The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

  Oh! Yes! And I worked my skin to the bone looking after you for a very long time until you woke up from a coma.

  There were many lost girls. In the old woman’s stories, the girl was recreated in many lost childhoods. The ancient lost child of a Mountain Ash forest. The lost girl who had spent days running through a forest path of fairies where swan lovers flew one after the other, while circling above the swan poet’s lake. A little girl became lost while travelling old tracks through the marshes to hunt where swans built nests near underground rivers. You choose, the old woman had said.

  It was difficult for Oblivia to believe that the old woman had been capable of looking after an unconscious child, feeding her stories for nourishment, more than food. She kept dreaming those stories like a child, even when she could see and feel the strangeness of an adult’s face reflecting back at her from the mirrored stillness of swamp water. She once remembered the old woman saying it was possible to hibernate underground in the drought, like frogs and swamp turtles, but Bella Donna was adamant in her discussions with the Harbour Master that it was impossible for a human being to shut down like a burrowing frog with cold blood. He did not like to admit it, but agreed. She would not be able to sleep through the drought like a frog, or like a swamp turtle, by conserving energy from living on a single heartbeat for whatever time was necessary to survive through hibernation. And Bella Donna had smiled at Oblivia, sitting on the floor, while the Harbour Master’s flashbulb eyes were burning at the girl with disgust: You were different. You were in a coma.

  The tumultuous universe of lost girls could still be heard from old Bella Donna’s voice speaking through the walls of the hull. She must have left her voice behind after she died. Well! It was best not to argue with steel walls Oblivia thought, since the swans were milling around the hull, still waiting to hear the old woman’s stories. She had more to think about. The swans were hungrier than ever now.

  In this winter the swans only produced one egg. This precious egg, their ode to the swamp, sat in a nest marvellously constructed with thousands of sticks, dried algae and leaves individually chosen and carefully placed. The two swans had worked for weeks in its construction before the egg was laid. It polarised other swans, glancing, idling the day at the nest, as though admiring the egg’s possibilities. The swan lovers constantly uncovered, cradled, and re-hid the egg under the leaf litter of their perfect nest where snakes slept for warmth. As time passed, the brooding pair looked as though they would stay forever protecting the dead egg, wishing it would hatch. Then one day, a group of haughty swans swarmed over to the nest and forced them to give up. More half-hearted nests were built crooked with randomly placed sticks and old bits of plastic rubbish, then all too briefly, only admired as foolish work of swans unable to predict what height the water levels would become with the uncertainty of rain. Whatever vague ideas of procreation had been in the initial motivation, these were abandoned for a different kind of infatuation – a love affair with the northern skies.

  When swans mourned, their long necks hung with their heads almost touching the ground. It seemed as though the swans were now glued to the shores of the swamp where they looked dolefully towards the hull, waiting for the old woman’s world of stories to appear, hoping for the hot air of the mirage to be filled with a cooling sweetness.

  Instead of the swans saving themselves from swamp people’s dogs, they continued staring like statues at the broken forms of silver reflections, shimmering over the water. It was like watching suicide – witnessing, the swans’ refusal to swim away. Black feathers lay scattered over the ground and were blown over the water. Seagulls flew in from the coast many kilometres away and joined the nightly attacks. The swan frenzy raged on and on with blood-stained dogs and seagulls, while bleeding swans mingled with the red haze of sunrise, still sitting on the ground, heads tucked under their wings.

  The swans kept dying in their eerie pact, leaving Oblivia to crawl over dead birds, and having to bury them under piles of broken reeds. Swamp people watched. Will you look at the girl out there? Why? What is she doing now? She’s burying the swans. Pause. What for? Because they are dead stupid? So, so on, manija and so forth.

  White smoke rises quickly in a breeze. It created a haze over the swamp from the bonfires the girl lit for the pyre of dead swans, and pushing the raft into the water and using the long sticks to poke down into the mud below, she carefully manoeuvred it back over to the hull to be closer to the stories from old Aunty’s swan books.

  She is reading through the old woman’s collection of books about swans to find a way of bringing the swans back to the remaining waters in the swamp.

  Swans swimming correctly and sedately in swanlike fashion, screamed in her head, good news, but the mud-caked flocks remained in sync with their perpetual north-south swaying, plodding through puddles, beaks sifting through mud searching for non-existent food.

  The girl read about the many lives of swans flying around mystical, mist-covered palaces of princes who also become white swans. Curly wing feathers of black swans became the black curly heads of warriors in epic hunts, in places where the fearless steps of the bravest of heroes stalking along the banks of a coal-black river to kill a swan prince, might just as easily end in the hunter’s death, or a swan that became a prince, or dead princes lying beneath waters flowing with green-grey algae.

  When the rains finally came, all of the winngil, big rain – the bush dripped from clouds sitting on the land, until finally, with so much water flowing over grasslands and running through gullies leading into the swamp, the old lake reappeared again. The swans safe now from the dogs, were cleansed by months of preening from rain pouring over their feathers. The breeding nests were full with half grown cygnets. Their packs again swarmed through the water where constant winds flowing across sheets of floodwater rippled each pulse of the country’s heartbeat. The air was electrified by the sun disappearing behind the madarri, clouds that packed the sky, and reappearing like a fiery pearl in the mouth of the creature formed by clouds that looked like an enormous swan.

  The News from the Sea

  Somewhere else, far away by the headwaters of a wide river, where another arm of the same Indigenous Nation as the swamp people lived, that belongs to other people – maninja nayi jamba – there was a young boy, a juka becoming a man named Warren Finch. He also stared at the future. The boy had just finished reading an article from a local people’s community newspaper that he had been carrying around forever, that he had read as soon as he had hurdled over the big national benchmark for Indigenous people, to be literate in English.

  This newspaper article was his only possession, and he had read it so many times each word was etched in his brain. Long ago, he had stolen the newspaper from his family when they had tried to hide it from him, snatched it out of his hands in fact, after he had asked them to read the story to him. He had kept it folded neatly in a rusted Log Cabin tobacco tin. He believed he owned the story, which was about the rape of a young girl in an Aboriginal community by members of a gang of petrol-sniffing children.

  His elders, the old grandfathers, had told the young boy the story about a very important little girl who was raped by boys. Promised one for their country. His promised one. They said a terrible thing had happened on their country, at that poisonous no good place they called Swan Lake, which was polluted by all of the rubbish from the sea that had been carted into the place, turning good pristine water into rust. They described the journey they had taken to get to that place after the terrible incident to deal with the matter as the big bosses of country, a journey which along the way, had taken them over all the stories for this one, that one and other ancestral rivers, and a long way across from the old sleeping man range, and a long way from all that good porcupine spinifex flatland country, mulga spirit country, gidgee tree, black soil sacred country. They said, with fists thumping their hearts, that they had reached utter badness at the end of the journey, the only blight in all of their homelands, the
place where the Harbour Master was looking after that sand mountain on the other side of their own Aboriginal Nation’s territory that spread through hundreds of square kilometres across all their old song story country – mother country, father country, grandparents country, and so on through family closeness and feelings towards all things on their land. They claimed that those people over there had been paying for what happened to the country they were responsible for long before that thing happened to the little girl. They told the story of having felt radioactivity running about in the air in that place, and saw with their own eyes the Army in charge of the place – bossing everyone around inside a big fence, saying they were looking after all of the children, so all of the poison was already charging around inside the head from a long time ago and still going on. They even had to stop dangerous thoughts from getting inside their own brain, like a cut letting in the poison, and trying to steal the controls, and steering them around to do bad things to each other. Boys should not play rough with little girls, they said very quietly. It was no good for their whole nation. You will see in time what we are talking about. Then they told him never to talk about it, never mention it again.

  The story about what had happened to the girl who was found in a tree became common knowledge through this large tribal nation. The story became a wild story. Everyone had an idea of what really happened. Some people were saying firstly that the girl was taken, kidnapped by the tree from her people as punishment. Others said that she was really the tree itself. She had become the tree’s knowledge. Or, possibly she was related to the tree through Law, and the tree took her away from her people.

  These elders, seasoned orators with centuries of reading Australian racial politics behind them, the AM to PM news aficionados, and track masters in how to skin a cat, or kill off a lame duck, had partly decided that it would be a good idea for this boy Warren Finch, already the joy of his people, to be brought up their way – the old way – away from the hustle and bustle of intra and extra racial Australian politics, a tyranny that they claimed was like a lice infestation in the mind.

  Everyone in Warren Finch’s world was full of gusto for the child and wore their pride on the outside. They already expected this finely built boy who shone like the rising sun, and was already as fearless at their greatest ancestral spirits, would one day become the best man that ever breathed air on this planet. His education was to be undertaken in isolation, out bush away from everyone. The story of the girl who was found in a tree was so polluting, it could only be resolved by feelings of resentment at the swamp people’s spite for allowing something like this to happen when they knew that the destiny of the girl belonged elsewhere, to the clans-country on the other side of the hills, in the homeland of their boy, more wondrous then the air itself, like a bit of a sweetheart that sonny boy Warren Finch.

  This whole thing about the girl would never do for the direct relatives of Warren Finch who saw themselves as the antithesis of those other people, their over-the-hills so-called kinspeople in the swamp, mixed up, undone people and what have you, who had thrown too much around of their brains and were germinating seed all over the flat, so that they ended up having to be guarded night and day by the Army. People in other words, who were so unlike their good selves, it was any wonder that they were related to one another. You have to weigh up the price of principle, of what it was worth, that was what Warren Finch’s people believed, who reckoned that they owed their success to historical savvy, inherited from a line of hard nosed, hard hitting bosses you might call idiosyncratic, even mavericks, but real go-getter people, with the good sense for standing up and saying ‘Yes Sir’, or, ‘No Sir, Madam (as the case may be, and conveniently so) Australian Government’. They prided themselves as being the anti-brigade, take what you want people, of having their own unexpected orthodoxies to what was expected of them. They even kept full-time cheer squads, everyone in fact speaking the anti-talk, to spruik the river of a special crawling language from their mouths at any professional white or black designer of black people’s lives.

  Warren Finch’s people were good at it and taught the next and the next generation to behave accordingly. For instance, and it was only poking a twig at the tight-fisted ball of their status quo, for whatever it took to deal with people from the outside world coming along with great ideas for fixing up the lives of Aboriginal people, or wanting to take something else from them, mostly in the form of traditional land and resources, they agreed by presenting themselves as being well and truly yes people who were against arguing the toss about Aboriginal rights. They could rock the grey matter – like a peloton riding in the slip-stream of the agreeable – just like the majority of Australia, while at the same time be just like anyone else – as anti-culture, anti-sovereignty, anti-human rights, anti-black-armband-history for remembering the past, anti-United Nations, or Amnesty International, as much as being anti-pornography, anti-paedophiles, anti-grog, anti-dope, anti-littering, anti having too many dogs and pussycats, anti any kind of diseases or ill health, anti-welfare, anti-poverty, anti-anyone not living like a white person in their houses, anti having their own people building their proper houses unless the white government says it’s okay – they can do it for a bit of training money. They wanted to be good black people, not seen as troublemakers, radicals, or people who made Australians feel uneasy, thinking Aboriginal people were useless, wasting Australian government money, and if it meant being anti all these things to prove that they loved their children, and could get on, and if this is what it meant to be reconciled – Well! So be it. What else? What else did they have to say to make things okay so that they could get on with everyone else? Well! They were also anti-truancy, anti-consultation, antiothers, anti-urban, city blacks, mix-bloods etc, just as much as they were anti-racists, anti-anyone black, white, or whatever and from wherever else speaking on their behalf, and anti anyone who opposed their human and personal rights, or their land rights, or their native title, anti never having enough heat in the weather, or anyone who got in the way of what they said was Aboriginal-defined self-determination, and they were just about anti any dissenting hindrances from Federal government of what they wanted, or any hindrances to hindrances in themselves, and anti whatever else was somebody else’s reality, or what any other people said about black people no matter if it was right or wrong, and they were anti about whatever there was to be anti about if white people say so, and even if they seemed to be just a bunch of negative people, or uncle Toms, or coconuts, the upshot was that their highly successful and self-defined Aboriginal Nation Government was designed from such, and was as much.

  A whirlwind blew the bit of newspaper out of young Warren Finch’s hand. It landed in the river. That question, the young boy thought of what people thought of what happened to that little girl, as he watched the paper floating away, would now be carried off to the ocean. He was not sure who would answer the question. But somewhere, as the paper floats out to sea, he sees that a small group of hermit crabs have turned it into a raft. They are riding on the floating paper, and working to keep it afloat until eventually he imagines, after riding ten thousand waves, their little ship would moor in a harbour. He dreams that as luck would have it, the raft paper arrives safely in the busy shipping port under the cover of night. By early morning, a local fisherman in his fishing boat has dragged the newspaper in with his grappling hook, or perhaps it was dropped at his feet from the full-bellied seagull that flew overhead.

  This man, Warren believed, would carefully dry the paper with his hardened fisherman’s hands, because he honoured the sea that had given him this piece of news. What he read when the paper dried made him feel like crying, and he asked the sea why it had sent him such news. He made it his business to show the newspaper that fate had brought to him to all manner of people who lived there, because they honoured the sea too, and were interested in the news from other countries that the Gods brought to them.

  Warren Finch thought about the law of a whorl wind for a
story that wanted to go all over the world, and continued on his way…

  Warren Finch could grab another person’s luck, and dream it into a ghost story. He went back to his favourite fishing hole where there had been a hatching of blue butterflies. Thousands were springing off the paperbark trees, and spilling through the wind like a quivering evanescent blue river flooding towards the sky. The river fell apart, and the butterflies flew about the wild banana vines which grew rampantly over and under old growth, before winding around and through the bushland trees.

  A hundred swallows hunting the insects flittered about, flying up and down from the skies above Warren’s head. He had thought the girl in the story was weak, he had often dreamed about visiting her, and always the dreams were about how he tried to incite her to come out of her hiding place in the tree as though he was frogmarching an insect out from the darkness and into the sunlight of his world. He was a child, but his mind was already laden like a museum, where old and new specimens, facts and figures, lived together as evidence of his own personal history.

  On this warm to meddling hot day, Warren Finch started to conjure up the circus that had taken place in his life. He could remember how it annoyed him so long ago, when everyone said that he was uncommonly wise for someone so young. Now, the same as back then, he would throw his fishing line into the water, neither caring whether he caught fish or not because he always caught fish, even while he was planning the content of speeches he would be giving, or not giving later in his life. He was flicking the line in the direction of the blue butterflies, staring at trees, and he stared straight though the country, to the place he had carried around in his mind most of his life, until he finds the little girl again inside the tree, where he speaks to her, asking her to listen to the love song he has composed for her.