Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  To me, everything was feeling itchy and off, like a jumper you put on backwards and then when you try wearing it the correct way still feels wrong. Why hadn’t I chosen a spot that at least offered fishing? Something to do other than walk circles and read my books. I didn’t want to trek through the scratchy bush and be bitten by creepy-crawlies any-fucking-more. What the hell was I doing out here alone anyway? I was tired of my own company and finally exhausted by my role as ‘the stranger in town’. It had been six months of new acquaintances and fast-expiring friendships. Now I was hungry for that same intimate sense of home I’d seen expressed by the traditional owners I’d met throughout my travels. Their ancestral relationship to the land was forty, fifty, sometimes sixty thousand years long, and that was beyond anything I’d ever witnessed in my overseas travels—let alone, as a first-generation Australian, experienced myself. And while I knew I could never have that same feeling, I craved some sort of facsimile. Being on the move now felt like a hindrance to its development.

  That evening, in the early hours after midnight, I woke to the terrifying sounds of an ill wind howling outside. It was pitch-black and the walls of my tent were buffeting like crazy. This park was full of old trees waiting for the right wind to send one hurtling to the ground. I heard the menacing sound of wood cracking but had no idea how far or near it was. I’ll die if a big tree falls on me, I thought. It felt as if I were in the cabin of a tiny sailboat being tossed around on a vast ocean of wind.

  I tried to calm down by reminding myself that soon I would be driving back to Sydney. Soon I would have love and laughter in my life. And I’ll live in a house! I’ll be able to charge my phone whenever I want, shower every day, boil water in a kettle, watch YouTube at two in the morning if I so desire, hear the tinkling of ice in my glass, sit in front of a spinning fan, and have a bedroom door I can shut on the world. What utter luxury.

  I played images of my loved ones and our imminent reunions in my mind. There was Mum vacuuming my bedroom and washing my sheets, as she always did when I returned from an extended period away. Who’s that standing at the door? It always took half a second for my dog to register who I was—followed by the excited wagging of his tail. I’d sit with old friends around a small table crowded with plates of food in a noisy Chinatown restaurant—people who are the keepers of my history, and I of theirs, and with whom I share a secret, familiar language.

  For two hours I lay in the dark, terrified. What if the Earth had been destroyed, and all that remained was my tent and a mean-tempered space wind whirling around me? Perhaps if I were to unzip the fly of my tent, outside I’d see nothing but stars and space dust. Well, at least I needn’t worry about being crushed to death by a tree.

  Another loud and ominous crack rang through the air.

  I decided to leave the next day. It was one day short of the full week that I’d planned, but I no longer cared. Every cell in my body was crying for home.

  One hour until sunrise. If I can just make it through this hour, all will be well.

  I woke to the last gasps of a fading wind, whimpering like a child exhausted by its own temper tantrum. Perhaps I had overstayed my welcome. And in making clear my intention to depart, whatever frightened spirits that occupied this bit of country were now at peace.

  I flung open the fly of my tent and was greeted by the sight of steam rising off everything—the rocks, the trees, the earth—as the sun dried out the damp.

  When I began packing down my things, I was gripped by emotion. This tent had been my home for six months, and I was dismantling it for the last time. Who knew when I would sleep in it again? (A small part of me was tempted to chuck it in the first bin I came across.)

  I’d spent so much of this past week homesick, but I knew I would also miss the sunrises and sunsets, sleeping under the stars, the animal encounters, the silence and freedom of nomad life. That blush of peach in the sky just before the sun rises—I wished I could bottle that. It grew more garish, turning orange and gold, but that early shade of soft, delicate peach was the colour of gentle joy.

  It took me an hour and several trips to cart all my things to the car. Back and forth I trudged through damp leaf debris, bags and gear loaded on my shoulders. Eventually, the camp spot was free of any trace I had been there. I snapped one last photo for posterity, then walked to the car carrying three empty water tanks.

  With my RAV4 packed, I climbed into the driver’s seat. I slid my key into the ignition and started the engine. My window was rolled down as I pulled out of the campground, the smell of eucalyptus oil and fallen rain filling my car.

  As I drove, memories of my time on the road swam around in my head like happy, fat, silver barramundi: the swirling sands of Mungo Lake, the storm clouds hanging over the moody Coorong, the sun setting fire to the MacDonnell Ranges, my Goolarabooloo friends showing me how to throw a line into the ocean, Samuel looking suntanned on the pristine sands of Yolŋu Country, the bellow of a cassowary in the dripping wet rainforests of far north Queensland. All of it was stored inside me and could never be taken away.

  I had left Sydney wearing the haunted look of so many overworked, sun-deprived journalists. And here I was, one giant loop around the nation later, with my soul heavy as a wet sponge with feeling and my spirit rejuvenated.

  I left behind muted-grey gum trees shrouded in mist and was soon back on the main road, winding through villages still sleeping in the hills of Katoomba. A song was stuck in my head, or the fragments of a melody I couldn’t quite place, like butterflies flitting about that you can’t catch. What was that song again?

  My car rocked this way and that as I drove the bitumen bends. The sodden white mist was dissipating to reveal familiar train stations, suburban villages and residential streets.

  I felt as if I wasn’t only driving back to Sydney but also back to my life. Or perhaps, to start a new life. One in which a different relationship with my country had been forged.

  How long had I had kept Australia at arm’s length because I thought it didn’t recognise itself in me? Because I didn’t feel Australian. But I had been mistaken—I’d simply never felt like a specific type of Australian. There was no requirement for me to be, or even aspire to be, a Bushie, Drover’s Wife, Larrikin, Digger, Surf Bunny or True-Blue Dinky-Di Top Sheila.

  I thought back to what Samuel and all the people I’d met over the past half a year had helped show me. Pauline Hanson, draped in the Southern Cross and speaking Strine, was not symbolic of the Australian mainstream. Rather it was I who shared in common with the majority of Australians a pride in our nation’s cultural diversity.

  For so long I had viewed our cultural cringe as a symptom of the hole in our heart. We had no ancient history, culture and language to call our own, and had not yet earned any right to belong to Indigenous Australia. But now I saw that while this absence cursed us with disorientation, wasn’t it also a blessing? Being Australian did not preclude blood or ancestral membership, or even cultural knowledge, the way being Chinese or Yolŋu did. If there was no fixed idea of Australian, there was also no fixed idea of un-Australian. That elasticity defined the nation more than a particular dress, food, language, religion or habit, or even an affiliation with the land.

  It meant we could be me.

  I hadn’t needed to be with Samuel for a spot in Team Australia—I’d had one all along.

  Then I remembered the song in my head—oh yes, ‘Under the Milky Way’ by The Church. I had an urge to listen to it. After fumbling around for it from my CD case, I hit play.

  And with that, I began to cry.

  I was struck not only by the physical momentousness of having completed a 30,000-kilometre drive around Australia for six months on my own, but also by all of its emotional highs and lows. I had fallen in love with the dry, spartan, silent beauty of this country and grown comfortable with its ruggedness. I had come face-to-face with some of the darkest chapters of our history, heard stories of murder, slavery, genocide, dispossession, segregation, c
hild abduction and rape, and yet not once felt a compulsion to turn my back on Australia—quite the opposite: I felt closer to the country having faced its past. A past our young nation struggles to speak aloud. I felt a new sense of confidence in my place in Australia and understood I had a role to play in reconciling our country with the land and its First Peoples.

  I was even excited about going back to the big smoke, where the buildings cast long shadows on the earth and hid all kinds of surprises. That noisy urban jungle held potential for a different sort of adventure to my road trip. Sydney—a theatre with five million cast members. And I was so excited to see everyone that I knew.

  I was going back confident of something deceptively simple: I am Australian. I have a legitimate spot—not in the land, that was a separate issue, but in the ‘project Australia’ currently occupying this continent. And every single shareholder in project Australia had an equal stake.

  Sure it didn’t always feel that way, like when someone tweeted at me to ‘go back to Vietnam’ (wrong country, mate), or when tabloid media portrayed Indigenous Australians as nothing but bums and drunks, and Muslim Australians as nothing but terror-inflicting jihadists, not to mention the obsession with Sudanese-Australian media personality Yassmin Abdel-Magied that bordered on pathological. But in Samuel’s combination of patriotism and pride in Australian multiculturalism, in the way that just about everyone I had met on my trip had treated me so decently, not at all like a outsider, I had finally seen that most Australians understood, implicitly, ours was a country uniquely united by its diversity.

  I need not keep my head down and play the good immigrant—need not and should not. By slavishly binding myself to precious or popularly held definitions of Australian, I only perpetuated them. I had just as much right to define Australian as any other, and if there remained national associations with whiteness or Britishness, masculinity, conservatism, anti-intellectualism or pastoral life, I instantly redefined what it meant to be Australian merely by being myself.

  Australia had grown up enough to accept me as their everyman. I was sure of it. And the more I asserted it, the truer it became.

  All of a sudden, something became crystal clear.

  ‘I love Australia.’

  I said the words aloud to my empty car as I sped past old colonial homes, second-hand antique stores and the quaint cafes the Blue Mountains is known for, sandwiched by bush.

  Saying it so baldly felt transgressive. This was probably the first time in my life I had said it without irony or reserve. And it was true. I was dizzily in love with Australia.

  My love was no abstract concept, kept afloat by the helium balloons of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘democracy’. My love went all the way to the core of my being. It could be expressed with earthly pleasures. It was the same longing an overseas Chinese person had for the spicy chilli broth of Sichuan cooking, or a British expat for the smell of rain on the heath. It was the love Dorothea Mackellar felt for her sunburnt country. It was a love inspired by the Warumungu people who were so attached to their land that once, when an enormous boulder of the sacred site Kunjarra was removed, their elders became sick. Now that I had tasted Australia, smelt it, walked it, seen the lay of its land and read the story of its life, my love for it was visceral and spiritual.

  I came off the last Blue Mountain and, with that, the sloping road tipped me into the western edge of Sydney somewhere near Penrith. The greenery and villages gave way to a walled motorway that I knew shot straight into the concrete heart of western Sydney, dense with factory outlets, fast food joints and industrial parks. In less than an hour I would be back at my mum’s two-storey brick home in the quiet, leafy suburbs of north-west Sydney.

  It was in this city that the story of ‘project Australia’ began. Having travelled the country, I returned knowing that being exposed to its strange, wonderful and heartbreaking history had engendered in me a fresh feeling of intimacy.

  Through all the pain, anger and frustration, I accepted Australia for who it was. My sense of patriotic duty and care was as solid as the ancient rock lining this continent.

  Australia was my family, and our futures would forever be entwined. Waves of relief, of elation, moved through my body. Somehow, I’d made it. Through my tears, I began to smile.

  Zen pelicans paddling on the slow-moving Murrumbidgee River, near Yanga Woolshed, New South Wales. The river converges with the Lachlan, running into the mighty Murray River. These waterways are vital to life in Australia’s dry interior.

  The sculptural sand monuments that dot Mungo National Park, New South Wales, are shaped by ever-present winds blowing in from the west. The park is home to the oldest human remains on the Australian continent.

  David Unaipon: Ngarrindjeri polymath preacher, writer, inventor and musician. Australia’s $50 note bears his portrait and depicts his former church, which still stands in the South Australian town of Raukkan.

  Move over Barnaby Joyce, I absolutely love my Akubra. Here I am near Redbank Gorge in the West MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia. Ghost gums grow here at sometimes gravity-defying angles.

  The west coast of Australia has bewitching sunsets and I’ll never forget this one on Eighty Mile Beach. Although I grew up in a coastal city, being on Australia’s east meant I’d never seen the sun set over the ocean.

  Here I am with Tyson Mowarin, Ngarluma man, filmmaker and founder of the Roebourne-based digital agency, Weerianna Street Media. Behind us are the great art-bearing boulders of Murujuga in Western Australia.

  My Toyota RAV4 seeing some action in Karijini National Park, Western Australia. This region is one of the world’s major iron ore sources, which gives the earth there such a distinctly orange-red hue.

  By the final, ninth day of the Lurujarri Trail we’d hiked 72 kilometres of Western Australian coastline with Goolarabooloo traditional owners.

  ‘Chinaman Creek’ near Manbulloo Station, Northern Territory. This marks a place where Chinese people likely lived or ran market gardens during colonial times. One of many signs of Chinese occupation throughout Australia.

  You can see how nervous I was of lurking crocodiles, yet how enticing these mermaid waters were. Rangers at the Kakadu National Park tell tourists they swim at their own risk.

  Kakadu’s traditional owners are the Bininj people in the north of the park and Mungguy people in the south. An interpretive park ranger described this gunbim (rock art) site as a ‘menu’, of sorts, and somewhere you can also see a hat-wearing, pale-skinned buffalo hunter.

  The glorious peak of my fishing prowess. I had the impression catching a barramundi was a rite of passage for all Top End fishers, and after I nabbed this beauty I was satisfied I could leave the NT.

  Eddie Ah Toy, 2005’s Territorian of the Year, is a third-generation Chinese Australian living in Pine Creek. He stands outside a corrugated-iron building that was once the Ah Toy Bakery. It is not uncommon to meet well-established Chinese Australian families in the NT who can trace their roots back to the gold rush.

  I visited half a dozen heritage cemeteries with dedicated Chinese sections—yet more evidence of the strong presence of Chinese people during colonial times. I saw this elaborate Chinese shrine in Cooktown Cemetery, Queensland.

  I may not quite deserve the title of ‘twitcher’ but I most definitely converted into a bird lover on this trip. The fabulously coloured cassowary is among the more flamboyant of avian species.

  By the time I reached Ballina in northern New South Wales, the sea well and truly looked and sounded like the ocean of my hometown. I loved hearing that roar of bolshy surf again.

  My final campground was situated in the densely wooded Kanangra-Boyd National Park, part of the Greater Blue Mountains. Here mist and rain are rarely gone for long. I took a nerve-wracking night of storms as a sign I should finally go home.

  Afterword

  Just over a year after returning from my trip, I landed a dream job: I began teaching Australian Studies at The College at Western Sydney Un
iversity. At the time, most of my book was written and my money had run out. I have an enthusiasm for Australian history and culture that I’m eager to share with young people, and enthusiasm is an excellent base upon which to build an engaging classroom environment.

  The campus is based in Bankstown, an ethnically and culturally diverse part of Sydney. Most of my students have a non-English speaking background: Lebanese, Pacific Islander, Italian, Russian, Chilean, Iraqi and Afghan. I consider it a privilege to show them that even though the Australia of our popular imagination has so often failed to demonstrate its cultural diversity, in fact it has been a defining characteristic almost from the beginning of colonial Australia.

  My classroom presentations are peppered with photos and anecdotes from my trip. For many of my students, who are mainly in their late teens, this is the first time that stories of Australia have resonated with them. Over the course of a semester I facilitate their journey of discovering that so much about their country is fascinating: Indigenous Australia’s bewilderingly long occupation of the land, the surprising story of two radically different cultures coming into contact for the first time, the unfolding tragedy as one of these cultures attempted to subsume the other, the waves of immigrants who have followed the British and the challenge they pose to a cultural monopoly, and ultimately the survival of the First Peoples of this land.