'What happens when a 32-year-old first-generation Australian woman decides to chuck in a dream job, pack a sleeping bag and tent, and hit the long, dusty road for six months? Thirty-thousand kilometres later, Monica Tan had the answer. In mid-2016, Monica left Sydney unsure of her place in this country. As a Chinese- Australian city slicker she couldn't feel more distant from powerful Australian mythologies like the Digger, the Drover's Wife and Clancy of the Overflow. More importantly, she wondered how she could ever truly belong to lands that have been the spiritual domain of Indigenous Australians for 60,000-plus years.
'Stranger Country is the blow-by-blow account of the six months Monica drove and camped her way through some of Australia's most beautiful landscapes and shared meals with miners, grey nomads, artists, farmers, community workers and small business owners from across the nation; some Aboriginal, some white, some Asian and even a few who managed to be all three.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Author's note: To my Australian Studies students, past, present and future.
I acknowledge and pay my respects to the elders - past, present and emerging - of every nation through which I travelled on my road trip. I acknowledge that I live, work and study of Darug, Eora and Guringai Country.
I would like to extend the protection and care of my ancestors to any Indigenous Australians in China, just as their ancestors have take care of me.
'I was a bookish child with a voracious hunger for stories. At the age of four, I would hold a tiny torch under my blanket at preschool during nap time so I could keep reading. I devoured all the books and demanded more. In those early days, the books that captured my imagination were about magical, impossible things: fairies, pixies, kindly moon folk. I pored over Australian kids’ books such as Animalia, Possum Magic and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, losing myself in colourful illustrations of strange creatures, rather than anything rooted in the real.' (Introduction)
'Monica Tan wanted to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be an Australian and whether she could ever identify as such.'
'I was a bookish child with a voracious hunger for stories. At the age of four, I would hold a tiny torch under my blanket at preschool during nap time so I could keep reading. I devoured all the books and demanded more. In those early days, the books that captured my imagination were about magical, impossible things: fairies, pixies, kindly moon folk. I pored over Australian kids’ books such as Animalia, Possum Magic and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, losing myself in colourful illustrations of strange creatures, rather than anything rooted in the real.' (Introduction)
'Monica Tan wanted to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be an Australian and whether she could ever identify as such.'
