by Monica Tan
I had read in a paper looking at Asian and Aboriginal pearlers in Australia, by historian Julia Martínez, that among the pearling masters were the good, the bad and the ugly. The industry was rife with stories of brutal twelve-hour shifts without breaks, insufficient food, and cramped and unhygienic living quarters. When there weren’t enough Aboriginal serfs to go around, indentured labourers from Asia filled out the crews, sometimes working an entire year just to pay off a debt incurred in transport costs to come to Australia. If subsequent debts arose, the unpaid work continued. Indentured labour was used in the Australian pearling industry right into the 1970s.
And rarely was the work a path to citizenship. ‘My father fought for the Australian Army and he was a pearl diver, but still he couldn’t be naturalised,’ said Tina. Though she was nearly eighty, her sense of indignation hadn’t subsided. ‘I’m still waiting for his war medals to come.’
Her father hadn’t just been in the army—he’d belonged to a top-secret Allied forces unit, Z Special, dedicated to covert reconnaissance and sabotage operations. It was made up, in part, of Asian Australians, hand-picked because their appearance and language skills assisted them in infiltrating enemy lines in Japanese-occupied parts of Southeast Asia. I was struck by the irony that the same racial element that saw these men excluded from Australian society had been exploited for the country’s war effort.
According to Tina, her Yawuru mother didn’t have it much better. ‘Coloured people weren’t allowed on the streets after dark, so before six o’clock you had to be behind the common gate. In the early days, the white man was boss over the Aboriginal people. We weren’t treated as humans.’
‘If you were found, what would happen?’ I asked, in half disbelief. A few years ago I had learned that in America’s dark past, the slaves of the south were cruelly punished if caught beyond the plantations they were assigned to. It was a deeply disturbing notion that such curtailing of personal freedom of one group of people by another had taken place here, too.
‘My mother was caught that many times, they send her to Beagle Bay, away from Broome. About three times she went to Beagle Bay. The last one was they sent her to Moola Bulla out at Halls Creek. It was like a,’ Tina chuckled, ‘well, we called it a concentration camp.’
It seemed, to me, a particularly dark family joke.
Later I read that Moola Bulla had been set up in 1910 by the Western Australian government to train Aboriginal people to work in the pastoral industry, against a backdrop of increasingly violent confrontations between locals and the European newcomers over land and cattle. But Moola Bulla quickly degenerated into an institution where Aboriginal ‘troublemakers’ were detained and ‘half-caste’ children sent for a European education. I learnt of a particularly haunting story about a man sent there, named Ballymungen, whose son had been taken away. Every night Ballymungen would still make food for his son and speak to him as if he were there. His story is one of many heartbreaking accounts of parents who pined for their Stolen Generation children.
I mentioned that in a couple of days I’d be walking out of Broome up along the coast, on a nine-day guided tour called the Lurujarri Heritage Trail. Apparently there was a chance we’d go fishing, which I was particularly excited about. ‘Do you know of a good fishing store in town?’ I asked.
Caroline gave me the name of a place and said Ismail and Tina were related to those families in charge of the tour. ‘Salmon is running now. And they do a lot of reef fishing up that way, so you need a lot of tackle!’
Like so many Aboriginal families they loved to fish, and their repertoire in the kitchen had lots of seafood dishes cooked in Asian flavours: steamed fish with chilli, lemongrass and coconut milk; dugong with soy sauce. The NITV show Kriol Kitchen, filmed in Broome, celebrates Aboriginal Australian home cooking that uses native Australian foods with Asian recipes, like goolil (turtle) chilli tamarind sambal or magpie goose curry with pan-fried damper.
‘It’s almost two o’clock,’ Ismail said to his wife, pointedly.
Caroline gave me an apologetic look. ‘We have grandkids we got to pick up.’
‘I’ll get out of your hair,’ I said, with a smile.
But before I got up to go, Ismail opened the freezer and came back to the table to show me a sandwich bag of salmon. ‘This is my salted fish!’ he said proudly, opening it up so I could have a sniff. ‘Oh, one’s gone mouldy,’ he said, peering at it. ‘I’ll have to chuck it out.’
‘No, you soak it,’ his mum said.
‘Or you wanna cut that piece off?’ his wife suggested.
‘Just carrying on the tradition of what the old man taught me,’ he said, happy as a clam.
In Broome, through the media grapevine that can follow you to the ends of the earth, I learned that a prominent Indigenous man I’d once interviewed had learned of my trip. Apparently he had exploded with irritation. He was sick of Australians who used Indigenous Australia to ‘find themselves’, blustering to a mutual acquaintance, ‘Why can’t they just leave us alone?’
When I heard about this, I burnt with humiliation.
And I was frightened that my trip had attracted the animosity of such a powerful man. I had assumed my relationship to Indigenous Australia was different to that of a white Australian—that when I entered Indigenous communities, I didn’t wear the ugly historical mantle of coloniser.
Colonialism? That’s white people’s problem.
But no. There it was—being a non-white Australian did not automatically make me an ally of Indigenous Australia. A few months earlier I had been interviewed by ABC Radio and after they posted the recording online under the wince-inducing headline ‘Monica Tan’s Indigenous Odyssey’, someone responded sarcastically on Twitter: ‘I am waiting to be discovered.’ Now, to this prominent Indigenous man I was simply another damaged Aussie having a life crisis, bags packed tidily as a Mormon’s, wandering the Outback in search of blackfellas. I was reminded of a cynical saying: that every whitefella who heads to a remote blackfella community can be classified as a ‘missionary, mercenary or misfit’—or, arguably, a combination of the three. How naive I’d been to believe that as a non-white Australian I would be considered an exception and entitled to an exclusive all-access pass into Indigenous Australia. He wanted no bar of it.
All of this played on my mind as I drove to Roebuck Bay, having left Caroline’s house. I parked in an almost empty lot. The bay is known as Nalen Nalena to the Djungun and Yawuru traditional owners, its crimson sands marbled with the blue veins of an outgoing tide.
It was quiet now, but a century ago this had been the parking lot for hundreds of pearling luggers. The air would have been filled with the sound of creaking wood as they swayed in the sea. During the lay-up season from December to March, torrential rains shut the industry down; it was said you could jump from lugger to lugger, from Dampier Creek to Town Beach, without touching the ground. Before the ubiquity of plastic, Broome was supplying the world with mother-of-pearl that was cut into buttons or inlaid in cutlery handles, combs, knives, buckles, cufflinks, musical instruments, revolvers and furniture.
From there I took a lazy stroll; the only pace acceptable in a holiday town like Broome. I wandered up Dampier Terrace until I hit a short strip of upmarket jewellery stores—Cygnet Bay Pearls, Jewels of the Kimberley—and in their windows I saw, on velvet stands, marble-sized pearls hanging from gold pendants or set into diamond rings. There was nothing new about the pearl’s association with luxury and extravagance. One store had printed on a sign the 2000-year-old folkloric story of Cleopatra who, in an attempt to impress Marc Antony with her lavishness, took off one of her enormous pearl earrings, dropped it into a glass of vinegar and then drained the glass.
In the wild, the pearl is an aberration—a minuscule irritant trapped in the soft tissue of the mollusc. To neutralise this rude invader, the mollusc forms a pearl sac of tissue and steadily secretes the material that coats the inner surface of its shells. Eventually, the irritant is rendere
d an inert and rarely perfectly round ball.
Eventually I took a left turn, heading to the centre of town, and at a crossing saw a small metal plaque. It was set in reddish stone and honoured the city’s Aboriginal pearl divers in English and the local Aboriginal language of Yawuru: ‘To our old peoples, coastal people, river people, desert people. You were blackbirded, forcibly removed from your traditional Country to work, to serve the early pearling trade. You had the first cultural links to the pearl shell.’
The early European Australian pearling companies, often in cahoots with pastoralists further inland, invaded these lands by gunpoint, killing people who resisted and forcing the rest into a life of serfdom. The Yawuru, Karajarri, Nimanburru, Jabirr Jabirr, Nyulnyul and Bardi are all nations whose cultures and ways of life were upended as their young men and women were ripped from their traditional lifestyles and blackbirded—forced or tricked—into the industry as pearl harvesters or sex workers. With the industry came jetties, shops, road and towns; the land was blasted then forged into new shapes.
Broome boasts of having the world’s longest-running outdoor cinema, Sun Pictures, which opened in 1916. I came across it in the middle of town. From the outside it was a combination of timber and corrugated iron, painted in cream with sky-blue and earth-red detailing. The words ‘SUN PICTURES’ were set in light bulbs, in the fashion of Hollywood’s golden age. Inside, the floorboards were made of warm jarrah, and many rows of beach-style canvas chairs faced a missing wall and an outside section with a movie screen. Being an outdoor cinema, it only showed films after dark. But some tourists were milled about, savouring that sense of having stepped back in time.
I wandered over to a wall covered in film posters and historical photos. Immediately I was struck by one framed, black-and-white photo, taken in the 1920s. The photographer had been standing in front of the screen, facing a full house packed to the rafters. The audience was almost exclusively men and boys, all dressed in their best white shirts and some with snappy fedoras. The youngest in the room were three identical little Asian boys in the front row, with one brother sitting on probably their father’s lap. But the most fascinating aspect of the photo was also its most obvious. The best seats in the house—cane chairs with cushions, in the middle of the cinema—were occupied exclusively by white men. Almost everyone else, sitting higgledy-piggledy on hard wooden benches and in deckchairs around them, was dark-skinned.
The fact that Australia had colour bars in hospital wards, movie theatres, RSLs, hotels and swimming pools—until as recently as the 1960s in many parts of the country—was something I’d only learnt of while working at The Guardian. And I’d never before seen a photo that so clearly documented the segregation. Standing in a cinema whose audience was once discriminated against based on race, and seeing such undeniable proof of it, made this ugly part of our history much more real for me.
It made me wonder: why has this so rarely been portrayed in our depictions of Australian history? In our national consciousness, the word ‘segregation’ is associated with somewhere else: perhaps South Africa or the United States, with images of ‘whites only’ drinking taps and Rosa Parks so famously taking a stand on that bus. Genocide, slavery and segregation—do these words apply to Australia?
As I stood there in front of that photo, I could hear the conservative historians and right-wing media pundits foaming at the mouth at the mere suggestion. What bullocks, what a crock, don’t try and make me eat your black armband history turd. And so strongly were those words linked in my mind to the brutality of countries far away (not here) that even while faced with such incontrovertible evidence, I still felt as if it was an act of semantic extremism to describe Australia in such a way.
I plonked myself in one of the canvas chairs, where I guessed the Chinese and Japanese section would have been located. From here I would have seen a row of white men, just the backs of their heads, hair neatly combed and shiny with Brylcreem. Those men would have been the less moneyed Europeans, while sitting further in front were the white master pearlers, medical officers, merchants and officials.
The largest contingent was the remaining ‘coloured people’. Malays, Timorese, Filipinos and Aboriginal people would have sat smooshed together behind a mesh wire railing on stadium-style benches close to the noisy projector at the back of the cinema, or on the neck-craning seats up front. They entered via a separate door on the right-hand side of the theatre.
Darwinism had gripped the imagination of the Western world and seemed to give scientific credence to the notion certain races were superior to others. Conveniently, the palest skin tones were positioned at the apex, while Indigenous Australians were regarded as little more than a dying breed. Back then this cinema was a perfect diagram of Australia’s social hierarchy, carefully carved up by both race and class.
And where were my people? Literally, sandwiched in the middle.
Not only were east Asians considered to be mid-tone in skin colour, our society was familiar to Europeans. We had merchant culture’s commerce and currency, officialdom, taxes, bureaucracy, military, written language, mathematics, built architecture, private land ownership and agriculture, cities and dominions. To the colonial rulers, these were markers of civilisation that elevated us, somewhat, from the ‘primitive cultures’.
Considering white Australia’s attempts to definitively demarcate what constituted a ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ Australian, no wonder they were so horrified by the rampant ‘miscegenation’ in Broome. Such populations were considered ‘unstable, directionless and altogether inferior to racially pure communities’ and ‘a threat to cohesion’, wrote historian David Walker in his 2013 essay ‘Broke Narratives: Ref lections on the history of Australia’s Asian connections’. In the early twentieth century, William Gay wrote the popular poem ‘Australian Federation’, about the Australian people belonging to ‘one dear blood’. But the more babies being born of mixed descent—a quarter this, one eighth that—the harder it was to know what type of prejudice to apply to someone.
At a time when young Australia was forging a new national identity, a town like Broome was a blemish on our reputation. In the heady years around the time of Federation, Australians wanted to wean themselves off the tit of Mother England but still regarded themselves, dutifully, as an extension of her flesh and blood. Virtually every parliamentarian feared that Australia might be viewed as a mangy, mongrel dog of a country—white was right, but white was not yet might. This piece of Britain—broken off and plonked onto the other side of the world, thinly spread on an enormous continent—remained vulnerable to the depraved morass of almond-eyed, dark-skinned ‘Orientals’ and Pacific Islanders to the north. You can’t control what you don’t understand, and Broome’s proper mixed-up racial jumble must have looked like a disaster in the making.
As I sat there in the canvas chair, I began to mull over what Tina had said about her mother being sent to Moola Bulla just because she was out on the streets after dark. Could that really be correct? Surely it wasn’t the full story. It felt wrong. It sounded too extreme. At most, perhaps, it was the result of a scoundrel policeman gone rogue. I pulled out my phone to see what evidence I could dig up online that might support her story.
It didn’t take long to find. I brought up a copy of Western Australia’s Aborigines Act of 1905, section 40 of which states: ‘any female aboriginal who, between sunset and sunrise, is found within two miles of any creek or inlet used by the boats of pearlers or other sea boats shall be guilty of an offence against this Act’.
I shook my head and felt ashamed. Not only for what had happened but also for being so sceptical of Tina.
How many times have non-Indigenous people doubted Indigenous horror stories because, just like an oyster faced with a foreign irritant, we find it easier to take troubling pieces of information and coat them with doubt, over and over and over, until they disappear altogether and are rendered benign to us? But this legal document proves, unequivocally, that my country o
nce legislated such demeaning treatment of Western Australian Aboriginal people. This document makes a mockery of the Australian ‘fair go’.
However, despite the racist legislation, despite this cinema’s old border wall, Aboriginal Australians with Asian heritage—and a dash of Irish, like Ismail—continued to be born in Broome. After all, for much of its history, the town was just a remote dot in a vast swathe of wild, wild Australian west, where police presence was patchy at best. A town where coloured workers were exploited, and audacious Chinese and Japanese pearlers used white ‘dummy’ owners to make good on the paperwork. And under cover of night, on boats and cattle stations, Asian and Aboriginal lives remained intertwined.
As the Chinese proverb goes, ‘Heaven is high and the emperor is far away’, and Broome will forever remain a town of fusion food and fusion families.
Roger, one of many baby boomers on our trail walk, pointed at our Goolarabooloo guide and whispered to me, ‘He looks like he’s walking slowly, but I can barely keep up!’
It was day two of the Lurujarri Heritage Trail and our guide, Edward, was leading our line of walkers on a narrow track. He was dressed in a baseball cap, white singlet and shorts; on his feet, he wore thongs with a single thick band around the forefoot that reminded me of what my cousins in rural Malaysia shuffled around in. Kind of hilarious considering how this morning, among the walkers, a subject of much consternation had been optimal footwear for today’s 22-kilo-metre walk through changing terrain.
The Goolarabooloo guides deliberately refrained from giving us too much information, encouraging us to ‘be present’—with mixed success. We’d been told to shut off our brains and lead with our hearts: no easy task for a thirty-odd party of urban professionals. We were here to experience ‘living Country’ not conquer a trek. That said, not everyone had been able to resist bringing their Fitbits along.