The job was simply this: keep the line from falling into deep flowing water: Stop anyone from being washed away. It was easy enough. The environmentalists and their families lived rough along the water’s edges like nesting swans or a colony of egrets, in makeshift rafts, or roughly-made reed huts. Even their babies knew how to cling to the watery nests, or the bosoms of their mothers. It helped to have lived numerous seasons with spreading water to remember how to stop being washed away. Still, it was always difficult to predict before a crossing began whether there was a likelihood of flash floods. The last-minute cancellation of a crossing was always imminent. Refugees would squat by the water’s edge in the rain until conditions settled, while the water-navigators argued the toss in numerous committee meetings about whether the water’s stability was a goer, so a journey could begin.
But it did not matter how adept these environmentalists were with the bush, or with travel through water, or whatever else they could do to save lives. They were not to be trusted in the least by the refugees of every nationality coalesced by flights from the ruined cities – young or old who were hardened fighters too. None of them wanted any extra favour for who they were or where they had originally come from, and being essentially numb about risk-taking, they asked no questions, and just told the people-smugglers to get on with it: All we want to do is head north. We don’t care what happens. Just do your job. Anything will be worth it. Just show us where the Aborigine people live. So for days, sometimes weeks, the lines of humanity walked knee-deep in yellow billowing water, and if the predictions were wrong, waist-deep or up to the neck of children, which left each person to figure out how to keep carrying the burden of treasured belongings. The leaders called, Say c’est la vie, or drown. Chuck it all. The trail was littered with submerged electronics, cartons of beer, some huge paintings that had become completely transformed by the mud, as did the books about birds or the high country, or any treasured books of philosophy, music, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Usually, the only treasures that survived were animals. Many had brought along the family watchdog, their old daras, and these were left to swim alongside their owners or were carried, like those tagging along with the dog boys, hungry puppies stuffed under their jackets, among hundreds of street kids on the run. Someone had brought along their cow, the old beloved black and white bulaka. It was not like travelling on an aeroplane, or a catering bus. Forget that. Nobody had any food. No aeroplane. Budangku yalu julakiyaa. It was more like a self-serve journey, which meant everyone was constantly hungry, always too balika, looking for something to eat. The mortified travellers, who had not killed anything before, killed the cow finally. It was difficult to think of anything else. It was butchered in a frenzy in the water, and eaten raw, with no fire, budangku yalu jangu-yaa. Afterwards they had nothing. Not anything. Budangku yalu jumbala-yaa. Still, what was hunger to these people? They had always known hunger, and about this alone they cheerfully narrated their stories, rather optimistically, about how they were surviving on nothing: Yea! Who cares about hardship? It is just being cold and wet, that’s all, and being rained on, but was worth it.
The more enterprising street people who had pillaged poultry before leaving the city, had a ten out of ten chance of feeding themselves on the journey. These fowl thieves carried bantam roosters and treasured, egg-laying white silky hens stuffed inside their clothes, or a half dozen ducks, close to their hearts, and secretly hoarded the eggs.
The buskers of the city sung through hunger, and kept singing through the night to keep warm as the weary line walked on, while more water seeping out of distant hills and creeping along the crevices joined the flow of the flood on the flats. You could say that the country was a drain that wanted to drown strangers singing up its landscape.
Oblivia walked with her head down, but she also watched elderly men and women, and children holding cats, kinikini stuffed inside their jackets, trying to shield their pets from the savage attacks of dogs sniffing out anything they could eat. The dogs were often attacked with bamboo poles, which quickly escalated into brawls with the dog owners. The water leaders often lost control of the line when tempers flared over dogs, and the fighting broke into splinter groups.
Whenever skirmishes broke out, the line needed to be brought down to earth. A meeting was held in the water to break people into groups that related to each other. But lawlessness was what it was. People walked wherever, fought whoever and however, and often ended by walking off in all directions. Of course, there were consequences for anyone who thought they could make the crossing by themselves. Many were forcibly returned to the line. For others, it was important that the people they had paid to take them across did not walk off the job, or get killed.
With the journey headed deeper into the swamps, Oblivia walked with dozens of people with cages of birds whose song was a reminder of their old lives while they travelled towards the uncertain future. Nanny goats. Billy goats. A sheep. Someone with about a dozen pussycats stuffed under his jacket. Oblivia thought of the Machine. Perhaps he was somewhere, or still in the city. She carried in her arms a heavy fledging swan, having to mulamula it around all the time, inside her hoodie windcheater next to her knife. This was a half-grown cygnet that she called Stranger. The cygnet, like Rilke’s swan labouring with what could not be undone, had refused its destiny. It had no interest in swimming away, or to fly with its flock. The great flock of swans, wary of the dogs, kept a safe distance from the travellers, but Oblivia watched them swimming in the distance, or sometimes flying overhead, as though reassuring herself that she would not be abandoned.
Darkness would fall and the trails of bats, thousands flying overhead, heralded the worst time for the disintegrating line of people, calling to one another throughout the night, straying out of hearing range and becoming lost forever. Very soon, the weariness of the line became total exhaustion. Many felt there was no end, or way out. They became increasingly disoriented in the sea of water and began to hallucinate, many rushing towards the mirage of the Aboriginal people’s heaven they saw in the distance.
Only a few refugees from the city finally managed to reach the other side. The feral policemen leading the line, who abandoned the refugees that remained in their care, would eventually be arrested and placed on trial for people smuggling, but not for genocide, or mass murder, which were crimes thought to be so morally un-Australian, it was officially denied that anything like it ever happened, like in the rhetoric of the history wars era – genocide, a horrendous crime against humanity that was unheard of. It never happened. Not in this country.
The swan girl’s worry for the cygnet now hidden inside her clothes, under Warren Finch’s old windcheater, probably saved her. She walked with her head bent forward, trying to be unnoticeable amidst the dwindling groups of people. The Harbour Master looked very fearful with the frightened Rigoletto on his hip. He always knew where she was and crept up beside her again, and again. Get out, he demanded. You are First Lady, not bullock being led around. The line was struggling to stay together after days and days of tiredness and hunger, many falling by the wayside, unable to go on, with no one to help them.
There were murmurings, whisperings, and she could feel the primeval fear closing in as the crossing verged on mutiny. Anyone hiding animals was attacked. Groups of bandits moved alongside, picking off people they suspected were hiding food. There were numerous beatings of people unwilling to hand over their pets.
The dogs roamed freely, sniffing for food, attacking those carrying animals. The Harbour Master arrived wet and flustered with sheer frustration written all over his face. Why won’t you just go, he sneered at Oblivia, while adding, I am not staying. He pushed her, and she swayed to and fro, but held her ground. You are an idiot, he snarled in her face. Go now.
Oblivia feared that the dogs would eventually find the cygnet. All around, she heard the savage packs attacking people and their screams in splashing water. Even the swans overhead were terrified, and lost momentum in their
flight. They swooped lopsidedly in terror. She felt fear with each step, expecting something to happen at any moment. It was too terrifying to be discovered escaping, she had seen other people being cast aside for not being obedient to the discipline of the crossing. But, when it was time to go, she disappeared quietly, in the moments when the black swan cloud flew across the line of travelling people, covering the moon-lit water. She closed her ears to the sounds of the collapsing world behind her, and kept walking under the cloud of swans moving slowly just above the water, their loud beating wings creating a mad turbulence in the water that kept her camouflaged. Never turning once, she would not look back.
The only person who lived on the water amongst the flooded trees where no one ever goes was an old Chinese hermit. He lived on an island of sticks that looked like an enormous swan’s nest. His white hair and whiskers were filled with sticks too. As usual, he was hoping to catch a fish, singing that old 1960s song Wishin’ and Hopin’, just like he always did to paint the sky gold with the memory of Dusty Springfield’s voice. He was thoroughly besotted with the singer, and his feeling had only grown stronger since the first time he had seen her singing the song illegally in a dream of long ago, which hum! made him run from China.
The fish were still not biting when the wing beats of swans flying low across the water through the dawn fog were so close to his ears that he could feel the spirit of Dusty Springfield singing her Wishin’ and Hopin’ in the breeze coming straight from their straining wings, and her trumpeter bugling in their calls, and the drums rolling in their heartbeats. It was just another amazing all-bells-ringing kind of day living with his idol and it was all too joyous, but then! down in the fog something moved. He thought he had seen ghosts. These ghosts kept walking towards him through the fog and shaking up the water, so he waited, and kept on singing his Wishin’ and Hopin’ song. It was too late for obsessing, to make his cares fade away because these all jumped and rolled in his stomach. When he saw it was just an old man carrying a monkey he thought he was lucky, but when he saw a girl who was the First Lady of whatnot, and with a cygnet as well? Well! He thought he was just too plain luckless for words.
He called to the strangers, This is where you must go to enter another country, but they just kept walking with the ghost wind blowing them towards where he pointed. When he realised they were not going to stop to speak to him, he called after them about his secret love for Dusty Springfield and how he was remembering her voice forever out there on the water. He believed they were ghosts though, and watched them go on their way until they disappeared into the watery horizon.
Later when he caught a fairly medium-sized fish, unlike the tiddlers that he usually caught to feed himself, he believed that the only real ghosts he had ever seen in his life had brought him luck. So, he sent a bit of his luck their way too, wishing the ghosts heading into the desert reached wherever they were going, and hoping that the Harbour Master found a camel to ride on the long journey – to show them that you care just for them, sing the songs they want to sing… The old Chinese man’s singing to his songstress in the sky must have been a lucky thing, the Harbour Master told the wet and sorry Rigoletto after they were saved by the weather. The group was still walking in floodwater when the skies turned black with heavy clouds, and very soon afterwards they were walking through a mad storm. A torrential downpour flew like a wild river in the wind. The big cygnet refused to swim and Oblivia had to stuff it back under her shirt. She could feel its heart thumping with her heart, but kept walking as though nothing was unusual in calamity. Well! The monkey knew about monsoons, and clung to the neck of the Harbour Master who was salubriously humming the highs and lows, and speed and caution, of Weber’s Op. 34 Clarinet Quintet in B flat – although he was packing it really. The wind and rain blew so hard onto their backs that they raced along in the direction the Chinese man had pointed to, and where, soon enough, they were thrown out of the water and at the two-toed feet of a big fat camel standing in mud.
Lo and behold! The Aboriginal man on the camel spoke wisely – because he was supposed to – as he welcomed the strangers to his country. His pet cicada chirruped a song from under the piece of canvas that covered its cage when the camel man asked his talking companion for long journeys, since the camel did not speak, Will you carry the monkey man and his soggy looking pet, or will we let the old camel do the job? The cicada did not appear to have a direct answer to such a stupid question, if you could interpret the melody that remained unchanged to an ordinary ear not trained in interpreting how insects speak.
The Harbour Master was very weak from his ordeal, but still protective of the girl, and being an important man of another place, he bluntly asked the camel man, Which one are you mate? Gaspar, Balthazar or Melchior? And is this the gate of Heaven or what? Perhaps the camel man did look like one of the three wise men.
He was dressed in a thick green cotton shirt and red trousers – clothes stained reddish brown from the bush, while over his shoulders fell a large animal-skin cloak that protected him from the rain. His eagle-feathered cap was also fashioned from animal skin but it was now soaked with the rain that washed down his face and through his black beard, and over the seed necklaces hanging over his shirt.
The camel man said he was neither wise man, nor in Heaven. Introducing himself, he said the name that people usually called him was Half Life, and he offered no other explanation. I’m from blackfella land. My kingdom is right where you lot are standing. You got anybody else coming behind you? When Oblivia glared at him as though he must have been mad, he sat the camel down and quickly slid off. The Harbour Master was the one he helped first. Old man you ride on top. No more walking for you now, he said. Girl, you get up there too with that goose. He threw the animal-skin cloak over them, and handed over his flask, as well as a large piece of wattle-seed damper from a bag kept around his waist. The camel, unhappy with having to be sat down in the mud in the twenty-first century, was fidgeting with its mouth harness, spitting and oozing snot from its nostrils, and turning its long neck around to sniff and fuss about having mud in its fur, but with a quietly spoken word from Half Life, the animal quietly rose to its feet.
We follow the track the ancestors of mine made. Look who is here, he told his country. There was nothing more spoken in the rain journey ahead. Half Life needed to sing to his kin people their country’s songs with his cicada brother, as much as to the camel that seemed to enjoy ancestor music while it went sauntering on its way.
All journeys on the ghost walk are hard and long. There was no way around it. One can travel forty days and forty nights across deserts in bloom or drought, or a month of Sundays of eating nothing else but hares and rabbits roasted over a fire at night, but it was all the same.
Just be careful with my people though, or they will spook the bloody wind out of you. My theory about surviving a day with them is always take short breaths so you don’t miss it if they try to floor the life out of you. This was how Half Life introduced his people. You have to be related to people like this to love them.
This is a real sacred place here, Half Life said as they came into view of their destination – a camp of his kin-people living in the ruins of concrete-block buildings and rusted car bodies that were half buried with red desert soil, and from which grew clumps of spinifex, salt bush, native herb bushes, or the odd bare bush tomato and leaf-eaten bush banana, and the scrappy coolibah tree here and there – nothing to build a door with. Burrs and prickles covered the ground like a dense lawn, as well as chewed-up pig weed and twig-like arid country plants for the bull ants to trail through. Only salt soakages lay beyond to every horizon.
This is big Law here. We always come back. Spirits of our people live here. Ghosts living in abandoned car bodies. Some of them inside those old crap houses. Built by that top of the country’s last government of self-serving politicians before it chucked the dummy and went bust when nobody bothered voting for them anymore. Nah! You wouldn’t be bothered voting for people like
that. They were like a bloody soap opera. Well! It’s entr’acte times now. Better enjoy it before the next comedy of errors, another era with another round of tragedians and thespians mouthing off, and traipsing around on our block again, dragging us backwards through another bloody century of destruction. Our elders bring everyone here so that we can hear the Law of our people from the country itself telling us a strong story about what happened to them. What they do. Oh! Sad alright, some of those stories. But good ones there too. You can hear children dancing in the moonlight, rock-n-roll and shake a leg. Laughing. Those were the days. Make you want to cry how memories come looking for you. We move on again in a few days time. Palace next time maybe.
What was the point of complaining about how life had become? If all that was left of your traditional lands were tailing dams and polluted pond life, and the place looking like a camel’s cemetery? Still! No need to go around complaining because there is nothing left running in your brains except your bare-ass country and a pack of scrub donkeys, said Half Life. This is how we see life. Look around. Those donkeys follow us wherever we go. The ground looked as though it was crawling, but it wasn’t a miracle. It was a catastrophe. These were cursed people. Their worldly companions were a plague of Rattus villosissimus – the long-haired ugly rat – crawling grasshoppers, Locusta migratoria, and the flying ants swarming in the soup.
Oblivia looked at the ground-crawling camp and saw it was nothing special to freak out about, if that was what you thought about rat- and insect-swatting nomads looking as weather-beaten and wind-blown as she was herself. All of them living with sandyblight eyes among thousands of wild camels and feral donkeys surrounding the camp, which Half Life explained, just kept following them through life.
We are Aboriginal herds-people with bloodlines in us from all over the world, he added, and dreamily listed all the world’s continents that he could remember being related to these days, Arabian, African, Asian, Indian, European all sorts, pure Pacific Islander – anywhere else I didn’t mention? Well! That as well! Whereever! Even if I haven’t heard of it! No matter – we got em right here inside my blood. I am thick with the spirits from all over the world that I know nothing about. Nah! Man! We don’t live on their tucker though. Here it’s bush tucker all the way if we can yank it out of the mouths of these ferals running around and breeding up like plagues of rats, flies, insects whatever; no matter we got em, and that’s why we are trying to eradicate all these mongrel hares and English rabbits from being one less of a plague on the face of the country by eating every chemically deranged single bugger of them. It’s like their spirit will not go away unless we eat em. Of course that’s some other country mob business but what can we do! What Law? Nothing! We are retarded people now because of the history of retardation policy mucking everyone up. Leaking radioactivity. Crap politics from long ago. Must have been a madhouse then. Glad to be rid of them. That we survive at all is just a bloody fluke of human nature. Got the picture, if so, then you are welcome, if not, I reckon you got no alternative really out here and whatnot for understanding surviving.
The Swan Book Page 31