The Swan Book Read online

  His frustrating efforts to bring her back revealed nothing, except confusion whenever the dream suddenly surrendered a small memory, bringing him a small victory of being millimetres apart from the dark skin of the woman’s body above him, before it again became a cloud passing quickly across the landscape, travelling away through terrains he had never known. He was never sure when these images would reappear, or whether he even delighted in the idea of travelling further to find a glimpse of what had already died.

  Brolga and Swan

  Vignettes of flying grass seeds spiralling into columns on colliding paths, though neither a girl who hibernates and is kept alive through dreams inside the trunk of a tree, nor a boy who grows on his dreams of looking down on the world, could understand how destiny works. This was so: the girl refusing to have visitors walk into her dreams; the boy trading reality for dreams where he thinks he is a saviour. How children relegate fate as though it was a toy – something to pitch against their repulsion of each other while playing with a vague knowledge of the future they had watched in a dream. Their story was unfolding dangerously through the complex design of children growing up in untidy times. Of times inscribed in the warped, dull state of a publicly determined fate. Or Law that stretched back to the beginning of time.

  Oh! helplessness of helplessness, there were pirates of high places rattling knitting needles with the skills of an idiot, and measuring the overload of historical repetitiveness, where children like leaves into the wind were seriously jeopardising each other’s existence.

  In this breeding season, thousands upon thousands of brolgas of the crane genus Grus rubicundus congregated noisily across the plains. They hovered in the sky above Warren Finch. Masses of brolgas danced before the boy by mimicking his movements and endlessly paraded in the dry cracked clay pan all along the horizon of yellow flattened grasses. As this supreme ceremony of Country continued there were many groups of hundreds of cranes lining up, to prance springlike off the ground, to bow long thin necks at each other, lift heads to the greatest height possible to toss sprigs of grass, and to stretch grey chests skyward, wings still arched, while other troupes bounced with light grace a metre high up into the air and landed just as lightly, as though their bodies were pieces of floating paper. The sky was turning grey as thousands lifted and flew high into the atmosphere, passing others descending on ribbons, each hovering, waiting to find space to land.

  The boy went down to the river where the yellow water was flowing. He thought of himself as being a human raft while he floated through the shimmering haze at the hottest part of the day and stared upwards to the sky where the old brolgas, some said were at least eighty years old, were gliding in the thermals of hot air.

  On this day, the tantalising movements of the old brolgas were stealing his thoughts away, lifting his daydreams up a thousand metres, and floating them there, all his secret splendours of the night suspended in the sky, chanting Swans beat their wings into the height. Too bad! Serves him right. He should have been paying attention to what was happening right down around his own two feet.

  His mind sailed on and on into the thermals until he was in a trance floating along the river, so captivated in his thoughts now, he was almost touching the flying woman he had seen in his dreams. He felt good. He was in amidst the teeming brolgas searching across the landscape for the distant music of the night-time minstrels, those black wings whooshing through a dry breeze, and remembering how he had once heard a traveller, a travelling Indian woman’s voice swaying like that through a slow Hindustani raga.

  His head was high, lost in the vastness of the clear blue sky, when he saw in the corner of his eye a flash of black, of last night’s dream, now down-stream in the river. His thoughts crashed in one swift jolt into the water, and only the brolgas were spinning alone in the ghostly quiet of the thermals.

  He let himself be carried down the river, half-walking waist deep, half-swimming, not noticing the riverbank owls, julujulu, in the trees, because he was thinking that his dreams were starting to come true. He was very young. How could he understand that his dreams belonged to the future? Again, he glimpsed what he chased, a small object up-stream that was still too far away. Curiously, the object did not appear to be moving, although it always maintained a safe distance from him. Once out of the water, he walked along the bank towards the small, insignificant dot until he reached a point, past the owls roosting in the canopy of paperbark trees reaching across the river, to where he could see a black swan, visible only whenever the sunlight found its way through cracks in the shadows.

  Warren Finch, who had never seen a real live swan before, could hardly believe his eyes. He was impressed with the sight of this magnificent creature, a Whispering Swan, sunning itself on the river. He could not understand how the swan could be in his country, or why he was glorying in this creature of more temperate regions.

  The swan was gliding away, more interested in its surroundings, a sea of lily pads in a garden of long-stemmed purple waterlilies. Warren was already claiming the mysterious swan as his own, for it had appeared in his dream of the previous night. Could there be two realities? Bird of the daytime; woman of the night? He moved carefully towards the bird, but the riverbank felt unstable and he was unable to concentrate. He did not want to listen to reason from the old brolgas above, that the swan did not belong to him at all. He was whispering words he had heard, sweetheart swan of sweethearts, and hoping that if he could pacify the swan with the power of his voice, it would not fly away. He knew where it belonged. Its home was right across the country in the South, thousands of kilometres away. He thought it might die.

  He moved to find the quickest way up the river, taking great care not to snap the twigs on the ground, and all the while, almost believing that he was flying. He was up in the skies. The rhythm of his breathing was like a tabla beating to crush the occasional alarm calls of those soaring old brolgas. There was no stopping his desire: he wanted to touch the swan. Some old excitable fool that lived dormant in his heart was up and about. A rogue spirit that had become as transfixed as the boy had of seeing a swan.

  Quite possibly the bird was injured. Absolutely! Rogue spirit agreed. Let’s go. Let’s get closer. Quick! Quick! I will race you there. Warren could justify trying to aid an injured swan. It was an act of compassion, condoned. Cause. Cause it’s true. Any human on Earth would have thought so. But the swan seemed content to stay where it was so the boy could not be sure, and of course he thought, it would be best to capture it. There was nobody around except his rogue spirit to tell him to leave it alone. He forced his way through the brambles growing densely beside the river and up and down the river gums. He ignored the thorny vines lacerating his body which could have been the country trying to teach him to stay away – if he had been thinking about education. Finally, he reached the closest point of the bank to the swan, but still, the bird was far from his reach, idling about on the other side of the river.

  His eyes rested on a levee, some floating monument of sticks higher than the bank itself, all of the yimbirra refuse that was slowly on the move from up the river. It groaned up to where he was standing. He could see the inflammation banking right back up the river until it was out of sight, and it surprised him that he had not noticed it before. He thought of the big woman’s nest as he leaped straight onto the summit of sticks, branches and rubbish stacked no less whimsically than a million flimsy thoughts describing the nature of the world in his head at that particular moment. The old fool in his heart steered while the boy walked over the top to the edge and leant over, arms stretched towards the swan.

  Now he could see that there was something troubling the swan; its wings flapped frantically at the water while its feet ran on the spot, tangled in a bundle of fishing line knotted in the roots and tree branches. The sodden and limp swan now sensing its end was certain, was pulled helplessly through the waters.

  A wall of floodwater exploded through the piles of sticks, branches, tree trunks, old ty
res and broken down motorcars, that went flying through the air behind the boy, and you know what he had? Only that old fool at a steering wheel.

  The swan was drowning for Warren Finch, and all the boy saw were pictures of Aboriginal spirits with halos of light, just like Van Gogh had painted. The boy had not known what struck him. He had been so excited about the swan that he had not heard the river shouting behind him.

  Twenty Years of Swans

  It was more than twenty years since the day Warren Finch had nearly killed himself for a swan, when he arrived in the Army-run detention camp of the swamp in a flash car – a triumphant long-anticipated homecoming to his traditional homelands, with enough petrol for driving up and down the dusty streets for nothing.

  Around he drove with his friends, down every street, the back roads and by-roads, sizing up everybody who was a Black thank you – checking out the despair, mentally adding up the figures and checking it twice, and deciding like he was White – that it was all hopeless, nothing would help, and driving on.

  He was sure going to miss the pride of the place. The swamp had become truly wondrous in the eyes of the benefactors. These locals, along with the other detained people from God knows where, all jelly-soft now from years of inter-generational interventionist Australian policies of domination, were true beholders of wonder and fervour-ridden with the beauty of home. They had no say about anything important in their lives. This had been an Army-controlled Aboriginal detention camp for decades. Whereas Warren Finch’s Aboriginal Government Nation that was just down the road, had grown prosperous with flukes of luck here and there called mining, and saying yes, yes, yes to anything on offer – a bit of assimilation, a bit of integration, a bit of giving up your own sovereignty, a bit of closing the gap – and was always paraded as Australia’s international showcase of human rights. The swamp people had seen life triumph. Hadn’t they witnessed the growth of an enormous flock of swans on their country? The swans had thought it was okay to live there. Well! This, and the loveliness of their children and country, traditional or adopted, gushed like a permanent flowing river through their hearts. Hearts must have it sometimes, for after a lot of bureaucratic argy-bargy with Canberra for around two hundred years – but who’s counting the cost of crime? – the community had been successful in giving the swamp the far perkier name of Swan Lake. It was the only thing they had ever achieved in a fight with Canberra. Their name received official status from Australia and that was a beautiful thing in the eyes of the locals.

  But nope! Not Warren. He saw nothing for the sake of sentimentality. He drove right around the watery expanse for a bit of sightseeing, an excuse for intensifying and exercising his cynicism while describing what he was looking at to people he was mobiling back down South. Finally, he snapped the mobile phone shut in disgust and parked his dust-covered white government Commodore thing in the shade of the Memorial. The twin, giant, concrete-grey, crossed boomerangs. He stepped out of the car, into the full force of a north country summer’s day, and glanced at the block at the base of the boomerangs – the sign inscribing a dedication to all those who had fallen in the long Indigenous war against colonisation with the State of Australia – And continue to fall.

  Who knows if Warren Finch paid much attention to the Memorial, but he would have agreed on one thing at least, that it was a pretty ingenious idea to erect this traditional icon, so symbolically embedded with psychological power. Nothing was going to beat clapping boomerangs calling the stories and songs – not even Warren Finch standing around the base tapping his song into the concrete, just to check that the whole darn thing was not crumbling from shonky trainee workmanship, and likely to collapse on his car.

  He would not have known the local stories about what they thought was pride. The boomerangs belonged to the old people. They had devised an image of themselves as super mythical beings – giants of the afterlife clapping these boomerangs all day long. These were their longed-for days. They said they would be better off dead. More powerful. They would telepathically stream their stories forever through any time of the day they said: We will haunt Australia good and proper, just like the spirits of the Anzacs living in war monuments all around the country, and just like the ghosts of wars living in all of that rust dumped in the swamp away from white people because they thought they were too powerful.

  Warren Finch was not some random person, someone who had come to look at Aboriginal people for the day as part of their job so that they could make up stories about what they had seen, and even though he did not have much respect for the sacred monument, he was convinced that those two grey swellings of cultural pride illuminated at least one fact – that nothing easily slid into oblivion. He gazed beyond the monument and zeroed in on the polluting junk that lay around in the swampy lake.

  The vista seemed to excite him, and he started muttering on about some of his important theories of colonial occupation, but whatever personal conversations he was having with himself, those who overheard him said they could not understand what he was talking about, and dreamingly claimed, No! Nah, nah. Whatever! Of course the junk in the swamp was not a glorious sight, and well may this be true, but this man’s time was in no way infinite. Warren was very conscious about how much the world beckoned for its few important people. He strode about life in his natural state of beckoning overload – one, two, three, that’s all the time I’ve got for you. These days he spared only a minute or two on most things that crossed his path, and this was what he did while spending sixty seconds flat intellectualising the swamp full of war fossils. Tis this sight alone, he chanted in a flat, bored voice, almost as though he was still speaking on the mobile, that justifies many thoughts I can’t get out of my head about dumped people.

  It’s a mighty slow crawl from ancient lineage. That’s why you can’t fast-track extinction, he claimed, murmuring to his fellow travellers, although to them – recognising the fact of their being Black, and his being Black – it was hard to understand why he was talking like that about himself. They did not want to become extinct through assimilation, if that was what he meant, while assuming it was. But, just what else would a man see? Someone like Warren Finch who was touched by all of the cultures of the world was now seeing the poorer side of his own traditional estate for the first time.

  In the swamp there was a long-held belief and everyone knew what it was. The whole place believed that one day prayers would be answered, and it would happen like this: there would be an archangel sent down from heaven to help them – a true gift from God. Not like all the previous rubbish stuff. Then so it was. It was heard through the grapevine that the gift had been delivered. This would have to be the boy genius that everyone had heard about from those other people of their vast homelands – the ones who were much better off than they were themselves. The ones they were not talking to. Those rich sell-out Aboriginal people with mining royalties and a treaty.

  So when the archangel Warren Finch arrived, sure they were supposed to know because it was supposed to be a miraculous occasion. A gift from God was supposed to be incredulous. Perhaps there would be more stars in the sky. Or, perhaps, beams of sunlight shining from him would dazzle all over the swamp. They had always imagined what this occasion would be like, and most had even prophesied how the archangel would hover over the lake indefinitely so that everybody could get a chance to see him up there doing his business by spreading his protective wings over them, and all would be well after that. Not like all those other so-called miracles for assimilation that had been endured and considered God-given failures. However, Warren Finch deceived everybody. He really looked no different in appearance to anybody else living in the swamp.

  For a few moments, the archangel glanced over the lake, and he thought naming the ugly swamp Swan Lake was a really stupid thing to do. He started to interpret the name in traditional languages, and then in the many foreign languages in which he had fluency. He said the name was common enough, but what’s in a name? It was not going to save peo
ple from heading towards their own train-wreck.

  What was more, he thought the name was only a deceitful attempt to stretch the largesse of anyone’s imagination. He would not be tempted to pity the place. Instead, he took pleasure in picturing the atlas of the world and dotting all of the places he knew that were named Swan Lake. So he had to ask himself: What was one less Swan Lake on the face of the world? He considered the possibility of having a quiet word with the world-leading astronomy centre of which he was the patron, to see if they could rename a hole of some obscure outer-space nebulae Swan Lake. Yep! Why not? Once he was down the road which would not be long now, he would make a point of doing exactly that on his way back to Heaven.

  This was the era of unflinching infallibility, claimed Warren, the postmodernist, deconstructionist champion, affirming from the bottom of his heart that any view of a glitch in the modern world could be reshaped and resolved. He laughed, saying that he felt like a foreigner standing on these shores that represented nothing more than the swamp of old government welfare policies. He looked like he knew exactly what to do. Someone who believed as most people believed of him, that he owned the key to the place where political visions for the entire world were being fashioned. And where was that? This was his question to himself, his concern, as he turned back for a second glance at the swamp, and his answer was also to himself: Brains! In the brains of the men on top.

  The late afternoon shadow of the monument ran like a dark road across the entire lake, and Warren Finch’s eyes were led along it straight to the old Army hull in the centre of the water, the largest vessel amongst all of the wrecks. He had only parked in the broadest part of the shadow next to the monument because across the road he could stroll over to what he called – their ‘so-called’ Aboriginal Government building.