Non-Fiction
Finding a Way Out: Lost in East Gippsland / Christina Ng
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream
One of the first nursery rhymes I’ve learnt as a child drifts in and out of my memory ever since I left Singapore, my home country, nine years ago. The more I sing the lyrics in my head, the more they settle and accumulate like sediment in a stream.
Before settling in where I am now in Germany, I’ve made many attempts at leaving Singapore to seek the perfect environment to make my home. Since my twenties, I have tried to move to Taiwan, Thailand, Bali, Australia, but none worked out. There was always a kink somewhere that I could not iron out that booted me back to Singapore. I would then start my journey all over again, to find the Neverland in my head, like a dog moving in expanding concentric circles, straying further and further away from the centre, chasing its own tail.
Australia was one of those concentric circles. It was a land that held much promise for me with its bountiful nature, and, in my mind, a lightness of life like a flowing stream. I signed myself up for a Wwoofing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) programme with little thought but a lot of enthusiasm, which enabled me to roam around Australia for a month working in hostels or organic farms in exchange for food and lodging; but as adventures go, I spent most of my time finding my way out of various unexpected situations.
My first destination was a hostel located south of Melbourne in Mornington Peninsula near the beach. I was supposed to be there for a week, but after a night at the abode making up beds, the big Australian owners told me regretfully that I had to go, because I was too small (in size) to handle all the heavy work of making up beds and hauling mattresses. “We really need our people to be hardy.”
I called D, my second host who lived with her teenage daughter in rural Bruthen about five hours away by train, and asked if I could go to her a week earlier. She agreed happily, telling me that she was in the process of building an organic farm from scratch and I could do whatever chores that felt right for me. These ranged from preparing the soil for compost, building chicken coops to collecting the chicken eggs and taking her dog, Maggie, out for walks.
The heavy lifting at the hostel, or the farm chores that D said I could do, were tasks that I had mainly depended on the male figures in my life to handle. In fact, in the carefully crafted urban environment of Singapore, the little knowledge I had on farming had been a leftover from my science textbooks.
Working at D’s farm required a paradigm shift for me, especially when modern Singapore is focused on upward mobility in offices, less of living alongside nature and animals, tending to them and letting them tend to us. In Singapore, wild nature is less accessible, nor is farming a big part of our lives. What’s more, post-independence Singapore was built with the hands and minds of males—from the labourers to the governors—or so my history textbook would have me believe. Growing up, being active and doing physical labor was considered a man’s work. Getting my hands and feet dirty doing manual work would require me to rethink my role and capacities as a woman.
I arrived at the farm slightly jittery, unsure if I would be kicked out before the seven-day stay we agreed upon. D’s daughter, a moody young girl who seemed more like a city girl to me, gave me the once-over and mumbled something about how she and her mum were pagans. I didn’t know what she meant, but D chipped in cheerfully saying: “Don’t mind her. She meant we worship nature.”
Their kitchen was filled with all kinds of nice-smelling herbs. It looked like one that belongs to a reclusive martial artist from a Jin Yong novel--Jin Yong was a Hong Kong novelist famous for his Wuxia world where martial artists from ancient China go on arduous adventures, meeting like-minded swordsmen to remove oppressors and fight for justice. In my imagination, D would be the charming, self-sufficient lady herbalist devoted to discovering herbs and healing whichever world-weary hero or heroine that comes knocking at her door.
*
My host family gave me my first task that very night.
Thunder rumbled across the skies like it was fleeing from a shrieking ogre of its own making. Brilliant flashes of light sliced the utter black into zigzag pathways, the gold bursts glowering for a brief moment, and vanished.
There were no stars.
I was in D’s rocking, out-of-use caravan in her farmyard, listening to the raindrops, one by one, clattering on its roof, when D’s daughter knocked on the door. “My mum says it’s better that you stay inside with us tonight”, she said, her air of nonchalance a stark contrast to the near frenetic activity going on above me in the sky.
I was more than willing to sleep in the farmhouse, looking at how the storm was working itself up like a cauldron of hot soup that was boiling over. The rain had already soaked our shoes when we got to the house. D’s daughter threw me a towel, looked at me fumbling with my sleeping bag and asked hesitantly: “Can you make us a fire, please?”
As someone who comes from Singapore, an immaculate land replete with skyscrapers, I, like most Singaporeans, live in public housing called HDB flats. These are high-rise buildings that look like massive lego blocks stacked atop each other, but with the ground floor empty of housing units, seemingly sitting on rows of whitewashed structural columns. This would be the void deck of the HDB block—first introduced in the 1970s because the then Law and National Development Minister Edmund W. Barker wanted schoolchildren to have a shelter which they could stay dry under while waiting for family members to take them home on rainy days. As time passed, the void deck transformed into an airy space to breathe: where cackling old men play chess at communal Chinese chess tables; residents sit quietly on stone benches staring into space; teenagers hold their heads in agony with their homework strewn all over the round stone table.
We have nature but, like the rest of the infrastructure in the country, it has been perfectly organised into areas of manicured greenery and seldom is it a haphazard show of rolling hills stretching endlessly into the distance, or unkempt shrubbery dotting the landscape like in East Gippsland, Victoria. In Singapore, a country just degrees north of the equator, trees are often stocky and shorter. Rain trees, angsana trees, flame of the forest—fiery names that match their equally glorious crowns—are trees that I’ve known all my life: they tend to grow horizontally, stretching their arms sideways to embrace the air, obscuring the sky with their widespread branches rather than fervently reaching upwards to touch the clouds.
Back home, interacting with nature meant camping out at St John’s Island, an offshoot of Singapore once used by the military but now frequented by school children for a taste of a safe jungle; or getting stung by a jellyfish while sneaking out to the beach at night with my cousin without a torch, and realising that the night was dark and full of glowing terrors.
Therefore, when D’s girl asked me to start a fire for her, my reply was agony in equal measure. “I don’t know,” I said in an aggrieved, almost aggressive tone that reminded me of my mum’s. The girl was aghast, looking at me like I have failed to perform my duties in exchange for food and board.
In the end, we threw many scraps of paper, magazines, and newspapers into the fireplace in an attempt to start the fire. D came home just in time to stop us from dumping her favourite homeopathy magazine into the feeble flames and got the fire roaring in no time: the very first time I heard wood crackling happily in a fireplace, while the thunderstorm raged outside.
I spent the night drifting in and out of sleep on the rug D laid out for me on her wooden floor, while her daughter winced about the rug being soiled by my dirty sleeping bag. I chided myself for my romantic notions of escaping my tiny HDB flat in Singapore to look for the possibilities and adventures that I had imagined expansive Australia could offer me.
D’s dog, Maggie, was at my side when I woke up, sniffing around my sleeping bag and looking at me expectantly. “Good morning!” D’s voice always had sunlight in it. “She has been waiting there for you for a while now.” Maggie wanted a run in the bush; what the Australians call “bushwalking” would be my Singaporean version of hiking at Bukit Timah Hill—a 163-metre tall hill designated as a forest reserve in 1883, a popular hiking spot in land-scarce Singapore.
When I opened the door to head out, a family of guinea pigs—a huge one in front with five mini ones following clumsily behind—scurried across the farmyard with their itsy-bitsy legs as the sun’s rays peeped through the clouds, smearing the sky a drowsy orange.
Maggie was yelping excitedly and already tearing down the road. I ran after her as she went straight for the piece of forest behind D’s house.
Maggie and I found ourselves in the midst of eucalyptus trees—tall and elegant—in no time, where she seemed to be right at home. The sun was more awake now, sprinkling its light through the warp and weft of branches and leaves, engaging them in a whimsical waltz with the breeze: step two three, step two three, and back.
Some of the trees had deep ridges and furrows on their barks, like a tactile map of how far they had come. The wildflowers, tiny and cheery, were simply basking in the moment. I fumbled my way through the forest looking for a marked trail as beads of sweat rolled down my forehead, the sun becoming more and more punishing as the morning advanced.
Maggie was suddenly nowhere in sight.
It did not take very long for me to lose myself among the tall, thin, overreaching trees. In the intensifying heat, every tree, shrub, fern looked just like the other. I felt lost in the eerie sameness of the woods, like how I disappeared into the routine at home: day after day of waking up to a screaming alarm clock that threw me right into the endless to-do-list at work that started with “do it better” and ended with “do it quicker”, only to come home to my mother pacing up and down the flat wondering where her dreams had gone. Days repeating themselves like Groundhog Day, growing bit by bit into raucous anxiety chattering in my ear: nothing would ever change.
Which was why I was here in East Gippsland.
I did not know where I was going anymore. In Singapore, I was mindlessly plodding down a marked route from point A to point B, as if I was navigating from one end of the island to the other end, chopping down any trees that stood in my way without second thought.
Now I was here meandering through stoic gum trees, alien in their silver-white barks sparkling in the scorching sun, the glimmer feeling more like the glint of gnashing teeth instead of the sense of wonder I had felt just some time ago. I was walking in circles, not moving forwards, or backwards, trampling on mushy leaves covering acres of woodland, my vision fixated on a few of the same trees that I had been circling.
The writer Jamaica Kincaid wrote in her book Among the Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, where she went hunting down seeds in the Himalayas that she can grow in her garden in Vermont, of the vastness and beauty of the mountains as “so dreamily irritating to be so far away from everything I had known.”
I did not know how much Kincaid had ached for everything she had known whilst knee-deep in her adventure in the Himalayas, but, in my moment of disorientation, the forest was a mirage of home, dreamy and irritating. Every tree I saw was a reminder of an aspiration I had of escaping to a foreign land that could not, or would not, keep me. No matter how dreamily beautiful the forest once was, it had morphed into a cold, hard challenge to surmount, another task to cross off from my to-do list.
And then, I saw Maggie in the clearing right in front of me in a muddy puddle, splashing happily. She dipped in and out, rolled around and ran to me, shook all the droplets of mud onto my feet and grinned.
My throat was parched from the heat, but I was filled with relief at seeing Maggie. She gave a few yelps and started running, turning her head round now and then, almost as if to check if I was following.
Moving behind my furry friend, putting one foot firmly in front of the other, it was as if the forest’s unfamiliar terrain and Maggie’s familiar warmth had momentarily fused into the common centre of concentric circles that I had hoped to get to.
*
In the short seven days I was at D’s place, my work on the farm was interjected with visits around Bruthen.
Bruthen, the small rural town that D lives in, is situated 24 kilometres northeast of Bairnsdale. It did not leave much of an impression, very similar to other villages that I have passed by in Victoria. Its name, though, was interesting, which D said is an aboriginal word from the Brabiralong people of the Gunaikurnai tribe meaning “long wooden point” or “place of an evil spirit”. In 1840, the Scottish explorer and pastor Angus McMillan passed through the area and organised an armed assault on the Gunaikurnai people in retaliation to his friend being killed by them, leading to the massacre of the aboriginal people whom the land belonged to. Violence between the indigenous population and European settlers continued until the 1860s.
Though there was a historic post office, general store and church from the 19th century that remains to this day, nothing about the town gives any hint of the area’s objectionable past. History whispers the most violent story that happened in a place, but it is ultimately up to the people who come after to choose what they want to remember, like what the American writer Mark Twain said: “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice”.
The village was once a rest stop for fortune hunters hoping to dig for gold in East Gippsland, but now, it is painted as a quiet and scenic town in travel brochures, a place where travellers could savour the myriad wonders of undulating fields and clustered woodlands. The people I met seemed to have made themselves comfortable with a bucolic lifestyle.
D loved taking me with her in the car to “show me the community”, and Maggie would always tag along. The dog loved a good ride in the car, popping her head out of the window, her little paws gripping on the car’s window ledge, her nose sniffing at the air, her fur a mess of black feelers rustled by the wind. I could see her mouth stretching from end to end every time I looked into the rear view mirror.
On these trips, I happened upon a travelling mother with her son in a caravan; mother trying to write, her son, in contrast, playing the violin as effortlessly as it was laborious for her to write. I also encountered a bohemian couple rearing alpacas in a huge farm with a wooden attic streaked with sunlight and filled with djembe drums.
On one occasion, D took me to visit her mum who, like my mum, was given to outbursts that no one had any inkling of its source. She screamed at her little dog for being a little shit one time we were there, and D pretended that nothing had happened, whisking us away in her car when her mum would not stop hurtling abuses at her dog, and began to include all of us in her fury.
Friendly as D was, she did not say a single word about the lack of male presence in her life or about her mum. She told me that the farm was already beat-up when it fell into her hands, but wouldn't say more about how exactly she ended up in this place, what prompted her to make such an effort in restoring it, if she had a partner. What shone through the farm, littered with half-dug plots and mud-caked farming tools, was her devotion: she always woke up earlier than me (I was no early-riser but the constant crowing of the rooster made sure I was up by 7am), dug the vegetable plots, made the flower beds, planted the seeds, built fences… and her kitchen never stopped smelling of fresh herbs. She stayed close to the earth she loved despite the heavy burdens that came with it. There were moments where I saw her, eyes shut, stroking the cat on the sofa, a picture of exhaustion. But her face would brighten every time she talked about how this remote farm—the size of over 20 five-room HDB flats in my country (equivalent to 2,500 square metres)—would all come together.
At the farm, it was D’s steadfastness that pushed life both indoors and outdoors like the strength of water pushing through sedimentary rocks. It reminded me of a quote from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become”: it impressed me how D did not let many drudgeries of farm life burden her, but rather treated it as a kind of music that animated and punctuated her life.
The day before I left for Melbourne for the next part of my journey, I came across a book in D’s bookshelf: The Princess Who Believed in Fairy Tales by Marcia Grad. The synopsis on the book cover read: “For every woman who has ever dreamed of finding a Prince Charming and living happily ever after, only to have her cherished fairy tale shattered by the painful day-to-day reality of being hurt by the one she loves.”
I flipped through the book and got to know a princess who grew up dreaming of being rescued by a Prince Charming, but the mainstream narrative of fairy tales and happily-ever-afters did not happen with her verbally abusive prince and her parents who only wanted her to do things their way.
I felt a twinge of sadness for the hurtful, moody prince who was devastated when he lost his princess—the princess who finally found the strength to leave her abusive family on a journey of self-discovery. It wasn’t till I reread the synopsis dedicated to every woman that I started to cry: “And for her mother, daughter, sister, or friend who wants to help—and needs to understand what she thinks, how she feels, why she stays, and why it’s so hard for her to let go, even after she leaves.”
*
As D waved me goodbye, her farm still incomplete, me feeling apologetic, she smiled and said: “You’re a city girl, aren’t you?”
I remembered the day I arrived at the farm, bright with hope about how the country, the air, the vast landscape that I imagined would change me in seven days. The kind Australian man who took me to the farm from the train station did give me a casual “warning” about what was to come, replying my “oh, so much space” and “wow, the country’s so carefree” with: “Yeah, it’s beautiful all right.” He paused. “There’s too much space—people kill themselves because they don’t know what to do with all of that.” He said it with a wry smile, belying a carefreeness that comes with a price.