Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  Hours passed as the road cut through stumpy grey-green scrub, and it began to feel as if we were driving on a treadmill. I had forgotten what trees looked like. Then we saw that, in fact, we had been going somewhere—for a drug-testing police unit appeared on the horizon. They were picking drivers seemingly at random. When we slowed down, an officer indicated I should pull over.

  ‘That’s your fault,’ I said to Thomas, who had the long hair of a stoner. He smiled at me nervously.

  As soon as I opened my doors, the sniffer dog went nuts. ‘Do you have anything in there?’ the officer asked sharply.

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you have something,’ he said, stern and impatient.

  ‘Chinese tea?’

  ‘No, something else.’

  I shrugged, feeling unruffled. I had done nothing wrong and predicted, with perfect confidence, I would soon be on my way and that later I would recall this incident as a moment of mild inconvenience. Not being afraid of the police is a privilege of belonging to Australia’s upper-middle class. I was an upstanding, law-abiding taxpayer. They worked for me.

  Three officers pulled my gear from the car in long entrails strewn across the side of the highway. They were unzipping bags and opening lids while the dog excitedly wagged its tail and yipped, trampling over my gear.

  Soon it became clear the dog was getting hopped up over one item in particular: Thomas’s duffel bag.

  ‘You definitely have something, mate,’ the officer in charge said to Thomas.

  The policeman was shaped square as a Lego piece. His cap covered his eyes and made him indistinguishable from every cop I’d ever seen on television. When he said ‘mate’ it sounded menacing, as if nothing could be further from the case.

  ‘Did you have anything in the past?’ he growled.

  Thomas looked sheepish and nodded. ‘A few weeks ago.’

  ‘That stuff stays in your clothes for months,’ the policeman said.

  The officers took the bag to a nearby table and went through its contents while I packed up my belongings. Thomas stood nearby, looking guilty, his hands dug deep in his pockets. Presumably he was wondering what Australian prison food tasted like.

  Finally satisfied that we had nothing on us, the senior police officer issued Thomas a stern warning and let us go. The dog was still barking like mad at the offending bag.

  We got back in the car and I pulled away, relieved to be on the road again. Once we’d driven a short distance, Thomas apologised. I said I didn’t care, and laughed when he told me how scared shitless that cop had made him feel.

  We were now driving through an otherworldly landscape. In the distance were purple-blue flat-topped mesas rising like long loaves of bread from dry plains covered in green shrubs and salt lakes the colour of rust. Spurts of voluminous white cloud suspended in the blue sky made me feel as if I were driving along the cold and dark bottom of the ocean, looking up at a school of jellyfish.

  I enjoyed seeing the country through Thomas’s eyes, the way he was excited by the Wild-Wild Westness of it all. To the urbane European, Australia represented something vast, raw and unhinged. When a ball of dried spinifex tumbled across the road like in an old Warner Bros. cartoon, Thomas laughed hard. ‘That was the most Outback thing I have ever seen!’ Later, we spotted a visitor sign sprayed with bullet holes. ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ he said, but his voice was full of glee.

  After another hour we came around a tight curve and across the scene of an old car accident. Feeling nosy, I suggested we stop to have a poke around. Thomas agreed, so I slowed down and parked on the side of the highway.

  The car had flipped over, surely speeding on the bend we’d just rounded, and landed stomach-side up. It was crushed like a gold-coloured soft-drink can, and the driver’s belongings scattered about the red dirt almost artistically. Having previously visited parts of the Top End, I’d known to expect plenty of bombed-out cars left to rust on the side of the road. The cost to get them towed and repaired often exceeded the value of the car.

  I was reminded of one of the finest-ever openings of an essay. It’s by Kim Mahood, quoting a Western Desert woman about whitefellas who work in Aboriginal communities: ‘Kartiya are like Toyotas. When they break down we get another one.’ Mahood continues:

  Unlike the broken Toyotas, which are abandoned where they fall, cannibalised, overturned, gutted and torched, the broken kartiya go away—albeit often feeling they have been cannibalised, overturned, gutted and torched. They leave behind them dying gardens and unfinished projects, misunderstandings and misplaced good intentions. The best leave foundations on which their replacements can build provisional shelters while they scout the terrain, while the worst leave funds unaccounted for, relationships in ruins and communities in chaos.

  Thomas and I walked several times around the flipped car whose wheels were gone. The twisted metal carcass had an unusual racing stripe with a checkerboard design. I felt as if this were the belly of a machine beast with its internal organs on display: battery, radiator, engine, alternator.

  ‘Do you think he died?’ I asked Thomas, of the driver.

  ‘I think they might have tried to pull him out here,’ he said with the grim concentration of a CSI detective, pointing at the driver’s window.

  But we had already made a fundamental error: the ‘he’ was, in fact, a ‘she’. Scattered letters were addressed to a ‘Lucy Sanders’ living in Victoria. When I spotted a calculator buried in some grass nearby, I exclaimed, ‘She’s a scientist!’ not considering the many reasons why one might require a calculator. It was unnerving to see Lucy’s nine-inch, lace-up black platform boots, plastic gloves, car manual, cleaning spray and unpaid fines being gradually swallowed up by red dirt, among old animal bones and clumps of hardy desert plants.

  Eventually a police car pulled up and two officers got out, directing us to bugger off. We didn’t need to be told twice.

  Back on the road, we found ourselves the smallest and fastest vehicle heading north, overtaking cautious grey nomads in enormous caravans and families in four-wheel drives towing trailers. Whenever we got trapped behind hefty fifty-metre road trains, pulling multiple trailers loaded with livestock, freight or fuel, I’d take the terrifying step of getting into the oncoming lane to overtake.

  The sun glowed white-hot like an ember on the horizon, precisely where the road ended. It was blinding, but I had no option but to look directly at it if I wanted to see the road, which had been transformed into a river of liquid gold. Alarming visions of a head-on collision flashed through my mind.

  A semitrailer approached us from the other side of the road. My entire car shook nervously as it passed and the harsh jangling from the metal trailers filled the air.

  ‘FUCK!’ I said.

  A pair of neat bullet holes had appeared in my windscreen. The road train had kicked up a spray of rocks, sending two straight through the glass.

  ‘Shit, that could have killed you!’ said Thomas, although afterwards we concluded that this probably wasn’t correct. I made a mental note to get my windscreen fixed in Alice Springs and hoped the holes wouldn’t turn into a spider web of cracks.

  Thomas changed his plans slightly and asked if he might follow me further up the highway. Now he wanted to go all the way to Coober Pedy, a tourist-ridden opal-mining town on the approach to the NT border, which I’d reach the following day. He thought aloud: he could spend a couple of nights there and then nab a ride from someone else. Despite my concerns, he remained steadfast in his resolution to hitchhike the whole way to Darwin. ‘Out of principle,’ he said.

  When the sun dipped behind the horizon and the winter cold came rushing in like a high tide, we decided to stop for the night. We found ourselves on a vacant bit of land next to a petrol station and picked a spot beneath the slowly spinning blades of a tin windmill.

  I noticed that my car’s front grille was sprayed with terracotta mud, and I was glad that the next day I would enter the Territory wi
thout any trace of my city-slicker origins remaining. That bit of dirt announced to the world that a genuine country gal was behind the wheel. A real road warrior.

  Having dropped Thomas at Coober Pedy, I crossed the border alone. I was amazed to see the speed limit bump up to 130 kilometres per hour. Then I remembered my friend Ryan—an Arrernte man from Alice Springs who now lived in Sydney—had once told me most of the Territory had no speed limit at all.

  I’d seen through Facebook that Ryan, coincidentally, would be back in his home town around the same time as my visit. Over the past few days we’d been chatting via Messenger without locking in any concrete plans to meet. When he had eventually told me his dates, I’d gunned it to Alice to have a couple of days’ overlap. I really wanted to hang out—mostly because the golden rule of travel is that knowing a local is better than not, but also because I was excited to see someone from back home and felt it would give me some perspective on how far I’d come since leaving Sydney.

  Stuart Highway was named after John McDouall Stuart, the first European explorer to cross the continent south to north and return alive, albeit barely. The names of stops along the highway reflect his party’s prime concern: Finke River, Stuarts Well, Alice Springs, Barrow Creek. Stuart’s terse regulations issued to his party in 1862 speak volumes about the conditions in which they were travelling and the inclinations of his men:

  —No horses are to be abused, kicked, or struck about the head,—When leaving the camp no one is to go without arms and ammunition,—No one is to fire on natives without orders unless in self defense,—When on the march no water is to be used from the canteens without permission of the leader.

  I particularly liked his restrictions on notetaking: ‘No journal to be kept or notes taken (except the Naturalist)’, which I assumed was the equivalent of today’s ‘no recording devices to be used’.

  Once again, the view had changed. I was in a sparse red landscape broken up by piles of speckled-egg orange rocks and tufts of spinifex. A few desert trees dominated the view, one with needle leaves shimmering in the wind like the fringe of a hot jazz flapper dress, and another that was thin and short but sturdy, with coarse bark bleeding dark red sap.

  Over the past month, I’d noted my mind was growing more attuned to the natural world. I’m part of that generation frequently derided for recognising more corporate logos than native plant and animal species. In our defence, that just illustrates what constitutes useful information for a life where parrot calls, wattle flowers and roo tracks rarely come up in conversation or are necessary for survival. But now I was paying careful attention to plants, animals and geology, reading any signage erected at tourist sites and national parks. For the rest of my life, I would remember Mungo as the place of wind and yellow sand, and the Murray River shaded by towering gum trees as it hosted paddling Zen pelicans, and now here I was in the Central Desert, where the horizon opened up and tiny slips of pale white ghost gums haunted red rock crevices.

  A few hours later I reached Heavitree Gap, a small missing chunk in the MacDonnell Ranges, through which everyone entering Alice Springs from the south must pass. In these ranges oasis-like gorges and spiritually charged waterholes can be found, the only water sources for miles. During the late 1800s these rare wellsprings became the first battlegrounds between the Arrernte people and an outlandish group of pale-skinned men never before seen on their country and who brought with them heavy, horned and hooved, water-polluting animals.

  The gap in the ranges is called Ntaripe by the Arrernte people. During colonisation the white men ran a long line of wooden poles through the gap, which is considered sacred to the traditional owners. I’d watched the documentary First Australians in which Arrernte Luritja elder Max Stuart said, ‘People thought the noise that the telegraph line made was some sort of monster snaking across the country.’

  Soon I was approaching Alice Springs. A flimsy service town, it’s mainly populated by an itinerant tribe of tourists, hospitality workers, miners, military staff, art dealers and others working in the ‘Aboriginal sector’. Even among the Aboriginal residents there are a lot of blow-ins. But the town of twenty-five thousand is the most significant human settlement for thousands of miles. Smack bang in the red heart of the country, it’s roughly equidistant from Adelaide on the south coast and Darwin on the north.

  When I reached Alice, I drove straight to the aquatic centre to take a shower. But six dollars seemed a little steep for something I could probably get for free soon enough—although I hadn’t worked out where to sleep that night, which made me nervous.

  I was still in my car, parked at the aquatic centre and recovering from my run-in with Sheridan, when my phone beeped. It was a message from Ryan.

  Hey! Welcome! Or as us local Arrernte people say, ‘Werte’. He suggested we meet at a bar called Monte’s around 8 p.m. I breathed a sigh of relief. I felt unnerved from Sheridan’s graphic introduction to Alice and needed to see a friendly face.

  I pulled out of the car park, and on the way to town stopped at a petrol station. As I was pumping petrol, who should I see across a multi-lane road but Sheridan. He was still on his bike, talking to an Aboriginal man. From that distance he looked very young and small, but I noticed he still seemed just as indifferent as he had while casually uttering foul obscenities at me. No doubt I’d remember our encounter long after he’d forgotten it.

  It was Territory Day, and the intermittent explosion of home-lit fireworks made Alice Springs feel, disconcertingly, like Mosul under attack. I headed towards the pedestrian mall on Todd Street, with art galleries, tourism agencies and cafes, and supermarkets and other brand stores all within a four-block radius. I found Monte’s on the corner of some tidy streets. Nearby was the town council, more pubs, a KFC, Thrifty car rental, and the Central Australian radio station and music studio CAAMA. Monte’s was probably the closest thing Alice had to a hipster bar, decorated in a circus theme. I wandered in, making my way through a crowd of young locals looking relaxed and happy, sipping on frosty pints of beer and snacking on thick-cut fries.

  Ryan was sitting near an outdoor heater. He was a handsome guy with a footballer’s physique and tawny-gold skin. Each time I’d seen him there had been a twinkle in his bright blue-green eyes as if life were nothing but a lark—although was that ever the full picture?

  He flashed me a megawatt smile. ‘Werte, Monica! How’s your trip been?’

  ‘Amazing!’ I said.

  Ryan dressed smartly in a long-sleeved denim shirt and a single diamond stud earring. Even though we were in Alice, he retained the polished sheen of a Sydney urbanite, and suddenly I wished I’d sprung for that shower or at least put on a fresh set of clothes.

  ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘You happy to be back home?’

  Ryan put his outstretched hand on his chest, dramatically. ‘So good. I just came back from a big trip with the family out bush. There’s nothing like it.’

  ‘You must sometimes feel torn between that life in the big smoke and your life here, hey?’

  ‘Of course. Here there’s all this culture and language. My nan—she has some amazing knowledge.’

  He led me to the inside section of Monte’s, which had a stage for live music. We ordered beers from bar staff who all had tattoos and art-school hairdos. With our drinks, we joined two of Ryan’s cousins from different sides of his family. They both looked around the same age as me and Ryan, with Chris dressed in a skate T-shirt and the taller cousin Adam in a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of Muhammad Ali’s face.

  Ryan introduced me and added, ‘She’s interested in Aboriginal culture! So I reckoned she oughta meet you fellas.’

  As I slid into the leather-bound booth, I smiled weakly. Man, I wondered if that intro made me sound like one of those old-school anthropologists with a thick moustache, wearing a safari suit, trekking through the wilds of Australia to document ‘the natives’.

  Chris told us about his new job at the Granites Gold Mine, the same company where Adam
worked, although this year he was on sabbatical. The mine was four hundred kilometres away from Alice up the remote Tanami Road, but it had its own airport that flew workers in for two-week periods, with one week off in between. They operated around the clock, so they were put on either day or night shifts. Chris worked on an above-ground drill, while Adam drove a truck through ninety kilometres of underground roadways drilled one kilometre below the surface.

  ‘Whoa, like a mini-city,’ I said.

  ‘And it’s dangerous down there,’ Chris said. ‘Sometimes if you come head on to a truck, you have to back up and hope to god you can find a space to squeeze into.’

  A lot of their mob worked at the mines. On his first day at work, on a lunchbreak, Chris had walked into the canteen and found an entire table taken up by extended family members.

  ‘Dunno if you mind me asking,’ I said to Chris, ‘but how much do you make working at the mine?’

  He hesitated and looked coy, but Adam was happy to jump in. ‘I make 120K.’

  I whistled—it was double what I’d been making at The Guardian as a deputy culture editor. On the other hand, mining is repetitive, physically demanding, lonely work far away from your family: not a life I would quickly sign myself up to. Not while I had other options, anyway.

  Adam said he’d already bought his own home and was paying off a second, ‘so my son doesn’t have to’. He was tall and powerfully built. I noticed that his Everlast shirt was emblazoned with a quote beside Muhammad Ali’s face: ‘I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m fast, I’m pretty, and can’t possibly be beat.’ But in contrast to the boxer’s braggadocio, Adam seemed softly spoken and a man of simple priorities: to live peacefully and provide for his five-year-old son.

  As the guys chatted away, I could tell mining was just a paycheque; their real passions were footy, motorbikes and heading out bush. Ryan grinned at me. ‘Most of these boys use their first few paycheques to buy a Holden Commodore.’