The Swan Book

by Alexis Wright

  Anyone could see that the community was one big, buzzing hive of activity where busy Aboriginal tribes-people never stopped working. They were as driven as the millions of flies that infested the camp, and you could betcha one thing: these people would strike an accord with the ghosts of a century or more worth of politicians and policy makers of Australian governments. It had been bigot country then. They would be smiling on these camel entrepreneurial people, and saying success at last. For here, every individual seemed totally obsessed with being some kind of economic independence human success story in an Australianmade hell. There were people bumping into each other all day long to discuss or argue about the plagues of feral animals. Who was looking after the barn owls? How the camels were penned or not penned, watered and fed, who could use which one or that one, or why one camel was more worthy or trustworthy than another. In short – worrying about every aspect of domesticating the animals once imported into the country by other people, that they were not eating.

  Rigoletto hid under an iron bed and stayed well and truly out of the way while the mostly leather-skin-clothed women and children that looked more like animals to the monkey were endlessly chasing donkeys in the rain, or wrestling them like wet squawking sponges to the ground, or whipping them senseless to make them move away from the camp. Why these donkeys wanted to hang around these people was a complete mystery to the Harbour Master and he yelled out in vain, Why don’t you let the baby Jesus’ donkeys alone? So he was told to shut the fuck up. What tradition, the Harbour Master wanted to know, talked like that to old men? He ended up arguing constantly with the women who had been looking after him but now treated him like a donkey too.

  The camp itself was strewn with carcasses of hares and rabbits or any other feral creatures thrown on the woodpile. It was hard to establish if there were enough people who would be able to eat all this food before the camp moved on. Then there were the pelts in various stages of being tanned or turned into items of clothing – cloaks and caps like Half Life wore, as well as shoes, saddles and ropes. At night it was no different, for no one slept a wink in the bevy of ceremonial singing and hunting, or packing up and moving camp. Why waste time sleeping when far into a wet rainy night, all the able-bodied huntsmen and women rode off on their camels, with each person carrying a pet owl as their night hunter, and only returning hours later loaded with a hundred and fifty or more rabbits and hares strung over the camels’ backs? This was why the one big over-worked feral shebang was monotonously the same, routine and endless.

  At least you got somewhere, and all we have to do is keep going, that’s all, the Harbour Master explained to the emaciated girl, although he could see the bony thing was not listening to him. He felt she was dying, and admitted that she had been too high maintenance for him as he sang to the country’s spirits, long, long songs, that went across the country to her homeland. There was nothing more he could do. She lived in her own world with the cygnet that had now grown into a swan. There was too much noise in the camel community, and it made it harder for her to hold her thoughts together before they were forgotten. She could hardly remember what happened on the day that Warren Finch was assassinated. The images were like those recalled from a dream that flashed in her mind and were instantly forgotten. Her life in the city seemed to have coalesced into a stream of forgetting, of what happened so far away, and of memories that seemed implausible, or too hideous, and almost irreverent to be thought about in this place. So Oblivia and the swan sat in their own little corner of this shifting world, out of the way of being trampled by the industrious people and their animals. The camel people were pursuing their own course, in its own order of mayhem and hassle, which was oblivious to having her, or any outsider in its midst.

  Oblivia turned her head away when the groups of children came by all day long to touch the swan and to throw it some food, the bits of damper and grass seeds still attached to stems they had collected for it. They were full of questions, asking why she was looking after the swan, where she came from, what she was doing just sitting by herself for? Why are you mental? Irritably, she quickly shooed each group off one by one, with the language of a stick angrily prodded at them, only to end up with even larger groups of children whiling away the time by sitting in front of her and copying her every move, the hostile way she stared at them, and teasingly throwing stones over her head – giggling for the stick to be chucked around, until their parents called them off for more chores – to hurry up and get going, while leaving her to make her own decisions about life. It was up to her. Entirely. Everyone was free to have their own thoughts about where they belonged or what they needed to do. There were only two options: live or die. Make your own decision. They knew the girl’s heart was faraway from them, and assumed she was thinking about her own country.

  Whenever Half Life walked by, he glanced at the huddle on the ground, noticed she was still there, and thought that perhaps he should see what was happening to her – whether her spirits were up or down. He thought she was crying. What would she cry about? Was she crying about that prick Warren Finch? Half Life had heard on the radio that the beloved missing First Lady, now hailed as the heart of the nation, had joined the illegals travelling through the country, and thought it could have been her, but he said nothing. Who needed the fuss? He thought that he could have done with a wife himself, but he was far too occupied with the work that needed to be done. They all were. He had no time for standing around talking about life, marriage, raising a family. This was sorry business. They were mourning here. And tomorrow, they would mourn somewhere else. No! He did not want any children. Would he have to guard them with his life on his own country, lest the government took them away from him?

  All she did, other than burying her head inside her jacket under her arms folded around her knees, was to look at the skies becoming clearer, as though it was there where she had to search for a road out, the road that emerged half-heartedly before disappearing again, that would only become fully visible when the swans arrived. She had become more eager to leave, to continue the journey before it was too late. She grew impatient and weaker. Conjuring her journey back to the swamp was hard work. It exhausted her. She hardly ate, and could only think of herself as one of the swans flying towards her, while niggling voices in her mind kept reminding her the time had come if she and the swans were to make the journey north to the swamp before summer set in, otherwise they would all die on the way. You want to die out here? Like all those other women?

  She thought about death. Visualised the journey towards dying, and thought this was how Warren had planned to abandon her after all – just like other men who had dumped their disappointing wives in the bush. Left them to die. Only their bones were leaning against a tree somewhere, and those poor things still waving towards home for an eternity. At this point, she thought Bella Donna’s story must really be about the last swan arriving back at the swamp with one of her bones in its beak, bringing it home. If this was so, so be it. She would be dead, that would be the end of her grand old love story, a fable of what happened after Warren Finch was killed, when his ‘promise wife’ was so heart-broken, she ran off and died in the desert. The missing First Lady. The enigma. Her body never found. She would be like Lasseter’s Reef. Adventurers would just about kill themselves in the desert while trekking around the place searching for her. She would become a legend in the bastions of Australian civil society interested in the anthropological studies of Aboriginal people, just as long as it appeased the dark theories of a discipline that kept on describing the social norms of Aboriginal men as dangerous and violent. They would speculate about her bones in absentia, and wonder whether she really was a child bride – just a little girl – so they could experience the sensation of charging Warren Finch posthumously with incest, pornography and raping a child; or whether or not the bones were of an ancient woman, or of an assimilated woman; or of somebody with sapwood-imbued bones who really could have slept for a very long time in a tree – just like th
at Rip Van Winkle fellow – yes, the bones of a girl who had never really matured, never fully grown. Well! How could you tell? It was hard to imagine. Why wouldn’t she show Warren Finch who was the greatest? Yes, it was easy to think about dying. Would you call just lying down in the grass to die revenge, pay-back, or a suicidal act?

  So she waited more and more impatiently for the swans to arrive, becoming more fearful, and feeling more dependent on them to guide her safely through the laws of the country, the spirits who were the country itself – if they were still alive, and flying towards this isolated camel people’s camp, a speck in the vastness of an undetermined landscape for those unable to read it, frightened at the prospect of having to attempt the journey alone through unknown territories without a guide to clear the path to her country. Then one day, when the caravan of people, camels and donkeys finally realised its intention of leaving when the soakages dried out and actually left during a surprise rain shower and followed the rainbow, nobody noticed she had been left behind.

  The Harbour Master was the first one you could blame for negligence when he left with the camel people. He was a ghost of a man too preoccupied with losing the magic of lightning-speed travel. He was old-fashioned. One of those types too overcome with disappointment for this new world. He had to reach his destination in God speed. How could he think of travelling an eternity with camels and donkeys for God knows how many days, months, or friggen years? Sweet Dreams Baby! His destination was what? thousands of kilometres away – think of Heaven. And Heaven was not the next waterhole up the road, which dying camels and old nomads thought was good enough to call it a day after walking all day long in the sun. His spiritual resting place was his own chosen place, where huge angels that were called something good like Prosperity and Eternity watched over monkey country. His eternal resting place was not going to be in any barren wasteland that kept being killed off by political stupidity.

  Anyhow, you only had to take a look at little Rigoletto in the pelting rain for pity’s sake. He was too wound up and frightened about being trampled by wet, frisky camels running about, to come out from his hidey-hole under the iron-frame bed. The little monkey sat motionless with his arms tightly folded around himself. He looked like a rock. He clutched his possessions to his chest. What? The stories? Worried in case a camel or donkey would try to eat his stories?

  Yes! The Harbour Master could only dream of getting away from the spinifex shrubbery, the claustrophobic way this landscape can close in, surround, ensnarl. He clung to the monkey hope of living the high life on the balconies of the eternal white marble palace. On the Taj Mahal, Rigoletto would move gracefully through time, shaking the hands of passing tourists with his lips stretched back and through baring teeth, telling a good story. This dream of escaping was worth…Millions! Can you imagine Rigoletto? Millions of people handing over peanuts, bananas, pomegranates, oranges and the whole apple cart to hear a little monkey snarling through one of his favourite stories about living a thousand and one nights of hell with the Harbour Master. We will never go hungry if we live in a palace, would we, Rigoletto? But to get there, they would have to survive the journey through a lot of country with the camels Half Life described were destined for the ships exporting them to foreign markets. It seemed like a bit of a plan.

  Marsh Lake Swans

  So holy and beautiful to behold this country where the swans flew hillock over hillock as far as the eye could see along a rolling landscape of saltbush, stubby plants, pittosporum, emu bush and flowering eremophilas.

  Their flight having begun at the old abandoned botanical gardens in the city so long ago, it was a journey foretold, clear in the oldest swan to the youngest cygnet – the flight through thousands of kilometres from the southern coast to a northern swamp.

  Bushfires came in walls across their path. As the grasslands burned, the swans flew high, sailing through winds gusting above the smoke in a journey a thousand metres up in their dreaming of home. Each kilometre was achieved by wing flapping and slow glide through floating ashes that flickered with fire and dazzle-danced the sky in the full-throated blizzard of heat flying over the hills, before falling on the country beneath. The swans, their strength crippled, breathed hot smoke-filled air, and the smell of their own singed feathers crawled into their lungs. Wrapped in fear, they whistle up the dead to see how they are going, before surrendering to the air, plummeting thousands of metres down into the fire. It tested the will of their wings flapping slower, almost unconsciously, instinctively remaining airborne.

  It happened this way, until the remaining bony creatures find they are descending into the stagnant, blue-green algae blooms of a flooded plain where the trunks of dead trees are a reminder of what was once a forest. Then they continue, the swans flying through seasons and changes in the weather, and over travelling refugees, and the fence posts of flooded and then bone-dry lands. It was as if the ancestors had pulled the swans across the skies, passing them on to the spirits of gibber plains, ironstone flats, claypans, salt lakes and drifts, towards a sacred rendezvous – a tabula rasa place – where all of the world’s winds come eventually and curl in ceremony, and where Oblivia waited at the camel camp amidst the drying soakages, to be cleansed for entering another country.

  She whistled to them; tried to blow music from the flute, a swan tune that dances around the hills. It was old Bella Donna’s swan-bone flute she had always worn around her neck just like the old woman did before she died. The flute was made from the wing bone of a Mute Swan and had been in Bella Donna’s overseas family for generations. It could have been a thousand years old. Only the cygnet the girl had carried in the crossing had gently played with the bone in its beak, otherwise these days, the girl treated the small wing bone like a necklace, a walkuwalku hanging over her clothes or over her back – the only belonging left from her home on the hull. She knew the sound was known to be sacred to swans. You can’t use something like this for fun. Her music danced on among the din of winds rustling through the grass and ruby saltbush; and the swans flew down to rest among the arum lilies on an insect-infested marsh lake.

  Miracles are funny things. The Harbour Master looked around for his miracles every day, but only saw the reality of living rough as guts with the herds-people sipping tea in the rain with all those camels moving about them with a plague of stink beetles, and women and children slinging stones at the donkeys they said were feral-ing up the place. He said that those favourites of his the Prosperity and Eternity angels had lost their minds if they thought this was it. But what was life if you could not have hope? Maybe the angels had forgotten to bring his miracles in the way of first-class airline tickets so he and Rigoletto could fly off to the heavenly marble palace. Maybe they had lazed about and dropped the bloomin’ requested miracles off at the wrong place. He blamed history for making him think these mongrelised depressing thoughts.

  The swans welcomed into the country’s song now spent days in the swamp while it never stopped raining. They danced the water, stirring it up, even at night with wings spread wide, lifting and dropping as they ran along the surface of the water, as though dancing in wing-exercising movements. In this way they communicate with each other – while the girl watches, knowing how she must read the country now as they do to follow them home. Then once more, the swans fly, and dance the rainy skies above the swampland, and return, skimming across the water to land.

  This ceremony of swans continued, where together in mass blackness, they swam in circles. Reeds and water lilies become trampled. The swans pause, then lift themselves out of the water to stretch the white tipped wings that beat quicker, faster, as more circles are made with wings and tails splashing, and synchronising heads dipping under water, webbed feet kicking up water as they move, then the pulse is broken, and the huge body of swans breaks up and reforms.

  Wings beat the water on one side, but when they switch sides, the beat of the other wing changes the tone of the music. They are almost prepared for flight. Oblivia follows them
into the water and the swans observe her as though she is a newly-hatched cygnet. Hour by hour, after dipping deep in the water to forage for weeds, they glide towards her to drop their offerings with little bugling sounds, until they can see that she is surrounded by floating weeds. She sleeps on the wet land among the grass at night, while the majority of swans continue the unbroken ceremony, but there are always swans resting beside her, necks curled over their backs and asleep, raindrops falling over feathers, heads nestled under wings.

  It was at night, after an icy wind had descended from out of nowhere in the middle of the day to push the temperature down to zero, and the ground had become frozen, that finally with the wind running along the ground like a spirit, the swans flew away from the leaf-littered water.