The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

  So! Hold on to your seat real tight, hold your breath, keep your eyes in your head, and go on, don’t be frightened.

  Please! Calmness! Peacefulness!

  Silence costs nothing just as silence means nothing.

  Cheer up like loud people and clap your hands and stomp your feet about this. Louder.

  I don’t think I can hear you.

  Oh! Come on! Don’t be a sooky baby.

  You have to be better than that.

  Your little mad girl’s world is a bit shy you know.

  You are frightened of what people will think of you.

  You do not want people to think bad things about you.

  But I got to tell you to come out.

  I insist. I want you to.

  You have a story to tell.

  So, clap louder!

  Quickly!

  Tell everyone you have a few home truths to say to them.

  And plans?

  Yes! Yes! Really! Let’s think. You will have plans.

  You have to listen to your plans.

  I’m part of it.

  He could still feel the way she had always moved back, flinching at the warmth of his breath filling the dark space as he reached inside the tree to find what he already thought he possessed, as though he could reach across any space of time and distance in his thoughts. She was embarrassed and confronted by the way he travelled with his imaginary crowds of ancestral spirits that proudly followed him over the land, and who were watching, as he came down to where she was sleeping cradled in the spirit of the tree. The girl kept slinking further away from the strange boy who came through the darkness to talk to her about his frightening ideas, using words he had heard running out of the mouths of old men and women, and from families calling to one another from one scrap of dirt to the next, about people who trespassed on their native land.

  Warren Finch’s boy heart thumped like an animal mapping its own way down through the roads it ought to travel, like migrating birds reaching their destination before embarking on the journey. He was at his own concert and hoarse from screaming for a ghost to leave the tree.

  Warren Finch was travelling on the flat ground above the river, leaving the butterflies, to go where the grey-feathered brolgas were dancing ahead. The tall slender birds were performing a legendary fight in the Dreamtime story – one that the old law had marked on them forever with a wattle of flaming red skin on the back of their heads. He was studying this brolga dance which was being performed with the accompaniment of a whirly haze of dust sprayed from the rusty wrecks of car bodies strewn over the flats behind them. A coy wind rushed by, picking up and blowing their soft grey chest feathers, and a fine yellow dust that closed him in the atmospheric stench, and drew him further into the brolgas’ traditional, well-worn, and danced-about roosting ground.

  His elders had come by earlier as they did regularly, to check on Warren, the boy who brought only joy, and who was commonly called, the gift from God. He lit up their hearts. Even though he was a half-caste. They said he was the incarnate miracle. He even lit Heaven at night. They agreed wholeheartedly with the ancestors, and with any new gods if they cared to be about in the country of the traditional owners, and with all the insurmountable riffraff bothering them in modern times. This boy pumps up our hearts with proper pride and it feels good. What we say again, and again, and again is this, isn’t it a mighty proud day wouldn’t you say to be seeing this boy of ours out here on country?

  You could say that Warren Finch was a pretty special child. He was living alone, in the crowded space of the breeding colony of the brolgas, as he had done for several years of his schooling, away from his parents’ outstation where they were etching out a living with cattle and growing forests of wild plum trees for carbon trading. In this isolated place, it was clear that his schoolroom and teacher were the land itself. He was watched over every night in his dream travels by the elders who brought him lessons. They could not have cared less, or given two hoots about the fact that in the wider circles of Australian opinion, his education was typically called ‘special treatment’, or perhaps even wasteful, by somebody following them around like a big shadow in the many guises of omnipresent Australia.

  A colonial omnipresence looked like the daggers sticking out of the heads of elders these days. All fired by Australia. All conveniently rolled up nice and personal into one person called Official Observer. That official who thinks himself, from the Capital of Australia, Canberra, to ask a bloody squillion and a half questions about education, by ramrodding with his own valued opinions into the minds of Aboriginal people. The elders refused to answer anything. They offered only their big sighs of resignation. That that was good enough to give anybody who they thought was not their business, as these elders claimed with solemn faces: We are doing our own business here.

  The boy could not have possibly known how scrutiny works, or that he was a special test case for the curriculum of education devised by his elders. These were ancient-looking men and women – six of them – keepers of Country, who kept on living as though they were immortals. They were the bosses of this Aboriginal Government. Boss! That’s all they were called. No other name suited people who wholly belonged to the old Laws of Country. They were Country and they looked like it, and you don’t argue with Country.

  The Observer was always reminding the old people just how many Australians, whether they knew anything or not, and not to mention the big national media governing Aboriginal opinion in the country, just loved being judge of Aboriginal failure. The elders always replied with heads together – better than one: Well! Doesn’t inward darkness like to latch on to some other darkness?

  But how can birds in the bush educate him? He should be in school. The National Observer literally pulled out his hair to get this so-called Aboriginal Government to listen to him properly, and it was not unusual to see him storming off from the Brolga colony until somebody ran after him and persuaded the white man to please Mister come back, to try to be more reasonable in his understanding. He knew what they were doing but he was not going to say it. He was not going to sacrifice his career by mouthing off his theories about the kind of education Aboriginal Government was creating, but he knew the boy would be dangerous in the end. He just wanted to know how he was going to big note himself to his peers, the Australian Government, and to the United Nations watchdog about honouring the rights of Indigenous peoples.

  This trial with the boy’s education since early childhood was just a little periwinkle of an experiment, with a let’s see how it goes attitude for a right to educate, begrudgingly gifted by Australia while maintaining the perception that Aboriginal Self Determination was unworkable, and after two plus centuries of jumping up and down about this very thing being non-existent by Indigenous peoples.

  Weren’t the Indigenous People’s Rights embedded in that 2020 Constitutional Agreement thing that Australia signed, sealed and delivered to me here right into this hand of the old man? What was that about? The oldest local Indigenous man, a white-haired wise man regarded in the highest esteem by his people, had excused himself forever from answering any undermining question posed about an absolute. He had his right on a piece of paper and that was what mattered as far as he was concerned. Long time we been fight for that. What? Three hundred years maybe fighting over me being Black and you being White? Like mangy, maggoty dog fight. Can’t fight properly. Always having to scratch for fleas. Rubbish tings like that. Always floating around. Always. Can’t ever get rid of it. The old man was told to be quiet by the Observer who was sick of listening to him talk about politics and his rights. Hold your tongue old man. You are talking too much politics. You are obsessed.

  So what was that treaty I signed? older man asked again, while endlessly rolling the treaty word around the roof of his mouth with his tongue, just to feel how satisfying it sounded in his head, and it still pleased him to hear the word which he would keep saying a million times more perhaps, before he died. He had the right to fe
el pleased. He had forged the only treaty of its kind in Australia after three centuries of denial about original land theft that lead to the creation of Australia. He had gone to the World Court as mad as a run-over dog to do that. This old man got his treaty between Australia and the traditional owners of this piece of Brolga country alright, and pinned the bloody thing up on the door of his house. The words on the paper were faded by the sun, but that did not matter because the old man could recite what had been written on it, word for hard-forged word – one for every man, woman and child of his kind. This treaty was for the rights of Indigenous people over the traditional country that Warren would one day inherit as one of its senior caretakers.

  Traditional responsibility. That was what these elders were training him for with their educational system that prickled the nerves of the ‘official observer’, who was a man who had been one of the masterminds behind decades of failed Australian government policies, but somehow, because of all of his experiences, Canberra had judged him worthy of this position. Yep! No trouble at all. He was still king of his patch.

  Thank climate change and even the wars such a catastrophe created, and thank the millions of refugees around the world being sick and tired of how they were treated, that had cleaved the opportunity for this one nation of Indigenous people deemed worthy enough, to force Australia to sign a treaty by bringing the country to its illegal colonising knees in the World Court.

  But Brolga people had been opportunistic. They had made sure that they were in the right place at the right time. They blamed themselves and others like the swamp people for their troubles so that rich people would give them plenty of money. Luck was involved too with being anti-people, when they found themselves caught up in a mix of new thinking throughout the world about how to treat poor people, oppressed people, Indigenous people and whatnot! Things like that! Not normally done for have-nots. They had a long tradition of knowing how to say yes, yes enough, and that was fair enough too, while agreeing to a heartbreaking trade-off – only done they believed for the long-term survival of their nation – along with the shame they would carry forever, a perpetual sadness and melancholy of the heart starting with the old white-hair man, to have the swamp people’s part of their traditional estate, the Army’s property and dumping ground, deleted from the treaty.

  Well! Canberra bosses wanted to see treaties given like Christmas presents – they really did, because they wanted to explore the better angels of their nature, to explore what ideas of fairness and justice for all meant – right down to the last child sitting in the dirt with nothing. Usually in this tiny era of history, it was common in the Brolga Country and right down to Canberra to see people sitting around all day long thinking about what was utopia and what was peace. And to question what could have been the most peaceful era known in the existence of the world. Where had it all gone wrong? Were they already experiencing the greatest era of peace in the world but could not recognise it? Questions raised up more questions for goggling around in the mind. Can angels strike others in violence? Can lightning strikes be equated to genocide?

  Meanwhile overseas people flocked to talk to the frail old spiritual man of the Brolga Nation Government who had lived forever on nothing but his own sustainability, the ancient intelligence passed down the generations that he said was his religion. Easy words, but he just called it, looking after Country. He was proud that he had seen his people at last recognised as real people, not just a second-hand, shit-cheap humanity. He was happy now that this oldest culture on Earth was recognised as being fit to govern itself through its own laws, and to live on its traditional land. And, this boy, Warren Finch. This was what made his heart feel good.

  The Brolga Nation was chosen by an international fact-finding delegation to be their showpiece of what a future humane world was all about. A UN sign was erected at the entrance to the Brolga Nation. It read, Peace and goodwill to all peoples. This modern Brolga Nation was just the kind of place that International Justice could promote to bring an end to the wars of homelessness across the world. This high law said it was the showpiece, the example for the future, the hope for kindness to reign over the world for the next marvellous century.

  So, these elders, now traditional leaders of the modern world, who already knew that they were high class, were hailed for sitting on their land since the beginning of time, and for having fought very quietly for three centuries the war of oppression. They joined the ranks of other peaceful men in the world like the Mahatma Ghandi, or the Dalai Lama. They were properly cashed up for Rights of Culture, Land, Government, Language, Law, Song, Dance, Story – everything. It was under these circumstances, necessary to explain, that they had hand-picked their brightest child – a gift from God even though he was a half-caste – and had gone so far as to have bequeathed him to their vision of the new world.

  This was how he became the chosen one, singled out from all the others in this Australian warzone of torn people, and was hailed in vows under the Brolga Country moon as the truest gift from ancestral heroes, and having a bit each way, not just from God, but any other gods on the planet too.

  The education Warren received at his Aboriginal Government’s authorised school was a mixed marriage of traditional and scientific knowledge. In a curriculum that the elders had personally composed with all of the reverence of their traditional law, they watched over his education like hawks. In fact, they were like hawks with all progeny, teaching the young to survive in tough new environments. We are swapping band-aid education for brand new education, sealing the cracks – all the holes in the broken-down fences of Australian education policy for Indigenous peoples. Yes, they continued the better education, we know what is best rhetoric in their on-going war with the sceptic observer whom they continually accused was pass em this and not pass em that – always out to destroy Aboriginal people like a record still stuck in the same grove. Anyway. Whatever. Agree or not. This was the hammer, even in officially recognised Aboriginal Government, pulping confidence. The hammer that knocked away the small gains through any slip of vigilance. The faulty hammer that created weak ladders to heaven.

  So there it was. Warren had been taught, from the day he entered his people’s Aboriginal Government School of Brolga Nation as their sweetest boy of six years of age, that he would fulfil a vision primed for their own survival, that above all else, he would connect Brolga values with the future of the world.

  This was how Warren Finch had been able to live on his traditional land as a practising pupil out on his Country. The official words about this education were described as being: culturally holistic in all its philosophical, political and environmentally sustainable economic approaches for a school’s curriculum which honoured traditional law and the art of sustainability for culture and land. A lot of thought and hard work had been put into a boy like Warren Finch to create New Light. But everybody in his world already thought he would inherit the world after he learnt how to make laws by studying the dance and life cycle of the brolga.

  There was another time Warren Finch remembers from when he was still a boy learning how to be a man. He had stopped somewhere along the fisherman’s track above the high reddishgrey earth bank of the river, and was listening to the silence of the middle of the day. He reflected on the pleasure of his thoughts about what the future held, where one day in another place and time, he would recall this time. And he wondered what he would feel then, as he danced to a fiddler’s tune with the dragonflies above the river affectionately known as the Pearl – a traditional breeding place for local river turtles. He found it difficult to see through the large flat leaves and flowers along the way, but he was sure the river was not dry like it had been in the winter, when the lily bulbs lay dormant, hidden in the cool ground with the turtles, deep below the surface.

  In the middle-of-the-day sun that showered the land with bright light, he walked further up the river in search of the black angel he had already seen flying low just metres above his head, the previous night
, having been awakened from his dreams by droning wings far off, that he could not see. He had called out: Who are you, flying there? The thing he had seen flying close above his eyes looked like a very large woman. A twinkling bell-like voice had also awoken him from his sleep. Warren Finch lived in a world of bells, where birds like willy wagtail and magpies sang like bells even throughout the night, and beetles and geckos cried bell-like, and grazing cattle wore bells that rang in their night foraging over stubbly grasses. His elders often reminisced about the days when their people did everything to the sound of a bell on the Mission, rung by a white manager who ordered them about. Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong! Bell! Or: Ding-a-ling. Or, did it sound like: Dang! Dang? They inherited bell clanging, whatever the variance in sound. It was stitched in the brain.

  A black angel cloud flying in a starry night and playing harp music should be easy enough to find. But the moonlight shining sporadically through cloud cover only returned fragments of his dream by just revealing slithers of a woman’s naked body that looked enormous in the sky. She had come to him like a promise, from moving slow along the river that flowed as slowly as his blood. He felt her presence bonding with his own, slowly flowing like the river did, in his blood.

  Again and again he tried to recapture the woman’s shadow passing over his thighs under the light of the moon. She aroused a desire he had never known before, and with sudden urgency, he tried to force the images of the woman to return, but her fly-about hair, breasts, arms, legs slipped quicksilver through him, and in an instant, the memory of her had faded away into nothing. He was as before, always alone, and although he tried with great difficulty to recall this dream of dreams, others more mundane reminded him of the practical side of his life, where his responsibilities lay.