{"id":89008,"date":"2019-03-13T16:56:54","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T05:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=89008"},"modified":"2019-03-22T10:07:21","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T23:07:21","slug":"monica-tan-stranger-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2019\/03\/13\/monica-tan-stranger-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Monica Tan, author of Stranger Country, reflects on what it means to be Australian"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Go back to your roots.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does that mean for someone like me? Someone born and raised in Sydney to a couple that immigrated to Australia while the final nails were being hammered into the White Australia Policy in the 1970s? Does it mean going back to Malaysia, the country where my parents were born? Or does it mean going back to China, the country where all my great-grandparents were born and from which my ancestry hails?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And how do I go \u201cback\u201d to a place I wasn\u2019t born in?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am, by no means, an unusual story in Australia. Nearly half of all Australians were either born overseas or had at least one parent who was born overseas. Whether in your cultural heritage is British, Indian, Chinese ancestry or from the 190 countries represented in our mix, our only consistency is that since colonialism we are a nation comprised of many new Australians.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That poses a huge challenge to our national unity and shared understanding of Australian history and Indigenous heritage.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was while at the end of a four-year stint living in China, ostensibly \u201cgoing back to my roots,\u201d that it occurred to me that there were some other roots I had to go back to.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"monica<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was 30 years old and barely knew Australia. After a healthy diet of American pop culture and having travelled the world, I could tell you more about faraway cities like San Francisco or Boston, than I could about Broome or Cairns. I knew more about Emmeline Pankhurst than I did our own suffragettes \u2013 this despite the fact that Australia granted white women the vote over a decade earlier than Britain. I could now name dozens of Chinese ethnic minority groups, and not one Indigenous Australian nation.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time my feelings towards Australia were complicated. Not just, as you might assume, because I\u2019m Chinese Australian. Rather, just as much because I was a city-slicker, hipster intellectual. And what the hell did I have anything to do with horse-riding, Blundstone-wearing Drover\u2019s Wives and snag-flipping, LandCruiser-driving, ocker larrikins? And just as devastatingly, how could I ever truly belong to a land that was the spiritual domain of Indigenous Australians for over 60,000 years?
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With these questions in mind, I chucked in my job as a Guardian journo, stuffed my Toyota RAV4 full of sleeping gear and jerrycans, and hit the long (very long) road.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What took place over the next six months and over 30,000 km of driving, would change me and my relationship to this country forever. So much of what I thought I knew about this country was wrong. And the reality is far more rich, complex and inclusive than I could have ever dreamed.

Stranger Country by Monica Tan is published by Allen and Unwin and available to order at Booktopia.<\/a><\/em>

Follow us @TheBooktopian<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n
\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Monica Tan is the former deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia and co-host of the Token podcast. Stranger Country is her first book.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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