by Monica Tan
We were silent as we let the dust settle. I prickled with the thought he might be thinking the same thing I was: I can’t believe I’ve had sex with this person.
Over the course of my travels overseas, I’d concluded that few countries genuinely like immigrants. Australia is no exception: we swallow that bitter pill with the caveat that only the right sort of person is allowed in. But why should assimilation be the most important obligation of any migrant? What legitimacy does any cultural group have to dictate how others should behave? Those early colonists of Australia and the waves of foreigners that followed have never assimilated into Indigenous society, so legitimacy can’t be based on who came here first. Underlying the policy of assimilation, quite simply, is Western supremacy.
I tried to explain this to Samuel, but he firmly disagreed. ‘This isn’t about race. It’s about keeping violent and dangerous people out of this country—no matter what their race.’
I remained sceptical and said so.
The more I’d learnt of Australian history, the more sensitive I had become to this country’s long fear of its neighbours to the north and the way the ‘Orient’ has been used as a foil from which we assert our national identity. We are the light to Asia’s ancient shadow; they are savage countries of corrupt autocratic leaders and chaotic military coups; regressive, anti-feminist religious practices; environmental destruction, terrorism and perverted sexuality; and unhygienic, impoverished living conditions in smog-filled cities crammed with people—whereas our country is a young, virile and well-functioning democracy, with opportunity and a fair go equally portioned to every person no matter their sex, colour or creed; we are ruled by blind justice, Western rationality and Christian values, and have plenty of clean, sunlit space that our neighbours look upon covetously.
Watching the slow fade of one’s cultural dominance is no easy thing. It’s little wonder that change births zealots such as Pauline Hanson, who take up the mantle of moral crusader against a shifting tide.
‘The issue is that there are some of you who don’t want people like me in this country,’ I said to Samuel.
‘But you’re one of us.’
‘It’s always that way around. You decide if I belong.’
‘But you decide if I belong too.’
The idea I had any right to qualify the Australianness of the most Australian person I’d ever met was ludicrous. Wasn’t it self-evident he was ‘more Australian’? He was white, he lived in a country town, he drove a troopy, he listened to Lee Kernaghan, he came from a conservative family, he could only speak English and he loved footy more than life itself.
I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Why not?’ he asked.
I struggled to reply. ‘Maybe, because, I don’t know—I haven’t been here as long as you have.’
He knew I meant that in an ancestral way.
‘But why does that matter? They,’ he pointed to some Aboriginal people in the pub, ‘have been here a lot longer than we have.’
‘I know! And yet they’ve been pushed to the fringes too. And the problem is some of you don’t want us here. You know, Pauline Hanson might be putting shit on Muslims now, but twenty years ago she was putting shit on my people.’
‘And I find what she says now as repulsive as I did back then,’ he said.
‘People like her are in the centre and we’re on the fringes, looking in.’
‘No, they’re on the fringes,’ he said.
‘No, they’re in the centre,’ I said, but no longer so confidently.
He insisted. ‘They’re on the fringes, and they don’t speak for us, the silent majority.’
‘Hmm.’ I mulled that over. A little voice inside me began to wonder if he was right.
Keno numbers appeared on the television screen—we didn’t have a winning ticket. I was still holding out for that swag, though. ‘I’d like to own a swag,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I reckon those prizes are always “won” by some mate of the bar staff.’
Our conversation moved on to more light-hearted matters. Our verbal sparring had just died away, like when the bright flames of a fresh fire settle into a softly radiating heat. If only all the Twitter wars and Facebook blow-ups could find such a peaceful conclusion. On this trip I’d often noticed that while digital environments bred extremism, face-to-face conversations fostered natural empathy.
Samuel wore a suspiciously innocent expression as he drained the remnants of the beer. ‘Do you have any Australian in you?’ he asked.
My eyes narrowed. I didn’t reply.
‘Would you like some?’ he said, with all the politeness of an English maid offering a tray of biscuits.
I smiled, despite myself.
The Barkly Highway started almost dead centre of the Northern Territory and took me east towards Queensland through open plains. There was no hill, tree or shrub to be seen except in the pale distance, just an ocean of swaying green grass. Red soil turned sandy and yellow the closer I got to state lines.
In the Queensland mining town of Mount Isa, I tried to eat lunch on a windy hill but there were so many bloody pigeons. They shuffled about pecking the ground, puffing out their chests like plump businessmen in grey suits. Every time I tried to take out my bread and cheese, they hopped on the table to humbug me. I hadn’t seen these pigeons, so prevalent in the eastern states, in yonks. This was just one of many signals that I was returning to the Australian mainstream, the land of plenty. Bunnings, Coles, Woolies, Shell and Maccas all looked utterly strange to me now. From here on, I’d have no trouble finding fuel stops, phone reception, sealed roads and visitor centres.
My car still carried the soils of the Northern Territory. The doors, bonnet and boot were painted in a terracotta-red mud mask—not only from the week I’d spent in north-east Arnhem Land, but also the three that followed in other remote parts of north-west NT. Even my back window was caked in the stuff, except for a fan-shaped clean spot left by the windscreen wipers. I took my RAV4 to a drive-through car wash and, with a small part of me grieving, let the spinning, soapy brushes clean it all away. I was amazed at just how long I could hold a hose to the crevices around the headlights and watch a thick stream of red dust come pouring out. I didn’t recognise my car afterwards—I had forgotten it was white. I drove away feeling like I was in a brand-new vehicle, with a mixture of relief and disappointment that the challenging portion of my trip was complete.
Over the next few days I veered east through Queensland, and as I drove past stretches of plain that dragged on and on, and through former colonial towns that had long ago faded in importance to the rest of the country, I heard the same strange story.
I heard it for the first time two days after passing through Mount Isa. I was in Karumba, a town that bills itself as the ‘Outback by the Sea’. It’s located on the northern coast at the bottom corner of that missing wedge from the Top End. There, the still waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria teem with barramundi, salmon, grunters, snappers, mackerel and jewfish.
I met Robert, a retired drover, when we happened to fish at the same spot by the end of town, where the buildings petered out and the blue water crept up a shallow bank of wet sand.
Despite an accumulation of failed attempts over the past few weeks, I woke each day and found my determination to catch a fish renewed. Does it still count as fishing if you don’t catch any fish? I was impressed by my relentless optimism. My many failures didn’t leave a single chink in my shining confidence that today was the day the angel of death had condemned one mackerel or barra to end up on my dinner plate. I think I was hooked on fishing for the same reason so many people love to gamble: it felt like getting something for nothing. Although the rush from catching that barra a month prior had faded, this period of inaction had been broken up by enough tantalising fish flashes—a tug here, a bite there—to whet my appetite for the game. I’d find myself lingering at the end of every empty-handed session unable to call it quits: just another half an hour,
just another five minutes.
Robert had rolled up to this spot in a converted golf buggy. When he learnt I’d come with nothing but frozen bait, he immediately offered to share the live bait he was about to catch. I watched him throw a net into the aquamarine waters; it bloomed in the air like a flower.
In thirty-degree weather Robert was dressed in denim jeans, a button-up shirt and riding hat—an outfit I suspected he’d stayed classy in since about 1961. He wasn’t tall but was stocky and strong like a miniature Hereford, with small hands and thick fingers. He had rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, wiry white hair poking out from his chest and arms. ‘Where you from?’ he asked me for a second time.
I’d already told him Sydney. But throughout this trip, I’d been asked this question often enough to understand what he was getting at.
‘I’m Chinese Australian,’ I said, even though it was the answer to a different question.
‘Chinese—I thought so,’ he said. ‘So, you should be good at fishing.’
Interesting. Chinese people up here know how to fish. In my case, ‘should’ was the operative word.
Robert said a lot of old Chinese families living up here could trace their ancestry back to the gold rush—and where I was headed next, blackfellas used to give those miners trouble. ‘They’d leave us whitefellas alone, but they’d kill the Chinese and eat them.’
My eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘What?’
‘It got so out of hand a whole bunch of blackfellas were killed by the police to teach them a lesson that they couldn’t keep eating the Chinese,’ he said. ‘Look it up in the history books.’
The story sounded highly dubious.
Two days later, I heard it again in the former goldmining town of Croydon. During Queensland’s gold rush, eighteen thousand Chinese miners worked the Palmer River goldfields. By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants made up almost a third of the population of far north Queensland’s emerging towns, including Croydon.
The town’s visitor centre was manned by a tiny middle-aged lady wearing a polo shirt and a floppy wide-brimmed hat covered in lapel pins. She told me when the war began the town disintegrated, and a lot of the Chinese residents packed up their gear and headed east. She leant in as if to tell me a great secret. ‘Some of them were eaten along the way.’
‘By Aboriginal people?’ I asked.
‘Yup,’ she said, giving a smile of satisfaction after my look of surprise.
But I was only surprised because back in Karumba I’d assumed the story was nothing but the ramblings of an old codger—evidently it was quite well established.
‘They say, “You whitefellas too sinewy, them Chinese taste good. Like pork.”’ She’d said it, possibly unconsciously, in a blackfella accent. She elaborated further: apparently the cause of the unpleasant texture of the white man’s meat was their beef-heavy diet. Because the Chinese ate a lot of rice and vegetables, their flesh was particularly tasty.
I laughed in disbelief. This story just got better and better!
I walked around the centre, which doubled as a museum. I didn’t believe the cannibalism story, but there could be no doubt that violence had been inflicted on the Chinese in Queensland, much like in other Australian mining areas. As resentment among European Australians towards Croydon’s ‘oriental’ colony ballooned, anti-Chinese leagues were formed, and occasionally riots and mob violence broke out.
Later I read a verse titled ‘Yellow Agony’, printed by the Queensland Figaro newspaper in 1883. In brilliantly purple prose, it captures the prevailing racist attitudes:
Shoals of pigtails, almond-eyed,
Flooding all the countryside,
Skimmed off as their country’s scum,
Odorous of opium.
Yellow rascals, cunning, knavish,
Bowed in foul vice-bondage slavish,
They, with Eastern filth imbedded,
Form one monster hydra-headed.
Orientals, leprous-fitted,
Blood-diseased and smallpox-pitted;
Noxious, maid-devouring dragon he!
That’s Sim’s loathsome Yellow Agony.
Another museum display explained the Chinese weren’t only on the goldfields but the ‘chief providers’ of the town’s fresh fruit and vegetables as well. Chinese people all over Australia, fed up by discrimination at the diggings, were forced to turn to market gardening; they often discovered the work to be more stable and profitable anyway. They transformed scrub into flowering gardens, and were more successful than the Europeans at working with the wet and dry extremes of the tropical north. The Europeans were inclined to ‘cultivate a large area and wait for rain’, while the secret of Chinese success was captured in a photo on display: a Chinese man stood beside neat rows of tiny flowering plants, with two buckets hanging from a long pole carried on his back. I laughed out loud—this portrait adhered perfectly with my impression of the Chinese during the four years I spent living in China. No other people on the planet so steadfastly embraced the proverb ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’.
And how it infuriated those European Australians! They were often forced to swallow their racial prejudices when the larder cupboard turned up empty. According to historian Timothy Kendall, in 1901 a former independent member for Capricornia called Alexander Paterson told Parliament his horror story of coming home to find a Chinaman standing at the back gate with a vegetable cart, apparently the first time ‘the magnitude of this Asiatic pestilence’ caught his attention. Paterson chastised those responsible in his household, only to hear: ‘It is all very well for you to talk in that strain, but we live six miles from town, and how on earth we are to get vegetables from anyone excepting a Chinaman I cannot tell.’ Paterson explained to Parliament, ‘The result was that the custom of the establishment was transferred to a German, with which arrangement I was perfectly satisfied. But I may tell honourable members that it broke me all up when I afterwards found that the German bought his vegetables from a Chinaman.’ One can imagine that at this point all the parliamentarians were laughing helplessly. Poor Paterson continued, ‘While this question has its humorous side, it also has a very painful aspect. How is it that we ever allowed Chinamen to interfere so much with our trade as to put them in the position of being able to dictate to us?’
It was mid-October when I left Croydon and kept driving until I landed on the east coast. My east coast.
I travelled to Cooktown where in 1877 British official Dundas Crawford noted coolies arriving at the town. His writing reveals how the Chinese were viewed through European eyes:
They pass through the town in batches of six to ten, in single file but ever singly, each coolie carrying his own bamboo pole brought from China … Men walking with apparent nonchalance on the footpath act as guides, and the different files, never expressing surprise or any other emotion, never mixing together, and never stopping, carry their loads straight to the place assigned them; most to the camping ground beyond the town, where the greatest regularity is observed of the tents.
The discomfort reverberating in Crawford’s passage was not unfamiliar to me; it was the same displayed by boarders in my high school sneering at the quiet, studious girls from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The boarders were strapping, sporty country girls who cracked jokes through class and dominated the culture of my school—all the teachers loved them. I wondered how much of my cultural self-hatred developed then.
The Chinese were single-minded in their attitude: Keep your head down and nose out of trouble while in these strange, savage lands, and exploit whatever crack or chasm of opportunity presents itself. This was just as true of the Chinese students at my school as the 1800s-era labourers. But from the perspective of European Australians, the Chinese showed little emotion, which aroused suspicion; they were tirelessly obedient, which garnered them little respect. To those European Australian larrikins, hard-drinkers, surly miners, knockabout jackeroos, devout missionaries, and stout, hearty pioneer women
, the sectarian Chinese were unsettling in their uniformity. Sure, as workers they were hardworking, stoic and dependable, worthy of admiration for their industry and ingenuity in business—but they were hardly a race you could truly like or trust.
As I made my way down the eastern coast of Queensland, I heard variations on the cannibal story. A friendly grey nomad from Toowoomba said, ‘My brother reckoned it was actually white miners on the verge of starvation who ate the Chinese.’ A Guugu Yimidhirr elder said it was something spoken of among their people, as did a Yidinji man who added, ‘It might have happened once but that doesn’t mean it happened all the time.’ Both said their nation wasn’t responsible, but rather an Aboriginal group further south.
There’s nothing especially freaky or weird about cannibalism in a historical context. Many parts of the world have a history of human flesh consumption, including China and Europe. These examples often incorporate cannibalism in the grieving process of a mortuary ritual: the consumption of a loved one’s remains as sacred and ceremonial, considered the most intimate way to honour the deceased.
That said, I found no credible historians willing to back claims that scores of Chinese miners had been hunted by Aboriginal people for their tasty flesh. As historian Christopher Anderson wrote of the Palmer River story in 1981, ‘The spectre of indigenous cannibalism has been used all over the world to justify colonial violence.’
Perversely these rumours sit in the cultural landscape like a bare arse wiggling rudely at the concerted white Australian myth that Indigenous Australians were strangely passive as they were colonised.
Much like Australia’s long-standing connections and interactions with Asia, the many stories of Aboriginal resistance to colonisation—be it through guerrilla warfare, reprisal attacks, curses (and other forms of magic), petitions, strikes, protests and political or legal manoeuvres—were given no airplay in my high school history class. I wasn’t taught about Sydney local Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal warrior of the Eora nation, who from 1792 led a decade-long guerrilla war against the British to defend the very lands upon which we studied. Nobody taught me about the softly spoken Vincent Lingiari, a Gurindji stockman who led one of the longest strikes in Australian history. At the end of their strike, he and his fellow countrymen were finally given back their land, as captured in an iconic photo of sand pouring through the hand of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam into Lingiari’s.