidoscope whose bits of coloured glass can produce an infinite number of shapes and colours, there are too many variables and dimensions for our simple brains to grasp. Due to this interdependence, otherwise irreconcilable elements eventually harmonise by their own accord, so long as they are left to their own devices rather than forced into any artificial notion of order.
This is similar to a powerful concept in Yolŋu culture called garma, once defined by a Yothu Yindi Foundation spokesperson as ‘saltwater and freshwater mixing together and blending, intermingling and moving onwards’. It isn’t difficult to argue that if Australia is in a state of imbalance, this is because Indigenous Australia has been forced to accommodate the Western way of life too much, while not enough accommodation has gone the other way. So what’s the best response for a country stuck in a canoe veering too far left and heading for a thicket of mangroves? By taking a hard right, you risk going into a tailspin. The only way Australia would ever achiev
e garma, I thought, was through gentle course correction—we had to eschew zealotry for subtle thinking, tolerance, boundless patience born out of a willingness to place our faith in the universe’s ability to self-regulate.
I dug a hole in the sand and dropped a deuce. There was no toilet in this campground. After covering it with sand, I stuck a cuttlefish upright to mark where the deed had been done. ‘Poop with a view,’ as Samuel had called it. It joined several cuttlefish stuck into the sand, as if a crew of crabs had left their miniature white surfboards on the beach.
There had been a bit of rain through the night. Upon waking I’d heard the occasional weary plop of a raindrop falling from the trees onto the fly of my tent. I could see droplets dangling like earrings from pine needles, a spot of morning sun in their jiggling bottoms. The rain had turned everything fresh, green and cool, making the air feel less humid. With the sun peeking from behind its doona of cloud, steam was rising from the damp sand. This was just a small taste of the wet season, known simply as ‘the wet’, which wouldn’t begin for two months. During the wet, ninety per cent of the year’s rain would fall.
I walked to the water’s edge and filled up the container I had brought. I’d been too liberal with my water use and was down to my last half a tank of fresh water. From now I’d have to wash my cutlery and cooking utensils in saltwater.
With Samuel and his monster troopy gone, I had driven my RAV4 into the prime position, backing it up so that its tail tucked into a cleared spot enclosed by retja in an almost perfect dome. On one side of this drippy green dome was a latticed view of the ocean, and on the other a steep hill covered in thick jungle. My tent was next to a small fireplace marked by a ring of stones and my ‘cooking station’: a water tank propped on a short, pink wooden stool, a pump bottle of hand soap and a discount store fold-out table.
I got a little kick out of modifying my living quarters. I had a ‘portable shower’, just a fancy term for a PVC bag of water with a hose, strung up high on a sturdy-looking branch. It had been unbearably hot sleeping with my tent closed to keep out the intermittent rain, so I used bungee cords to tie each corner of the tent’s fly to some trees and vines: a passable waterproof roof. Something was soothing, therapeutic even, about organising my space for greater convenience. I pictured my set-up growing even more elaborate: I could thicken up the walls; add a bed; that low, thick tree branch there was just begging to be turned into a table and bench; I’d have to think about waterproofing during the wet.
Modification of the landscape is a natural impulse—only, what form it takes depends on culture and individual preferences. Across the Australian continent can be found Aboriginal groups who deliberately light fires on their country to create mosaic patterns of regeneration, others maintain stone traps to catch fish. In Australian cities, we have built sprawling suburbs and skyscrapers made of concrete and glass to keep the bush away.
Since Samuel’s departure I hadn’t seen another soul, save for wallabies, bats, imperial pigeons and an iridescent spangled drongo, and they generally fled as soon as they saw me. I didn’t take it personally and considered it a good indicator of their limited contact with the human world. There was something unsettling about the wallabies I’d seen at Nitmiluk, near Katherine, whose first reaction to the sight of a human being was to hold their little paws out; they snatched food right out of your hand if you weren’t quick enough to give it over.
At my campsite I’d also seen the plump orange-footed scrubfowl. It clucked in such an alarmed and fussy manner, I laughed every time I saw one. Its deep chestnut crest seemed gelled back to a jaunty point, while its head was a dusky imperial blue, bobbing comically backwards and forwards like that of a chicken as it scampered away. These noisy birds are active fossickers that maintain mounds of jungle debris up to thirteen metres in diameter. Heated by the decomposition of this organic material, the mound reaches a toasty thirty to thirty-five degrees when the female bird lays her eggs. Throughout their life, no scrubfowl receives parental care: after incubation in the heat of the mound and independently breaking through their eggshell, chicks struggle to the surface. Having emerged into the wider world, they discover they can both fly and feed themselves from day one. I admired such total self-sufficiency—and, at the risk of anthropomorphising, saw my own independent streak in it.
I explored the area a little and took a long, winding track that connected Ngumuy Beach to others equally empty and remote. Cliffs the reddish colour of roasted coffee beans crumbled into an energetic ocean ruffled at the seams by white foam. Most of the coastline was lined with a roughly textured, hole-filled rock called laterite. Much of the path had no trees or shade, and the sun burnt me as I meandered on exposed cliff tops. I kicked myself for not bringing a shirt or scarf and wearing nothing but a skimpy singlet dress. I didn’t even have sunscreen to reapply. Every cell of my skin was toasting to a crisp.
The turquoise waters spanned out to the horizon, uninterrupted by an island or ship. Every year, for many years, this ocean had carried at least a thousand seamen to northern Australia from the Indonesian archipelago.
Debate remained over exactly when these Asian seamen first arrived at our coastline. One study had dated rock art depicting their prau—wooden sailboats identifiable by tripod masts and rectangular sails—at the Djulirri rock shelter in western Arnhem Land to at least 1664; that would make this the country’s oldest-dated rock art depiction of contact. The annual visitors were known generically by the Yolŋu as Maŋgatharra, a localisation of the word ‘Mangkasara’—an ethnic group of Makassar, the capital city of South Sulawesi in present-day Indonesia. It grouped together the Makassar people with other Sulawesi-based populations from further afield, who were also homogenised in English-language Australian history as the Macassans.
I walked barefoot up Garanhan Beach, a long strip of white sand bricked in at one end by a shelf of laterite. My wandering took me beyond an assembly of tall, stately casuarinas, swishing their thick skirts of needle-like leaves in the wind, to a spot called Wurrwurrwuy. Here in the late 1800s, the Yolŋu people arranged some inconspicuous rocks, each not much bigger than my foot, depicting aspects of trepang-collecting Maŋgatharra life: mainly their leaf-shaped prau, but also fireplaces, storehouse and canoes. The drawings were set on a wasteland-like bit of windswept pinkish-red, hard, gravelly earth.
I was no stranger to trepang. Once in Beijing at a formal, lavish dinner I was served a course of haishen, as trepang are called in Mandarin. It was spiky and brown, almost translucent, and cylindrical—as if the chef had squatted over my gold-rimmed plate and painfully pooped out a thorny log-shaped turd. It looked soft and squishy, but when I poked it with my fork it was surprisingly firm. Haishen were very expensive and considered a delicacy, so despite my strong aversion to anything worm-related I forced myself to try some. It was tasteless, like gelatinous things often are, and hardly seemed worth the strain of overcoming my vermiphobia.
In Chinese culture, the most disgusting things to eat are inevitably touted as a miracle cures. Haishen is not only regarded a restorative for a number of maladies, it’s believed to have aphrodisiac qualities and the effect of lengthening a man’s penis—no surprise, considering its phallic shape and habit of stiffening and squirting a jet of water when under attack.
I reached the lip of laterite, pouting over the ocean, and threw in a fishing line. The water clashed with the shore in excitement, shards of white spray leaping acrobatically then streaming like silk off the coarse surfaces. Surely there were plenty of fish about, but the roughly textured rock was particularly sticky for my hook and it snagged immediately. I used a knife to cut my line, and when it happened a second time abandoned my fishing attempt. I sat down, feeling moody, and gazed at the infinite waters. Two snagged lines—if only Samuel could see me now.
I looked out to where sea met sky and imagined sixty approaching praus, powered by north-west monsoon winds the Yolŋu called ḻuŋgurrma. Each year the Macassans journeyed 1600 kilometres on
the high seas over two weeks; their safe arrival was no mean feat. In Macassan History and Heritage: Journeys, Encounters and Influences, edited by Marshall Clark and Sally K. May, I’d learnt how knowledge of these oceans had been accumulated and passed down orally through the generations. It allowed the Macassans, without sophisticated tools, to navigate hazardous coastlines of rocks sharp as teeth and long sections of open water. The Macassan sailors knew well the winds that set them on course or blew them off it; the precise stars that mapped their locations; the animals and birds whose behaviour sometimes foretold incoming bad weather and the men were ever vigilant to the shifting mood of the oceans.
Much like in other ‘first contact’ stories, the Yolŋu say the arrival of the Maŋgatharra shocked their ancestors, who presumed the visitors were some sort of spirit. Surprise turned into fascination as the Yolŋu familiarised themselves with the many unusual and useful items the Maŋgatharra brought with them: cloth, glass and ceramics; food such as rice and cocoa; alcohol and drug substances such as betel nut, opium and tobacco; tobacco pipes and fish hooks; and metal tools such as tomahawks, spearheads and knives. These were traded for Yolŋu labour, and fishing and harvesting rights of not only trepang but mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell and timber. Some Yolŋu words still used today reflect the influence of the Maŋgatharra, such as rupiah (money), while the word balanda was derived from the Maŋgatharra word for the Dutch (Belanda or orang Belanda).
Over the summer, the fishermen moved along the coast collecting trepang that dotted the sea floor and became exposed at low tide. Then the dhimurru—Yolŋu for east winds—picked up and carried them home again in March or April.
The full stop to this centuries-long tradition was the good ship Bunga Ejaya, which left Australian shores in 1907 under the command of Using Daeng Rangka. The industry had been in freefall following the introduction of licences and customs taxes by the South Australian government, back then the administrators of the Northern Territory. A fortification of national borders by a federated Australia, combined with a domestically popular suite of anti-immigration policies, was symptomatic of a new, heavily regulated and protectionist modern nation-state. For a long time after, any interactions with our nearest neighbours were first rerouted thousands of kilometres north to Great Britain as an intermediary.
