by Monica Tan
Even though this historical Asian trade was limited to a strip of Aboriginal Australian groups living on the north coast, it fascinated me as a rare example in this country’s history of an Asian–Aboriginal interaction neither managed nor mitigated by European control—or at least, not until its end. As well, it represents the first connection between my ancestral people, as Chinese consumers of trepang, to this continent.
While the story of the Maŋgatharra isn’t without its own chapters of violence and cultural clashes, the Yolŋu today chiefly characterise that relationship as business-like and cordial. It stands out as a stark example of a people’s isolation coming to an end without being forced to endure brutal invasion and colonisation. Perhaps the crucial difference is that at the end of the season the Maŋgatharra always left, but the balanda remained.
I had taken Central Arnhem Road a week prior, and would take it again tomorrow on my drive back to Katherine. But first I had to restock and refuel at Nhulunbuy, the region’s largest town and a curious dot at the end of that wearisome road cutting Arnhem Land in half like two triangle sandwiches. Curious because I doubted few travellers would expect that at the end of a ten-hour drive deep into virgin bush, could be a town populated enough to support a big-brand supermarket, car dealership, Christian college, thirty-bed hospital and even a country golf club. In the suburban section of town every second house had a fishing boat parked in the driveway—not scrappy dinghies but proper, sleek, double-decker cruisers.
I only had to take a couple of wrong turns to end up on the edge of town and find myself staring down ‘Restricted Access’ signs. Rio Tinto’s bauxite mine, Nhulunbuy’s raison d’etre, loomed on the horizon. The mining giant’s hefty pay packets had attracted Australians and non-Australians of every stripe and paid for all those shiny boats sitting in concrete driveways. When I’d been here two years prior, the company had just closed its refinery arm with more than a thousand job losses. I’d expected to return to a ghost town; however, on the surface little appeared to have changed. There were signs of the Yolŋu people’s growing business acumen, including a company owned by the Gumatj clan that had opened a small-scale bauxite mine and training centre on their traditional lands.
Samuel was still in town, and we arranged to have dinner at a local tavern. It was dark by the time I arrived. I found him standing at the entrance looking freshly showered, wearing his Clark Kent glasses and a clean shirt. I had showered as well and, as had become customary on this trip, a good scrub down was enough to leave me feeling like a total babe—a squeaky clean, overly pampered princess with shiny hair and golden skin. I had to remind myself that in my former, mostly sedentary life, showers were an everyday occurrence.
‘You look hot,’ he said, pinching me on the hip.
‘Thanks, darl,’ I said. ‘Not bad yourself.’
The tavern was half-empty. Like so many Outback drinking holes, it was fitted out with tacky plastic furniture. The bar top was lined with damp beer mats, powerfully emitting the ghostly smell of many thousands of drinks past. Samuel ordered a horrible-sounding dish called beef parma-gedden, a Tex-Mex spin on a beef parmy, and I ordered lamb shanks. We took our beers to a free table, sitting on a couple of high chairs opposite each other. I told Samuel about the rock drawings I’d seen, and our food came out not long after. The parmy was the size of Samuel’s head: a pig’s slop of plastic cheese, chilli beef and tomato sauce. Typical of Aussie pub food, it was high on fat, low on nutrition. I watched him polish it off, leaving cubes of cucumber he had neatly eaten around.
‘You don’t like cucumber?’ I said.
‘No, what makes you say that?’ he said sarcastically.
My shanks and mash tasted fine. A bit bland.
My eyes widened at the appearance of an Asian woman behind the bar. Her body was half covered in tattoos, and her straw-dry peroxide-blonde hair was swept up in a high ponytail that reached all the way down to her G-stringed arse. As she tossed her chin into the air, her hair flicked about like a horse’s tail.
Also, she didn’t have a top on. Her tits were huge. I couldn’t stop staring at them.
Samuel turned to see what I was looking at. He turned back and rolled his eyes as if to say, Christ, Monica, you can be such a yokel. ‘They’re called skimpies, and you’re supposed to slip a note in their G-banger,’ he said, with a smug look.
‘Did you ever go to the Roey when you lived in Broome?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘On a Thursday night?’ I asked, referring to the pub’s weekly wet T-shirt competition.
‘Every Thursday night. Skimpies are real popular in WA. Some even go on tour.’ He took a sip of beer and said loftily, ‘To be honest, it doesn’t really do it for me. If I can’t touch it, I’m not interested.’
I was still staring at the woman, although trying my best to appear that I wasn’t.
He had another look at her and said, with an arched eyebrow, ‘Of course, I might try and get her number later.’
I didn’t say anything, but he was looking at me with a barely disguised smirk.
‘How would you feel if I did that?’ he asked.
I didn’t bother saying his attempt to goad me into playing the ‘jealous wife’ was about as retrograde as a pub with a topless waitress. ‘If you did it in front of me I’d think that was pretty rude—but hey, what you do when I’m gone is your business.’
‘You’re prettier than her,’ he said quickly.
I hadn’t, in the slightest, needed such an assurance. I was sure there was little overlap between my ‘game’ and hers; if she and I were athletes we’d be playing different sports, and a cyclist was never in competition with a cricketer.
‘The only difference is you don’t have any tats,’ he said.
‘You might need to change one of the vowels there,’ I said, and whispered ‘tits’ just in case he didn’t get it.
‘Yeah, but they’re a bit too fake,’ he said.
‘Because you only want them a little bit fake, not too fake.’
‘Yeah, just fake enough to feel like you need to check.’
‘Can you tell?’
‘Only if you bury your face in them and just—’ He mimed two giant boobs with his hands and tipped his head forward, then shook his head to-and-fro. This was called motorboating, apparently.
I laughed. Once again I was struck by how absurdly different Samuel was to all the cardigan-wearing, Twitter-scrolling, super-woke hipsters I knew in Sydney. At times I toss up what plays a more significant role in my alienation from Australia: my Chinese heritage or the fact I am a fast-talking intellectual trendoid?
According to David Walker in Anxious Nation, a distrust of city folk is the flipside to our nostalgia for the Bushman. After all, cities are sites of experimentation, commerce, leisure, fashion, migration and trade, where races mix, gender and sexual orthodoxy is challenged, and social stratification becomes infinitely more complex. Cities are breeding grounds for bohemians, merchants, academics, politicians, feminists and immigrant communities. Historically, city slickers were viewed in white Australia culture as decadent and subversive. When push came to shove, and the throngs of faceless Asiatic armies were finally at our doorsteps, were we to believe that soft-palmed, paper-pushing city folk had the mettle to defend the nation? No way.
‘Do you have any tats?’ I asked Samuel.
‘You don’t put bumper stickers on a Maserati,’ he said, with a wink and a grin.
That said, he was thinking of getting a giant back tattoo to honour his beloved AFL team, the Western Bulldogs. The Doggies were founded in Melbourne’s Footscray, traditionally a working-class area and where Samuel proudly traced his roots.
True to their name, the AFL team were known as perennial underdogs. This year, however, they were tracking exceptionally well late in the season. A smile met my lips as I considered just how deep a feeling Samuel could conjure for eighteen men on a footy field wearing blue, white and red. ‘It’s a sure bet, isn’t it, for
a tattoo?’ I said. ‘Your love for the Doggies is a love for life—a surer bet than any wife or girlfriend.’
From the tavern’s ceiling hung a green canvas swag: the prize for a raffle you could enter if you played a game of keno.
‘Have you ever played keno?’ I asked Samuel.
‘I’m Australian,’ he said.
‘I’ve never played before.’
‘Let’s play, then.’ He pulled a ticket from a stack on the table and a pencil from a holder beside it. He explained keno to me, and we marked how many games and numbers we wanted to play, the numbers we picked to win and how much we wanted to spend per game, before Samuel took our ticket to the bar. Keno principally operated on dumb luck, although every variable affected the amount of risk we were taking, which correlated to the potential size of our winnings.
Later I discovered that keno—apparently the most Aussie of games—is actually a Chinese cultural import brought over by nineteenth-century coolies. Back in Canton the game was called baakgap-piu (white dove ticket), because after draws were taken in the city, messenger birds announced the results to outlying districts. In baak-gap-piu, players didn’t use numbers but rather picked characters from the well-known rhyming Chinese poem ‘The Thousand Character Classic’ that contains precisely one thousand characters, each used only once.
No country is truly an island—even the world’s largest island nation. Culture, technology and ideas have a habit of slipping through borders. What at first feels alien quickly absorbs local flavour to become something unique and peculiarly native. It sends its roots deep into the landscape and over time becomes old hat. Did Britain become less British when tea was adopted from Asia? Did China become less Chinese when communism was adopted from Europe?
Samuel came back to our table with two fresh beers. He had one eye on the tavern walls—they were installed with sports television screens, and filled the air with the blurred sound of racing commentary.
‘What music are you into?’ he asked me, half-distracted.
I felt a ping of deja vu—hadn’t Amanda’s friend asked me the exact same thing, back in Pine Creek? This time I confessed, half-sheepish, that on my drive to Nhulunbuy I’d listened to the Les Misérables movie-musical soundtrack.
Samuel liked Red Gum, Paul Kelly, Slim Dusty, Lee Kernaghan and The Waifs—all Australian, mainly Anglo men. He liked reading Australian books about war heroes and watching Australian films about nihilistic lowlifes and criminals like Chopper and Idiot Box. I wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about domestic pop culture—something I harboured some guilt over. I looked back on my youth and regarded myself the worst manifestation of cut-and-paste globalisation: a jet-setter with a severe case of cultural cringe, mindlessly collecting all the shiny objects from other people’s cultures (mainly American). Only since returning from China and working at The Guardian had I begun to deliberately seek out Australian books, films and television shows. Then again, perhaps I was being too hard on myself. Maybe I’d be inclined to enjoy Australian stories, if only some of their protagonists looked a little more like me rather than always like Samuel.
He could barely contain his derision when I confessed my Yankophilia. He said he hated Americans, then imitated them: ‘Oh my gawd, oh my gawd, oh—my—gaaaaawd!’
‘They make good films,’ I said mildly.
‘No, they don’t! They’re all boom-boom-boom.’ He mimed explosions.
‘Well, they’re good at stand-up.’
‘Are you joking? The Brits are better at stand-up!’
He was beginning to annoy me.
I deliberately needled him. ‘You really are cut from the cloth of the mother country.’ I knew he’d find that insulting.
He frowned. ‘No, I’m not. Anyway, I like Aussie stand-ups best, like Wil Anderson and Carl Barron. I’m Aussie and,’ he paused, and rather haughtily added, ‘I’m an individual.’
I laughed at his airs.
He immediately shot back, ‘You’re mad for those Seppos.’
‘Seppos?’
He could see I didn’t understand. ‘The Yanks? Septic tanks? The Seppos.’
‘What rhymes with Chinese?’
He didn’t need to think twice. ‘Evil.’
I didn’t say anything.
He clutched his beer in one hand and looked at me with a nervous smile. ‘You’re angry at me?’
I looked away, to nothing in particular.
‘That doesn’t rhyme with Chinese,’ I said placidly.
I had to assure him I wasn’t upset, which was true enough, but at the same time I was feeling something. We weren’t on the same page; it would never work between us.
‘Did you vote for Tony Abbott?’ I asked, all of a sudden. I knew that to him this probably seemed an abrupt segue. But in my circles, the short-lived former prime minister was a symbol of Australia’s worst tendencies. He was a loyal monarchist who notoriously tried to revive the titles of ‘knight’ and ‘dame’, a parochial nationalist and political dog-whistler, inclined to invoke the country’s deep-seated fear of the Other. If Samuel had voted for Abbott, it would immediately confirm my sinking suspicion of the kind of person he was.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Why?’ I asked, unable to hide my incredulity.
‘Nobody else loves this country like he does, and I love this country.’
‘Was he a good prime minister?’
‘Shocking, but he did some good things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Stopped the boats.’
Christ, Samuel was one of those. I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes.
Abbott’s pithy and disturbingly catchy political slogan would forever be linked to his two-year prime ministership. However, from the vantage point of history it was just the latest incarnation of more than a century of attempts to ‘stop the boats’ from Asia—which included halting the trepangers from the Indonesian archipelago, the coolies from China and then, in a less paranoid fashion, the warring Japanese.
In the minds of many Australians, our viability as a young and fragile nation continues to rest on strong borders. And to those Australians, there is no more potent an image than that of a boat full of refugees infiltrating our heavily patrolled maritime border zone. Apparently these asylum seekers have ‘flooded’ into Australia and left an iron-fisted conservative government with no choice but to ‘clean up the illegal immigration mess’, as Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has said, employing the language of crisis otherwise used during natural disasters. These boats come from Malaysia or Indonesia but aren’t anything like the proud, well-maintained praus once sailed by trepangers: they’re rusting or rotting fishing boats packed to the brim with half-starved, dark-skinned, paper-less passengers from war-torn parts of the globe, supposedly ‘preying’ on the sympathy of Australia. As historian Ruth Balint wrote in Australia’s Asia, boats that sneak in via the country’s ‘back fence’ instantly confirm every worst fear mainstream Australia has about the developing world: a dirty, crowded, poverty-stricken place, where human beings are turned into disposable cargo, their dignity stripped to its bare bones.
And it was never too long before someone, somewhere in Australia—sad, scared and pissed off—cried out it was time to batten down the hatches and pull up the drawbridge.
‘All those poor people drowning,’ Samuel added.
‘Fine, but don’t say “stop the boats”—it’s an ugly phrase,’ I muttered.
A yawning chasm had opened up between me and Samuel. From the faraway place where I viewed him, he sat in his chair hard and cold as stone.
‘What else can we disagree on?’ I said caustically. ‘Do you think we should trash the Great Barrier Reef? Or that we shouldn’t let gay people marry?’
‘No. I’ve been to the Great Barrier Reef and I love it and definitely don’t want to see it destroyed. And I don’t care if gay people marry, they can do what they want—although frankly, I don’t see why anyone would want to marry.’ He quietly mimicked
me, ‘What else can we disagree on?’
I felt ashamed that I’d so quickly picked up the battleaxe. I had betrayed my hand—not as a staunch leftie, rather a sucker of the so-called culture wars. In Australia those wars are mainly rooted in the history wars of the 1990s, when conservatives and progressives diverged in their interpretations of colonial history and national identity. In particular, the nature and extent of past violence against Indigenous Australia, and the place British symbols and culture occupy in modern Australian society. The wars had ebbed for a while, then in recent years morphed into the culture wars sweeping the Western world. I often felt as if we were now in the midst of a bitter and rising backlash against an equally powerful tide of activism from traditionally oppressed groups including women, racial minorities and the LGBTQI community.
But how much of the culture wars was trumped-up noise? If you paid attention to all the back-and-forth arguments, you might come to believe that Australia could be neatly halved between progressives, greenies, feminists, human rights activists and unionists on one side, and right-wing conservatives, bankers, farmers, Southern Cross tat-bearers, talkback-radio listeners and the white working class on the other. But that was a distortion and exaggeration of our country through the lens of the cynical mass media, whose bread and butter was manufacturing outrage, and reflected in social media.
Samuel narrowed his eyes. ‘Who do you vote for?’
‘The Greens.’
He scoffed with disgust. ‘Might as well do a donkey vote!’
