by Monica Tan
I very quickly realised that I am writing this book for my students. Few of them have the same privileges that I had in life, and instead many more responsibilities and obligations. Who knows how many of them may one day embark on a similar trip around Australia, but that’s the beauty of teaching and of writing this book—the revelations that came to me on my trip need not be mine alone.
My students leave my classroom with more knowledge, insights and opinions about Australian national identity and race relations than when they entered. They are empowered to be both sceptical and hopeful, to make connections between the past, present and future—and, most importantly, to strive for reconciliation with Indigenous Australia and have a voice in this country about where it is headed.
When looking back on my trip there are things that, with hindsight, I view differently. It has become clear that, for whatever reason, throughout my travels I met more men than women. The book I have written reflects that disparity and may unintentionally continue a historical bias that favours the male perspective, including in colonial depictions of Indigenous Australia.
Reconciliation is a painful process of healing, rife with awkwardness and difficult truths. Take one conversation I had with an older white woman in the Kimberley. She was wearing a ‘Close the Gap’ baseball cap and said it made her very sad to think about Aboriginal people’s life expectancy: ten years younger than the national average.
She asked me about my heritage.
‘I’m Chinese,’ I said to her. ‘What’s your heritage?’
The question seemed to catch her off guard as if she were rarely asked such a thing. And perhaps it was contrarian of me. If I couldn’t feel good and settled on these lands, then neither could she. I wouldn’t allow her to take for granted she was the ‘default’ Australian.
‘Oh, you know, British—boring!’ she replied. She said she’d done an ancestry site DNA test hoping something interesting might turn up in the family tree. ‘I thought, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I had some French aristocracy or Aboriginal heritage? But sadly, no. The results were very dull.’
At the time I prickled with irritation. These leftie-types were desperate for some long-lost great-great-great-Aboriginal grandmother to show up in the family tree, when just one generation ago their families probably would have covered it up. This woman wanted to be Aboriginal when it came to culture and connection to Country, or even flying the banner of a persecuted minority. But did she also want to be Aboriginal if it meant being the target of racial abuse on the streets, inheriting the psychological burden of colonialism or, as she had just pointed out, facing a life expectancy so much lower than that of the non-Aboriginal Australian population? Aboriginal identity wasn’t parts sold separately—you either ran the full gamut or you didn’t.
But later I began asking myself if my attitude had been all that different. After all, I hadn’t just embarked on this trip to learn about Aboriginal Australia: I had gone into it as a Chinese Australian. I had so badly wanted my relationship with Aboriginal Australia to be different from that of a European Australian. I thought if I could just discover where our cultures overlapped—Aboriginal and Chinese—we would find those commonalities liberating. We needed a story of Australia, I believed, that wasn’t so oppressively strangled by the native–invader dynamic and mired in constant tragedy. It would be a story of friendship in adversity, of two ancient cultures actively resisting Western imperialism. One that could give our nation hope and show us another way to live together.
When I thought back on my trip—of my new friends in Arrernte Country, Ngarluma Country, Yawuru Country, to that cinema in Broome segregated by skin tone, a ‘Yapa from China’—I knew this had been proven true … but only to a point. My trip had also thrown up another, more confronting and equally important truth. One that until now I had been unwilling to face.
The Top End had shown me the extent to which the Chinese played a role in fortifying the hold that white Australia had over this continent. No, we didn’t come out on the First Fleet, but the first Chinese settler in Australia is believed to have been a Guangzhou man: Mak Sai Ying (also known as John Shying) in 1818, just thirty years later. Chinese men supplied pioneer towns with fruit and vegetables; helped build the Overland Telegraph Line and the Ghan Railway Line and other essential infrastructure; traded goods, ran general stores, cooked on stations, purchased real estate and dug for gold. We’ve been here from nearly the beginning of project Australia, and if you were to sketch a portrait of the stereotypical Australian Pioneer it would just as likely be a Chinese man in a straw coolie hat as it would be a European man in an Akubra slouch hat.
We weren’t the ones to kick down the doors, but we walked in after the British had done so. If we’re going to take credit for contributing to the formation of the colony, we also have to take responsibility for the impact this had on Indigenous Australia. As part of immigrant Australia, how can I ever come close to understanding the pain and suffering Indigenous Australians have undergone in the forced dispossession of their lands, peoples and cultures? I’d been searching for absolution from the devastation that colonisation has caused to Indigenous Australia, and instead been shown the stark truth: we Chinese Australians played a role in it.
These are the complex notions I bring to my classroom. Accepting the ambiguities inherent to life in multicultural Australia, and taking responsibility for making our country a more honest, mature and compassionate place is a considerable thing to ask of my young students. They are barely out of high school, and so much lies ahead of them. Yet time and time again, these young people show me their willingness and enthusiasm to do better than the generations that came before them.
Having a front-row seat to their growth fills me with optimism.
Birdspotting
These are the bird species I saw on my trip, listed region-by-region (repeat sightings removed).
Central Australia
Spinifex pigeon
Crested pigeon
Egret
White-faced heron
Cormorant
Wedge-tailed eagle
Grey-crowned babbler
Black-faced cuckoo-shrike
Australian ringneck
Singing honeyeater
Splendid fairy-wren
Rufous whistler
Red-capped robin
Black-faced woodswallow
Budgerigar
Mulga parrot
Painted finch
Western bowerbird
Inland thornbill
Brown falcon
Pied butcherbird
Zebra finch
Major Mitchell’s cockatoo
Grey-headed honeyeater
Magpie lark
The Kimberley & The Pilbara
Brolga
Galah
Red-winged parrot
Yellow-throated miner
Little corella
Willie wagtail
White-necked heron
Straw-necked ibis
Red-eared firetail
Whistling kite
Little egret
Australian white ibis
Black kite
Double-barred finch
Rainbow bee-eater
Masked lapwing
Sooty oystercatcher
Silver gull
Eastern reef egret
Peaceful dove
White-plumed honeyeater
Nankeen kestrel
Lurujarri Trail
Red-backed fairy-wren
Australian pelican
Osprey
White-bellied sea eagle
Jabiru (black-necked stork)
Top End
Blue-faced honeyeater
Silver-crowned friarbird
Rainbow lorikeet
Red-tailed black cockatoo
Little pied cormorant
Pied imperial pigeon
Great bowerbird
Bush stone-curlew
Magpie goose<
br />
Radjah shelduck
Cattle egret
Wandering whistling duck
Nankeen night heron
Comb-crested jacana
Whiskered tern
Azure kingfisher
Swamphen
Red-collared lorikeet
Grey butcherbird
Arnhem Land
Bar-shouldered dove
Great egret
Whimbrel
Spangled drongo
White-breasted woodswallow
Blue-winged kookaburra
East Coast
Pacific black duck
Australian brush turkey
Black butcherbird
Australian bustard
Australasian figbird
Olive-backed sunbird
Orange-footed scrubfowl
Emerald dove
Cassowary
Australian darter
Crimson rosella
Eastern rosella
Yellow-tailed black cockatoo
Australian king parrot
Lyrebird
Red-rumped parrot
Laughing kookaburra
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the many generous Australians who, throughout my six months on the road, opened their doors to me—be it the door of their home, tent, caravan, 4WD or troopy—or simply shared their life with me. In particular, I would like to thank those who feature in this book. In order to maintain their privacy it is impossible to name them individually, but I will never forget what they have done for me and will remain forever grateful.
A special thanks must be extended to the traditional owners whose land I travelled through. Considering the history of this country, it often feels as if all we non-Indigenous Australians do is take from Indigenous Australia—take their land, take their culture, take their stories. In writing this story, I was mindful of the preciousness of what was given to me, and the responsibility to treat that knowledge and those stories with reverence and respect.
This is my first book, and so often as I was writing I felt as if I were flailing on an impossibly difficult endurance course: pain and sheer, brutal hard work. Luckily, throughout that journey I had many teachers, elders, mentors and cheerleaders. Thank you to Janine, Elle, Tom, Michael, Daniel, Rhiannon, Tim, Nicole, Erin and Kylie, and in particular my writing group partners Catherine and Jake to whom I would regularly send ten thousand fresh, unhewn words, and not once did I hear a complaint. I am so lucky to have such exceptionally talented writers in my life, and receiving their feedback on early drafts was a master course in writing.
Thank you to my parents and the rest of my family for their financial support, unconditional love and unwavering confidence in me, including my brother Winston for his meticulous assistance in the fact-checking of this book. Thank you to those friends who continually deepen my understanding of Indigenous Australia, including Tyson, Peta-Joy, Murrumu and Warren. Thank you to the many academics who read early drafts, in particular David Walker. Thank you to the many current and former Guardianistas who provided me with opportunities to understand Indigenous Australia better through my journalism. Thank you to my agent Grace Heifetz, publisher Jane Palfreyman and editors Kate Goldsworthy and Tom Bailey-Smith. Without their faith in this project, artistic sensitivity and cool professionalism, I’m sure this book could have wound up on the rubbish heap of my broken dreams. Thank you to Macchina, the cafe where much of this book was rewritten, for their excellent coffee.
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