'Will I ever really belong to this country? As a Chinese Australian? As a non-Indigenous Australian?...
I was thirty-two years old and barely knew the country of my birth. It was time to change that.'
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 a land that has 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.
