Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  The hundred-kilometre road to the Daintree Rainforest became winding and narrow, hugging windswept hills sometimes known to maliciously throws rocks at cars. But perhaps most dangerous of all were the azure waters further out; under the open sky and hot sun, they winked seductively and made it hard for me to keep my eyes on the road. As I lurched around hairpin turns, the bitterness of motion sickness rose from my stomach.

  If Mungo Lake is a museum of dead things, Australia’s impenetrable tropical rainforest is a living museum of flora and fauna. It houses species that have changed little over hundreds of millions of years, since a much wetter Australia was connected to the supercontinent Gondwana. By the time Australia broke away, drier conditions were producing the eucalypt forests that now cover the continent, and most pockets of tropical rainforest were confined to rain-soaked humid parts of far north Queensland on the east coast. While over millions of years they mixed with plants and animals from Asia, still preserved is some of that ancient stock that can be traced back to Gondwana.

  I spent several nights camping where the Daintree meets the sea at Cape Tribulation. The vegetation grew so dense, the road looked like a square slice of cake taken out clean with a knife. Although the wet tropics covers less than one per cent of Australia, it contains almost half of our bird species, a third of our mammal species, more than half of our butterfly species and over seven hundred plant species endemic to the area. The rainforests seemed to inhale and exhale in a sweaty tangle of heaving biomatter.

  One afternoon I went for a trail walk deep into the rainforest. As I walked past some fan palms the size of a Hills hoist, I scratched the back of my neck and found a disturbingly large bump. There were so many creepy-crawlies about: green ants, spiders, moths, butterflies, and lots and lots of mosquitos. The night before, I’d cooked dinner at the campground’s public barbecue and watched a dragonfly attracted to the fluorescent lights buzz noisily about. When it came to rest on a post a gecko suddenly appeared, its tail flicking back and forth—in one lightning move, the gecko scampered across the wall and seized the dragonfly’s head in its mouth. The dragonfly’s wings and legs jerked for a moment, but there was no escape. With my mouth full of salad I had the strangest sensation that it wasn’t lettuce but the dragonfly’s head in my mouth.

  In the rainforest it was humid but cool as I climbed the steps onto a raised boardwalk. Soon I came across two tall young women from Europe in T-shirts and hiking shorts that showed off their muscular limbs, hunched over and whispering. I recognised that caution and wondered what animal they had spotted. A tree kangaroo? That would be pretty cool. Or a rare butterfly? I didn’t dare hope it might be one of the birds I’d been most excited to spot since buying my bird guide back in Alice.

  Then I saw it: Australia’s second-largest bird. At up to two metres tall it’s second to the emu, and third in the world as the ostrich takes the top spot. It stepped out from behind some palm fronds, at the teasing pace of a burlesque dancer. With that monster shag of black, cobalt neck with sky-blue cap and folds of loose red skin hanging from the neck, I had no need to get out my guidebook—it was the one, the only, the cassowary.

  Like the emu, it’s a flightless bird whose dads, not mums, hatch and raise their young. It has a mohawk-shaped horn that’s spongy, not at all hard as it appears to be, and absorbs the shock of hitting branches. Because of its horn and raptor-like bill, the cassowary could be mistaken for a missing link between dinosaur and bird.

  I was glad to be on the boardwalk because with its sturdy legs and claws the bird was hypothetically capable of killing me. Plenty of warning signs were posted about, advising tourists to be ‘cass-o-wary’. Upon encountering the bird in the wild: 1) Don’t run. 2) Walk back slowly without turning around. 3) Get something long and thick between you and the bird, such as a tree trunk—or, barring that, hold up your jacket or a bag.

  The bird displayed an almost haughty lack of fear towards us humans, swaying her thick bustle of black feathers to-and-fro and looking us in the eye as if to say, That’s right, girls, I’m a cassowary and you better be cass-o-wary when I’m in town.

  One of the women had a camera raised like a gun taking rapid-fire shots of the bird; the cassowary equivalent of paparazzi.

  The bird bent down and with her beak picked up a shiny, indigo-blue cassowary plum the size and shape of an avocado. She tipped her head up high, gulping it down whole. After bending her head again, she picked up a sliver of orange fruit and also swallowed it whole.

  With a slow swivel of the head, the cassowary gave us one last glance, turned and, swaying her bustle, exited behind thick green curtains of rainforest.

  I passed the next few days writing, reading, walking the nearby beaches and trying to fish. I began to think of home and feel a sense of restlessness. As if I were just killing time.

  The ocean was only divided from the rainforest by a thin strip of sand. Apparently the water was filled with deadly box jellyfish, and I imagined it like an Asian milk tea with floating pearls laced with arsenic. The jellyfish wafted about cube-shaped and transparent as an X-ray, and it was difficult to reconcile their fragile, ghostly appearance with the fact they were among the world’s most venomous creatures. Being stung by their ribbon-like tentacles causes agonising pain, and death comes as quickly as two minutes. I spotted bottles of vinegar, a sufficient antidote, stationed about all the beaches with signs that read, ‘Pour, do not rub.’

  Unsurprisingly, I saw only a few brave souls escaping the heat and humidity in the water. Probably out-of-towners. Like most born and bred Sydneysiders, I had an almost Pavlovian response to the sight of the ocean: it was rarely enough only to see it, I had to swim in it. I had to feel my limbs push through the waves of blue energy. Or at least, that’s how I used to be. Three months of travelling croc and jellyfish infested saltwater country had cured me—I didn’t feel even the slightest urge to swim. But I delighted in the sight of the ocean, the fizzing sound as it spread across the beach, the slightly salty taste of the air, and cool, wet sand between my toes.

  On my final day in the Daintree, I woke soon after 5 a.m. and walked down to the beach. I’d been getting up earlier and earlier on the trip, and I thought incredulously back to my former life when I’d struggled to rise before 8 a.m. The hills were so covered in plant life they looked like the vegetable stand of a supermarket: spinach, kale, broccoli and lettuce all bunched together. The green was so rich in the wet tropics, as if the saturation filter had been turned up. I could almost feel my body drinking in the rainforest’s beauty. The soft sand was crawling with hermit crabs that, upon my approach, scuttled in a mad dash to the nearest hidey-hole. I’d taken a seat on some dark rocks when the rising sun burnt a hole through a fleecy bank of mauve and baby-pink clouds. As it lifted like a hot-air balloon, it created a lemon-coloured afterglow on the horizon. The rippling ocean had the shimmer of a finely sequined sheet of metallic blue fabric.

  How many sunrises had I seen during the months of my trip? Bursting over so many different horizons, of pandanus forest or pindan cliffs, spinifex hills or glassy lakes—I could recall the most spectacular ones in as much detail as the lyrics to my favourite songs.

  It was the end of November and summer was creeping into the southern half of Australia. I said farewell to the ocean in Ballina on the northern coast of New South Wales. I wouldn’t see blue water again until I was back in Sydney, a place that with every passing day I was acutely aware I was moving closer towards. Like an infant who is hypervigilant of exactly where her parent is at all times, I found myself calculating the distances to Sydney wherever I went: 721 kilometres, I could drive that in a day; 369 kilometres, I could drive that in half a day.

  I was leaving Ballina having spent four nights at an Airbnb. I’d visited the town before, although in the intervening decade it had completed its transition from beatnik mecca to backpacker paradise/yuppy vacation village.

  I was far enough south that the ocean looked exactly like that of home. The blue
waves had a magnificent glossy sheen and more powerful presence, disintegrating into paperwhite wash over pitch-black rocks. I loved hearing that roar of a bolshy surf again. It was deep and cold water, full of turbulent energy. No jellyfish, no crocs—yes, there were sharks but they were mainly a problem for surfers further out.

  I stood on a windy spot along that grand coastline, and as I took in the ocean’s overwhelming presence, I smiled. Its familiarity was a sign I was getting closer to home, and that filled me with joy.

  One afternoon I put to use the foraging skills I’d acquired from the Lurujarri Trail, shucking two dozen dollar-sized oysters off rocks at one end of the beach. Ha! Look at me now! City gal gone bush. I was ending my travels with the ability to forage for lunch, build a fire, change a tyre, get bogged and then get unstuck, tell a kite from a kestrel, catch a barra and recognise emu tracks. And sure, I was still dead shit scared of snakes and crocs, my fishing skills felt more hypothetical than real, and I had no idea how to find water in the desert, but I’d come a long way. I hoped this was just the beginning of my new bushie life. I wanted to be the kind of Australian who could fix cars, wield a chainsaw, skin a rabbit, navigate by the stars, man a tinny and carve wood. There was so much left to do and learn.

  It was only when my oyster foraging attracted the quizzical stares of some passing locals—a sunbaked, well-heeled young couple; an old man in a polo shirt and shorts—did it occur to me that in this trendy town it was a little strange seeing a thirty-something Chinese woman squatting on the beach with a stone in her hand, smashing oysters and shovelling them into her mouth. I wasn’t in the Kimberley anymore. Shit, maybe this ocean wasn’t clean? This was the east coast, where millions of people had their waste pumped out to sea.

  Oh well, too late.

  After Ballina I drove south on the quiet back roads that lined the inner side of the Great Dividing Range, stopping at many parks and towns I’d been to before: Moree, Cathedral Rock National Park, the Warrumbungles, Dubbo. I loved the ocean—always would—but in Australia we were so lucky: if you ever felt the desire to just get away from humanity, all you had to do was drive four hours inland and there was plenty of soul-purifying, heart-awakening space and silence to get lost in.

  I had wondered whether, after all I’d seen of Australia, I’d still find my home state beautiful. But as I drove through the western plains of New South Wales, dominated by the twinkling golden bells of wheat-grass that grew as tall as an adult and from a distance appeared like angel hair blowing in the wind, I realised it still occupied a special place in my heart. It was genteel like the European countryside, altered by pastoralism. Towering ironbarks and white boxes dotted the land, each a monument to nature in the midst of an empty town square. How strange to be a person of Chinese heritage, growing up on this continent, and have a childhood so inf luenced by the tiny island nation of Britain thousands of kilometres away that I should hark for its landscape. As a young person, I had loved the BBC adaption of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and mourned the fact that due to my skin I could never hope to one day play the role of Elizabeth Bennet.

  I thought about my younger years when I was a stranger to the Australian countryside. My main exposure to regional Australia was visiting my best friend at her family farm outside of Bathurst. I remembered finding all this emptiness frightening. How did you know where to orientate yourself? In Sydney you were bordered by mountains to the west and the ocean to the east; you were either north or south of the Bridge. But here? The ocean was so far away. From the top of a high hill, you could spin right around and see only land and sky. The silence truly was deafening—I’d finally understood the meaning of that phrase. It was unnerving to hear the soft bleat of a sheep from a good kilometre away.

  But now, as I traversed these rolling hills, I realised the openness of the land had become comfortingly banal. It didn’t trigger any physical discomfort. It was ordinary as a spoon and fork.

  I camped as I went and most mornings would wake in my tent to the spluttering song of the kookaburra. I realised, with some surprise, it was a sound I hadn’t heard for most of my trip. I’d seen kookaburras in the Top End but they were the blue-winged kind, named for the electric splash of blue on their wings. Their squawking call wasn’t particularly memorable. Only the laughing kookaburra, found in Australia’s eastern states and the southern tip of Western Australia, boasts a call like an exploding star: its cackle beginning low and quiet, then expanding into a full throttle of ear-splitting, heavy-metal raucousness, trilling up and down, before tapering off into a throaty chuckle.

  I’d always assumed that the laugh of the kookaburra, together with the mob roar of cicadas in the heat of the day—one of the loudest insects in the world—was the aural signature of the Australian bush. But it was specific to my part of Australia. To me, it sounded like home.

  I spent my final week camping in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park just west of Sydney. The park is part of the Greater Blue Mountains, one million hectares of sandstone plateaux, escarpments, gorges and ninety-one kinds of eucalypt. A damp, cloying mist always hung around the mountains, even now in summer. In the past such high ridgelines, deep precipices and dense scrub acted as a buffer between colonial forces and the many Aboriginal nations lying to the west. For three decades it contained the horrors of the colonialism to the Sydney region. By 1815, a road built through the mountains was complete and the rush for land by European settlers was on.

  I deliberately set up my tent in a spot plunged deep into the bush, surrounded by thickly growing snow gums that masked the horizon and gave me the sense of being the only person left on the planet. I’d envisioned my time in the mountains as the poetic climax to half a year in the bush—just me and glorious mother nature, sealing our new communion! But soon I discovered I was too homesick to enjoy it.

  The days passed at an excruciatingly slow pace. I alternated between reading in my camp chair and, when the flies and heat became too intense, reading in my tent. I wore nothing but my undies, bra and a floppy hat, yet sweated like a pig. I snoozed, ate three meals a day and went for walks.

  Every now and then I spotted tribes of black cockatoos. In the air they were shaped like pointe slippers of black satin—the kind ballerinas wore, only with wings. My only other visitors were three kangaroos with light-coloured fur that one day at dawn came bounding through the bush. When one stopped near my camp the other two, like the wheels of an invisible tricycle, stopped as well. They grazed and appeared not to notice me. But when I began to brush my teeth, all three heads popped up one after the other. They were staring at me, so I waved in a neighbourly way that I hoped might say, ‘Want to come over for a cuppa?’ The kangaroos stared for a moment, then lowered their heads to continue grazing. A firm, ‘No thanks.’

  Otherwise, I was all alone.

  I cast my mind back six months to the version of me who had driven out of Sydney’s city limits—flabby, pale and crumpled with accumulated misery. Over the course of the trip I’d lost weight and now had what I’d been referring to as my ‘banging bush bod’. Nature was captured on my body like photo paper; all that sun and rain and wind pressing onto my bare skin had left it tanned and scoured. I was fit and energetic. I walked for hours each day and slept very well each night. I had only occasionally touched alcohol or junk food for half a year.

  One morning I read a booklet of rhyming verse by Henry Lawson I’d purchased in Gulgong, then penned my own Christmas verse:

  What more could a simpleton need

  Than this river, this sky and these trees?

  Bush life is grand, traversing the land,

  Yet my heart, how it yearns for Christmas in Sydney.

  These gum trees are beauties—I know,

  Tall, ancient and straight, pale as snow,

  I agree it’s a sin to chuck it all in

  For mum’s cheap plastic tinsel and bows.

  Wind blows and the kookaburras sing,

  I hear pat-pat of wallabies jumping,
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  Music to my ears, yet part of me fears

  I’d rather be listening to Mariah Carey carolling.

  At the end of each day the sun sets,

  Sky awash with pink, orange and red,

  Too nice a show for one lonely soul

  Who’d rather be buying presents for friends.

  Excuse this poem so sentimental and bleak,

  Which I confess written quite tongue-in-cheek,

  For soon I’ll be home, broke, glued to my phone,

  Wishing I was out bush within the week!

  By the fifth day, I was starting to lose it.

  I was damn tired of the flies swarming over my arms, legs, shoulders, neck, ears, and even my lips and up my nostrils. One marched right into my eyeball—I screamed in shock and, using my phone camera as a mirror, tugged at the bottom of my eyelid to see where it had got to. The fly was stuck in the corner of my eye. When I tried to push it out, my clumsy, pudgy finger squashed the unfortunate thing dead. And still I struggled to remove it from my eye, which was stinging. I blinked reflexively, and with every blink the fly corpse slid further down to the crevice of my eye, threatening to slide right into it. What then? I supposed it would be absorbed, digested even, by my body.

  Eventually I pushed out the scrunched-up fly carcass using my smallest fingernail.

  Even the indecipherable bushland was driving me mad, and I suddenly understood why Lawson described it as ‘the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees—that monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ship can sail—and farther’ in The Drover’s Wife. I had studied the short story in school and been touched by the central character’s despair. The passage that had always stayed with me was about her regular Sunday walks up the bush track; without fail, she would diligently make herself and the children look smart, ‘as she would if she were going to do the block in the city’, even though ‘there is nothing to see’ and ‘not a soul to meet’.