Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  ‘I’ll be staying in a tent,’ I said glumly.

  I’d been watching the TV series Wolf Creek, which features a young woman playing a cat-and-mouse game with a serial killer in the remote Outback. Every Australian man she encounters wants to kill, rape or marry her. It seemed like foolish viewing for a woman about to embark on a trip through the Outback, but I found it morbidly empowering to watch the protagonist shoot, fight and connive her way in and out of trouble.

  My colleagues gave me a farewell gift: a genuine, leather Akubra. It was my boss’s idea, and she had spent two hours picking it out for me. She said that according to the saleswoman, Akubras last twenty years through rain, hail or shine. I looked down at my perfect present—it had a stylish thin headband and was cradled with paper in a white hatbox—and burst into tears.

  That weekend I moved all my stuff out of my rented inner-west townhouse, where I’d been living with one of my best friends, and drove it to my two-storey brick childhood home.

  I started packing. It was the middle of winter, and I planned to camp most of the way, so I had to bring all my cold-weather gear—down jackets, woollen socks, thermal underwear—stuffed into two duffel bags. I’d purchased three cubic black storage boxes: I filled the first with cooking utensils and a briefcase-sized portable gas stove; the second with foodstuffs like noodles, cereal, herbs, cooking oil; and the third with bits and bobs like toilet paper, a camping lamp, cans of gas, washing detergent and a packet of sponges. But the list of things to bring felt never-ending: sleeping bags, a pillow, hiking boots, empty jerry cans, water tanks, a medical pack, toiletries, presents for people I planned to visit, diaries and books, and a case of CDs that I had to brush the dust off, for those sections of the Outback where I’d have no phone reception to stream music. What I’d expected to take only a couple of hours to pack required half the night, and I was amazed at how my Toyota RAV4—a large five-seater car with a spacious boot—strained to fit everything.

  I had a terrible night of sleep tinged with an uneasy feeling, as if a foul smell was in the air. I awoke in the dead of night with the sensation that all the cells of my body were coated in a cold, metallic sweat. For the first time I was confronted by the gravity of not what I was leaving behind but what I was getting myself into. Being out there. I tried to calm myself down by thinking, This is my land and I shouldn’t be afraid of it. Fear of the land, fear of a great inland expanse of nothingness, is a colonial mentality. If I do right by the land, it will take care of me. After all, part of what had pushed me to plan this trip was a desire to experience ‘Country’. In this context, Country means so much more than just a group of people living on a piece of land ruled by a government. It is an Aboriginal term that embodies a holistic view of one’s homelands, incorporating every living creature, every element and feature; the land is laced with story, history and spirits, and imbued with a deep sense of home and belonging.

  I wanted to view land the way that Yawuru man and Western Australian Senator Patrick Dodson once described it in 1976:

  We heard the other day land being described as ‘piece of dirt’. That would be the same as someone who considered St Peter’s just a barnyard to Catholics. For the Aboriginal people land is a dynamic notion. It is something that is creative. Land isn’t just bound up with geographical limitations that are placed on it by a surveyor, who marks out a plot and says, ‘This is your plot.’ Land is the generative point of existence; it’s the maintenance of existence; it’s the spirit from which Aboriginal existence comes. It’s a living thing made up of sky, of clouds, of rivers, of trees, of the wind, of the sand, and of the Spirit that has created all those things, the Spirit that has planted my own spirit there, my own Country … It’s a living entity. It belongs to me—I belong to the land. I rest in it, I come from there. Land is a notion that is most difficult to categorise in [non-Indigenous] law. It is something that is very clear in Aboriginal Law.

  I wasn’t sure if it was possible for me, a non-Aboriginal Australian, to experience Country. Was it cultural appropriation to even try? I was certain this wouldn’t be the last time I asked myself that question.

  My understanding of colonial history had been that in any given country town, Chinese people often ran the market gardens and would hire Aboriginal workers—by many accounts treating them well. Some Chinese men even married into Aboriginal families. I regarded my trip as an extension of that historical friendship. I wanted to focus on what I, as a Chinese Australian, shared with Aboriginal Australians. After all, weren’t our two ancient cultures both steeped in spirituality, rich in languages, traditions and customs, and took pleasure from words, songs, ceremonies and art?

  On the other hand I was acutely aware that this road trip and any attempt to write a book about Australia might sound like an innocent enough proposition, but history has left race relations in a delicate state. Was I destined to repeat a pattern of exploitation, fetishisation and appropriation of Aboriginal Australian culture by non-Aboriginal Australian storytellers? Even now I remained plagued by doubt.

  The next morning I woke to a sombre grey sky. I felt slightly nauseated from lack of sleep. Everything is about to change. Fuck me dead. I ate breakfast slowly and wordlessly, like a prisoner on death row, and took a few remaining items to my car: two maps rolled up in a cardboard tube—one a conventional map of Australia, and another showing the continent broken up in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language regions—and a daypack. I told myself that despite my carload of stuff there were only three essentials: my phone, credit card and car keys. Everything else was easily replaceable.

  Before I climbed into the car I hugged my mum, lightly, and promised to call her soon. I was grateful she seemed composed because I was anything but.

  My family have become accustomed to my penchant for solo travel and general life instability—I tend to quit enviable jobs, moving from place to place. They worry, but they also trust me. I have proven capable and resilient. They respect my need for independence and to live a meaningful life.

  As I reversed out of the driveway, taking one final glance at the lowering garage door and behind it my long-suffering mother, standing there silently, my brain struggled to comprehend I wasn’t just running an errand or taking a short holiday. Or the fact that when I returned in December, it wouldn’t be to the life I was now leaving behind.

  A light rain began to fall. For two hours I drove south through western Sydney, jostling with raging semitrailers, past rows of fast-food joints, budget furniture stores and car dealerships.

  By the time I reached Sydney’s city limits, two hours had passed and my eyelids felt made of lead. Boy, an accident on the very first day of my six months away would be plain embarrassing. Near Goulburn I pulled off the highway at a roadside McDonald’s to take a quick nap in the half-empty car park. I cranked my seat back, wrapped a scarf around my face to keep the stark winter sun out, and almost instantly fell asleep.

  My phone alarm detonated with harsh, insistent bleeping half an hour later. I cursed, feeling groggy and still panicky. My anxiety had the coldness of a doctor’s needle sliding into my arm, except it pierced my entire body. What a melancholic June day. I found the fresh silence in my car unnerving. Remind me again why I had abandoned my familiar Sydney life? I was a somebody there—not somebody important, but a daughter, sister, friend, colleague and journalist. Now who was I? Just a single, thirty-something nobody on the road with a car full of camping gear and a box of blank journals.

  Thanks to my habit of setting my life on fire, this panicky feeling wasn’t new to me. And upon dropping the match on a fortunate life I had vigorously doused with fuel, I was often paralysed by the thought that perhaps I’d made a gigantic mistake.

  Parked in that ubiquitous roadside McDonald’s, I lay tipped backwards in my car seat staring at my side-view mirror. It showed a square of hard blue Australian sky stamped with white clouds. I was gripped by a dizzying sensation that perhaps I could just fall through that square and e
merge into some floating parallel universe.

  I took a deep breath—mistake or not, I had to see through what I’d set in motion. I brought my seat upright and slid the key into the ignition. As I headed back onto the main road I felt, yet again, my former life going up in flames.

  Lake Mungo is a thousand kilometres dead on west of Sydney, at which point you’re still in New South Wales but not too far from both the South Australian and Victorian borders. If you gunned it all the way, you could reach Lake Mungo from Sydney in a day. But I wasn’t in any hurry and took a week, with a stop at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and stayed with friends in towns along the rivers that trickle from the mountains to the interior. The curling Murrumbidgee River converges with the Lachlan, running into the mighty Murray River. Rainwater funnels off the Great Dividing Range into these all-important waterways and is carried to the long, flat western plains.

  Among Australia’s many cultural faultlines—rural versus urban, northern Australia versus southern Australia, Indigenous versus non-Indigenous—the Great Dividing Range, a 3700-kilometre-long chain of plateaus and low mountain ranges, stands out as a physical demarcation of a divided country. This natural wall splits three states—Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria—into east and west. To its east is a thin strip of verdant land where one finds the country’s three largest cities—Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane—overlooking a powerful blue ocean, while to its west is an expanse of land that quickly flattens out, becoming drier until it turns into the red heart of the country.

  ‘There’s something psychological about that barrier that discourages people from coming over,’ my friend Tim said to me when I stayed with him and his young family in Wagga Wagga, a town just west of the Great Dividing Range. ‘West of the divide is the “real” Australia, and all those millions of people on the east coast might as well live in a different country. Australia is vast, Australia is arid; forests and sandstone belong somewhere else.’ And it’s true that while the physical barrier was long ago breached, most people in the three major eastern cities never developed the habit of heading west for their holidays; they prefer sliding up and down the coast, swapping one pretty white, sandy beach for another. When eight out of ten Australians live ‘on the rim of a soup-plate’, as it was once described by a visiting American academic, whatever lies in between coastlines is anybody’s guess: some sheep, some cows, a few blackfellas and a bunch of nothing, probably.

  Balranald was the last town on the Sturt Highway before I’d have to turn north and drive a few hours for Mungo National Park. On my approach to the town, where I planned to stock up on supplies, I stopped on the side of the highway during a prolonged spell of featureless plain. I snapped a photo of myself wearing my ash-brown Akubra with a duck feather in its band, and span around in a circle. Nothing interrupted the horizon line, the precise fold used to make an origami figurine, halving the green shrub-covered land from blue sky. Locals claim their plains are the flattest in the southern hemisphere. Distances felt impossible to judge: how far was that line of trees—one kilometre, ten kilometres? You could probably cycle for hours here without breaking a sweat.

  There are geological reasons why flyblown Australia is so low, flat and dry. Having drifted far away from active plate boundaries, in ancient times our continent retired into relative geological stability. Much of our continent is deeply weathered: millions upon millions of years of wind and water have scoured its surface, with some of our rocks dating back more than three thousand million years. The Ikara-Flinders Ranges in South Australia once rivalled the current Himalayas; now the ranges’ tallest peak, St Mary, is one eighth the height of Mt Everest. Because the continent’s average elevation is only 325 metres, many of our major rivers flow slowly inland, ending with ephemeral salt lakes.

  In its peaceful old age, the continent has indulged in a hobby of collecting all manner of mementos from the passing years in its layers of earth. It is not uncommon to find mind-bogglingly old objects preserved in near-perfect perpetuity, and Lake Mungo in western New South Wales is the archaeological equivalent of Treasure Island.

  I drove through the tree-lined streets of Balranald, which did not appear too different to the suburbs I’d grown up in except there were fewer cars about; parking is rarely a problem in Australian country towns. On a street corner I located the Balranald Discovery Centre: modern buildings painted in the understated cool blue-green of a gumleaf and encased by well-maintained gardens.

  Inside I found a middle-aged man sitting on a low stool behind the counter. He looked up at me. I looked back. When I opened my mouth to speak, he turned to the back door and shouted a name. A woman emerged, dabbing the remains of lunch from the corner of her lip with a tissue. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I was wondering if you could tell me anything about the Aboriginal culture of this area.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I waited for more, but no more was to come. ‘Well,’ I coughed, when the silence felt too unbearable, ‘I also want to know how to get to Mungo National Park.’

  She appeared to relax and plucked a pamphlet from a stack, then on a mud map briskly marked the distances between points. This section of the trip would be my first taste of remote driving and sleeping outdoors in the middle of winter. I planned to put my back seats down so I could sleep in the car instead of my tent—surely it would be at least a few degrees warmer? After camping two nights at Mungo, I would head south to the town of Mildura. A frisson of nervous anticipation raced through me as the woman told me that between here and my next fuel stop lay at least 250 kilometres of dirt-road driving, with no mobile reception at the national park.

  After thanking her for the instructions, I wandered through an adjacent building of the centre. A display stated that at one point in Balranald’s colonial past, its population of just four hundred supported six drinking holes. In 1858 the Sydney Morning Herald wrote of Balranald as ‘this obscure and miserable township, situated on the Lower Murrumbidgee’, which was ‘attracting a considerable share of attention as being one of those rowdy places for which the Australian bush in the interior has become famous’. The article then outlined a bizarre chain of unlucky deaths: the town’s publican, ‘poor Graham’, was killed and the murderer hanged not long after at Goulburn; the doctor who attended the trial drowned on his way home; his widow, ‘having gone to Deniliquin to get married’, was absent when her child burnt to death in an accident; and the messenger sent to inform her drowned while crossing the Murrumbidgee. The reporter gloomily reasoned: ‘it would seem that there are certain phases through which these townships have to pass. Formed by neither nature nor art, many of them drag on a miserable existence.’ I wasn’t sure if Balranald was still in a state of misery, but I suspected that most of these towns on the river had shaken off their bad-boy colonial pasts and were now known more for their fishing spots, senior-friendly bushwalks and heritage woolsheds. Part of me wished I could have seen these places when they were a little more raucous—although no doubt they would have been precarious places for a Chinese woman on her own.

  I was eager to get into the Outback; so far my trip had been too comfortable. From here on, the drives between fuel stops would get longer and the patches without mobile reception larger. For me there was no line defining the beginning and end of the Outback, rather it was any place I was forced continuously to contemplate what was necessary for my survival. Where am I sleeping? What will I eat? How can I stay warm? Where is my next fuel stop? Do I know how to get where I’m going? How do I find out the road conditions? Even though I estimated my fuel tank could hold more than enough to last me to the next petrol station, I had geed myself up with so much impending doom I filled an extra twenty-litre jerry can. At the supermarket I bought two plastic tanks of water, and a packet of dry Chinese noodles, veggies, some cheese and sandwich bread for lunch.

  Everything I needed was inside my car; I could go anywhere, any time. Euphoric with the sense that I was the bright centre of my
own universe, I hit the road.

  As I drove, the view reminded me of a Dreamtime story told by Wamba Wamba man Ron Murray in a recording I’d listened to at the Balranald Discovery Centre: ‘the world was as flat as a saucer and the sky hung so low over the earth that everything was small and living creatures were small as ants’. Eventually Baiami the Creator drank from a magical pool of water that was sweet and clear, and he grew so strong he used a digging stick to push up the sky to its present position, providing room for all the animals to enlarge. I felt as if I was experiencing the story in reverse: the land was paring back all forms and features, reducing itself to nothing as the blue ceiling dropped and flattened the ground.

  The Dreamtime or the Dreaming isn’t a concept well understood by non-Aboriginal people. I certainly struggled with it and had long accepted much of it would remain elusive to me. What I knew was that every Aboriginal Australian nation had their own distinct set of Dreaming stories and were sometimes compared to the Bible’s Genesis: an ancient collection of creation stories, spiritual in nature, describing in detail how the land was formed, the purpose of all things, and the principles by which all must live to maintain balance and order throughout the universe. I suspected the comparison was an awkward fit—any attempt to shoehorn one culture into the framework of another inevitably is.

  Is this beautiful? I asked myself after an hour of uninterrupted sameness, of primal, lifeless earth. Land with shape provides a path for the eye to follow: along a snaking river or through a gap between hills. When high mountains turn into low valleys, it’s natural fodder for drama. The sublimity of the French Alps, Grand Canyon or Himalayas is symphonic and plain to see. But this? Certainly it is provocative, and its fascination more psychological than aesthetic—more Yves Klein and Mondrian than Turner and Monet. Depending on who you are, a thousand kilometres of nothing can seem oppressive and distressing or liberating and calming. It is a landscape-sized sensory deprivation tank.