Stranger Country

by Monica Tan

  The killings were the climax of a series of deaths that had taken place over several months. In one version of events, the string of violence began when a Yaburrara man took some cattle, and local police killed the offender. The Yaburrara people fought back, killing a police constable, an Aboriginal police assistant and a pearling labourer. Local pearlers and pastoralists then armed themselves and, with the approval and support of the government resident in Roebourne, R.J. Sholl, descended on the clan’s camp and carried out the reprisal killings. In another version of events, the policeman who was killed had kidnapped a Yaburrara woman.

  I was reminded of the prescient words of Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, who in 1836 wrote in his journal while exploring the interior of New South Wales and Victoria:

  the kangaroo disappears from cattle runs, and is also killed by stockmen merely for the sake of the skin; but no mercy is shown to the natives who may help themselves to a bullock or a sheep. Such a state of things must infallibly lead to the extirpation of the aboriginal natives, as in Van Diemen’s Land, unless timely measures are taken for their civilisation and protection.

  The killings decimated what remained of the Yaburrara people, who had already suffered many deaths from an outbreak of European-introduced smallpox two years earlier. But Tyson said he knew at least one Yaburrara family descended from survivors and assimilated into his nation, the Ngarluma people, who occupied adjacent land on the mainland.

  Tyson pointed at a hill behind us. ‘Do you see that?’ he asked, tracing the ridgeline with his finger in the air.

  At first it appeared no different to all the other piles of red rock that surrounded us. Then I noticed something: on the crest, a line of stones was carefully planted upright in the gaps between boulders. They were longer and thinner than the others.

  ‘They’re standing stones,’ he said. ‘They’re all over Ngarluma Country, and when you see them, it probably means a burial site or a waterhole is there.’ I would never have noticed them if not for Tyson. And now I wondered how many times throughout my life had I failed to notice evidence of human life? I was reminded of when I first moved to China and, not yet speaking Mandarin, felt as if my head were wrapped in invisible cotton wool: I couldn’t communicate or understand the words that surrounded me. And when you’re in a culture not your own, are you not blind as well? It was so easy to traverse a landscape or human settlement and fail to understand or even misinterpret what you were seeing. How many manmade messages, indicators, warnings and sacred sites, just like these standing stones, were embedded in our landscape over several millennia of human occupation, but as an Australian not versed in the ancient cultures of the land, they had gone over my head?

  And which is worse: to be a Chinese Australian blind in China, or to be a Chinese Australian blind in Australia? It seemed no matter where I went, I was alienated and a stranger from the land.

  ‘Look, this is the only form of protection,’ said Tyson, pointing at a small square sign on a metal pole held upright with rocks and streaked with orange rust. It asked visitors to respect the site and said causing damage was an offence against the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972. Most of Murujuga had been included on the National Heritage listing since 2007; the site easily qualified for a UNESCO World Heritage listing, and advocates and traditional owners were leading a campaign to have it added.

  ‘Maybe there should be a fence built around these standing stones?’ I suggested.

  ‘Our people don’t like fences. We think it might just make someone curious and want to jump over it.’ He thought for a moment, then conceded, ‘Although like this someone will probably crawl all over this one day and knock the stones over.’

  He said hardly anyone was prosecuted for vandalism anyway. In 2008 a cement company had destroyed some rock art on Murujuga in a heritage-protected zone. They were punishable for a five-million dollar fine but in the end were only required to pay $280,000. The Western Australian Greens called that figure a ‘slap on the wrist’.

  Tyson claimed recent changes to the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act—including an increase in prison times and fines for vandalism—were nothing but whitewash. Most worrying to him and his people was how the Western Australian government had narrowed the definition of what constitutes a sacred place, and consequently wiped more than a thousand sites from the records, including some on Murujuga.

  I mulled over the dilemma. ‘Maybe it’s better to simply make people appreciate the importance of the site.’

  Didn’t more non-Indigenous Australians need a strong dose of reality? Didn’t we need to come face-to-face with the terror and horror of our past? For too long we’d kept dark secrets from ourselves. Was the country still a child, lacking in the psychological and emotional resilience to confront these shameful aspects of its history?

  ‘Okay,’ I said to Tyson, hesitantly, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this, but what if this were to be developed into a proper tourist site?’

  I hypothesised: yes, there would be all these people gawking at the memorial, more foot traffic and a higher risk of vandalism. On the other hand, this was an important story. If we were to memorialise the dead together, we might really feel as a country the impact of the frontier wars on the lives and communities of this continent.

  Tyson seemed conflicted and didn’t immediately reply. I couldn’t read his expression from behind his wraparound sunglasses. ‘That’s a tricky one,’ he said finally.

  I looked at the standing stones—red and bone-like, pointing to the sky—and my heart felt heavy as I thought of the Yaburrara lives that had been taken by colonial forces. The blood of those men, women and children had seeped into the soil as they passed into the afterlife: a family who’d laughed, fought, eaten, bathed, cried, grown up and grown old together, who’d sung the land into good health and paid their respects to the spirit beings that had created it; a clan with a name and a history and, so they had believed, a future—all those lives, evaporated.

  ‘Thank you for showing me this,’ I said quietly to Tyson.

  He nodded, and we got back in the car.

  We drove north to Withnell Bay where boulder-covered hills tumble into perfect blue waters. The bay shares its name with local pioneer John Withnell, one of the ‘special constables’ from the killings. Sholl, the government resident who approved the killings, continues to be honoured with a street name in Roebourne and a paver on St Georges Terrace in Perth.

  Throughout Australia are countless examples of dubious place-name choices, and generally the insults escape the notice of the non-Indigenous populous. Further inland, near the iron ore hotspot town of Tom Price, is a seemingly sarcastically named Mount Nameless—about which Yinhawangka elder Lola Young said, ‘They didn’t ask the Aboriginal people here if that place had a name already. And it had. Its name for thousands of years has been Jarndunmunha: there’s nothing nameless about that.’

  One of the most baffling to me was a name further north in the western Kimberley region: the King Leopold Ranges. In 1879 the hills known as Milawundi by the Bunuba people were renamed by explorer Alexander Forrest to honour the Belgian monarch. King Leopold II had recently carved out an expansive colonial empire in the African continent on behalf of his minuscule European nation; under his cruel regime, millions of Congolese people died, and copious quantities of ivory and rubber were pilfered.

  Other sites on Bunuba Country were bestowed with European names that, while not honouring colonial tyrants, pay homage to notable Brits with very tenuous connections to Australia. Alexander Forrest, or possibly his brother John, decided a gorge in the Kimberley was as good a place as any to tip his hat to Scottish geologist Archibald Geikie. Historical records indicate Geikie never once set foot in Australia. At the time of my trip, the gorge’s name was formally being reverted back to Danggu.

  There had been some rain recently, and as we drove over the low hills of the peninsula I saw spinifex of a very light, pleasant green growing in clumps—th
e only daubs of softness on a severe and cubist landscape. Contrary to appearances, the archipelago is rich in biodiversity and hosts over a hundred bird species. Beneath its dark turquoise waters, reef beds are decorated with brittle-stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins, while plenty of crab, fish and other sea life call this region home.

  As we drove I asked Tyson about his abstention from alcohol. He said everyone he knew drank. When he went hunting with his mates, he’d bring the guns and they’d bring the beer, even though he wouldn’t be drinking any of it. And they couldn’t watch the footy without drinking; in fact a game had just started, so they’d be drinking now.

  ‘The first and last time I ever drank was on my twenty-first birthday, and I didn’t even have a chance to get drunk because by the time I reached for my fourth can they were all gone—everyone else had drunk them.’

  ‘Not drinking is pretty unusual in Australia,’ I said.

  I told him about my unhealthy lifestyle while working at The Guardian: the Friday night piss-ups and how messed up it was after a hard week of work to need a drink that badly, to unwind and blow off steam. But I never had the urge to drink on this trip. I was already drunk on the beauty of this country, swimming in open horizons. All those show-stopping sunrises and sunsets, the sky, the rivers, the sea, the land—my body was alive with it all. It was a different kind of intoxication.

  ‘I’m not a purist like you, though,’ I said. ‘I’d be okay to have a drink every now and then, but it’s great to not need to. Why do you think you’re like that?’

  ‘I dunno, I must be stupid or something.’

  ‘More like the opposite.’

  ‘I’ve seen what drinking has done to the community and prefer to be healthy. I’m not even tempted.’ Tyson paused. ‘Although I reckon that’s why it’s hard for me to meet a woman. Because everyone else drinks.’

  We drove to a section of the peninsula that had been developed for visitors to view rock art. The boulders exist due to millions of years of weather battering away at volcanic rock. Despite its broken-up appearance, this type of granophyre is highly resilient—‘hard as diamonds’, as archaeologist Peter Veth once put it—so it makes for a canvas that, once carved, ‘never forgets’. The archipelago is covered in art: the largest and most diverse collection of rock engravings in Australia, if not the world. Among the works are, purportedly, the world’s oldest representations of the human face.

  Australia’s scientific community is still uncovering Murujuga’s full breadth of work. From at least two hundred site-specific studies—generally commissioned by mining or industrial companies to fulfil licence agreements—are hints of a dizzying array of imagery spread out across the archipelago, in a variety of styles, techniques and subjects, and almost certainly of global significance. It seems paradoxical that much of this archaeological record exists essentially to chronicle what Australians are destroying. A handful of large-to-medium surveys not done for industrial purposes, including one by Veth and his colleague Jo McDonald in 2009, give a minimum estimate of one million engravings; although Veth believes that across the entire chain of volcanic islands, the figure could be double that.

  Tyson parked his pick-up truck at the entrance, and on foot we approached a path that snaked up between pyramids of orange boulders the size of washing machines. These are the canvases upon which Yaburrara life and creation time is depicted.

  It was a cloudless day and the sun was out, but it remained cool enough that I wore a pair of denim jeans and a black sports jacket. I peered through my binoculars, scanning rocks twenty metres away, and spotted a boulder scratched with light lines. ‘It looks like, maybe, three carved boomerangs stacked atop one another?’ I said excitedly.

  ‘That’s the Ngarluma symbol,’ Tyson explained. ‘You can see it all over our Country.’

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket to take a photo, but he stopped me.

  ‘It might be a men’s site where an elder was instructing secret men’s business,’ he said.

  We walked up the path bordered by hundreds of engravings—a gigantic, permanent outdoor gallery—and frequently stopped to allow me to look through my binoculars. Tyson said that visibility was best in the late afternoon and it was late morning, but we saw plenty of petroglyphs, depicting fish, eggs, human figures, bird tracks, and other icons I didn’t recognise. We had the whole place to ourselves, yet I felt the presence of many thousands of art makers throughout history.

  We’d seen dozens of petroglyphs when I spotted the carving of a long, four-legged creature. Its tail was curled in the air and head bent down; most notably, it had stripes on its back. ‘Look!’ I said. I knew what those stripes meant: it was either a numbat or—‘Might be a thylacine,’ said Tyson. This extinct animal is more commonly known by the misnomer ‘Tasmanian tiger’; in fact, it roamed the mainland before the population receded, with the final three thousand years of its existence spent isolated to Tasmania. The last of its species died in Hobart Zoo in 1936.

  I felt a special thrill at seeing a thylacine in ancient rock art, as if a match had been struck in the dark room of history and the animal’s ghostly presence had flared up. ‘Must have taken ages!’ I exclaimed, conjuring in my mind the image of a man with a sharp, weighty flint in his hand, painstakingly chipping away at the rock; the artworks displayed a range of techniques including pecking, battering, scoring and incising.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tyson, ‘that’s some of the hardest rock you can get. Those would all take at least a few days.’

  ‘Isn’t it amazing the way humans have always wanted to leave their mark?’

  The path continued to meander between hills, large and small, and soon we reached wet areas where the rocks were fuzzy with green moss. There were piles of tiny, broken white shells that I recognised as middens; they’re found all over Australia, even in built-up, colonised-way-back places like Sydney. Most Aboriginal people in pre-colonial Australia hadn’t been in the habit of wearing shoes, so after eating they had fastidiously discarded sharp leftover bits of shell and bone.

  Tyson pointed at some dry sandy rocks adjacent to the puddles. ‘See that yellow? All the rocks around us are actually that colour. Those boulders only turn red after they’ve been exposed to the sun a very long time, and it’s just their surface that’s red. The darker the colour, the older the rock.’

  ‘Oh wow, look at that one.’ I pointed at a particularly lovely portrait of a kangaroo on the face of an elevated rock, positioned as clearly as a shop sign. As with most of the other engravings, to create this image the maker had scraped away the darker top layer exposing the paler colour beneath. I lifted my binoculars to take a closer look. The perfectly proportioned kangaroo had been carved from a single outline with two spots for eyes. It was captured side-on, its ears flattened back, all limbs visible and a thick tail curving to the corner of the rock. Despite being frozen in stone, it was as full of life as if it were about to leap out and bound away.

  No one is sure of the meaning behind each petroglyph. Perhaps this one indicated the presence of kangaroo, or perhaps ‘increase ceremonies’ had been conducted here to boost kangaroo numbers, or this was the site of a Kangaroo Dreaming story.

  Tyson explained that the older carvings of land-based animals, such as the fat-tailed macropods and thylacine, contrast with the newer carvings featuring sea creatures, such as fish, turtles and dolphins. Studies show that such thematic changes synced with the rise and fall of sea levels. When humans first arrived in the Pilbara, sea levels were lower—twenty thousand years ago they hit their lowest point, at 130 metres beneath today’s levels—so what are now islands were mountain peaks rising out of a flat plain, and the coastline lay more than a hundred kilometres from where it lies now. Naturally, seafood wasn’t on the menu back then. Over several thousand years, the coastline crept closer until reaching its present level seven thousand years ago.

  How startling that through all these climatic and dietary changes, Tyson’s people have sustained life on
this land.

  ‘Do you ever feel like carving more of them?’ I asked Tyson from behind him, as we leapfrogged single file across some rubble. ‘You know, as a continuation of this cultural practice.’

  He spoke over his shoulder. ‘People have thought about it, but elders would get upset. Anyway, we have new ways to express our culture, like painting on canvas and making films.’

  I nodded. I was no purist who advocated for cultures remaining frozen in time and quarantined from outside influence. ‘It’s the same thing but on a new medium, isn’t it?’

  Tyson seemed to juggle more projects than was manageable for one man. He was working on a virtual-reality film, a card game based on the Ngarluma kinship system, a location-based welcome to Country app, and a short film starring Balang T.E. Lewis. Tyson’s work is compelling and beautifully shot, and has picked up awards at film festivals. In his office he’d shown me recently captured drone footage for his hour-long documentary Connection to Country. The landscape shots were gorgeous, saturated with the rich reds, lemony yellows and spinifex green of the Pilbara, drizzled with the soft light of dawn.

  Like so many people living in regional Australia, he had mixed feelings about the industrial development of his land. On the one hand it was driving the destruction of local heritage; on the other, many community projects had been funded by mining money as part of compensation agreements with the companies.

  As we made our way back to the entrance, Tyson explained that when the gas giant Woodside had funded one of his own projects, they’d exerted no creative pressure. ‘They said to me I could use their money to say, “Fuck Woodside”, and there’s nothing they could do to stop me.’