The Swan Book Read online

  They followed the swan quickly, breathlessly, and down they went, becoming strong again simply from believing there was goodness left in the world. From remembering God and words, and lines of poetry, Upon the brimming water among the stones, are nine and fifty swans. The old woman looked as though she was back on the mountain that day years before, reciting lines they sang, quicker and more quickly, as their feet hit the stony path, And scatter wheeling in great broken rings, upon their clamorous wings.

  Through the swan, they had put their faith back in life as routinely as though they had been watching a favourite weekly television program. They knew without reason that the swan would always be there on the land, would always return, and always be remembered. They were like their ancestors of the Dark Ages who once followed swans up and down imaginary paths with the single-mindedness of saving themselves – from what? A similar misfortune? The swan flew above the gushing bluish-white torrents coursing down the mountains. We followed the idea of living, she said, believing that this swan was a guide that had reached out from our past.

  The swan flew on and on while every man, woman and child followed, tumbling in their own stream down rocky slopes and slippery moss to take up their flight, until finally before nightfall, the big white bird flew over the coastline through wild winds out to a grey sea, guiding Bella Donna’s people to safety from wars.

  Severely deluded into believing that they could be saved from whatever calamity chased them, the people went clambering after the swan even though the winds butting against their faces tried to push them back from the sea. But in the terror of having nowhere else to go, somehow the miracle of the white swan continued urging them onwards. They stumbled through the darkness, and they ran along a river covered with solid ice until they reached the shore. They ran straight on into the freezing water, towards the abandoned, unseaworthy fishing boats still bobbing in the bay.

  They set sail; following the swan’s own long migratory flight out of the country, heading towards the moon squatting on the horizon. Bella Donna lamented to the swamp people, the swan disappearing across the sea was like the myth of Icarus whose wings fell off for not heeding the warning of his father. But, people running away do not always remember precisely what was in any old text locked away in the library. Instead! Let’s sail. She sighed, and nodding her head, looked as though she was back on that same rough sea crashing on to the foreshore and revisiting the scrambling scene of their chaotic departure. She claimed it was an angel with swan wings pushing them out to sea that night; hands of the angel holding the masthead, covering the sails that should have been torn apart in the wind.

  Gladdened to be nestling under moonlight and safely afloat, Bella Donna of the Champions said, We wanted to relinquish our lands, their memories and stories, and after a little reflection and the buoyancy from being so far out on the water, we said we wanted to be exonerated from history. Soon, indeed on the morning of the following day and every day afterwards as they headed further out across the ocean, only the inconsequentiality of the day before lingered in the memory of their new identity as boat people. They believed they had become mythical oarsmen with gilded paddles rowing sedately to beating drums, in time to the rolling wave of a chanter waving outstretched batons, with long white horse hair flying in sea wind. It was as though they were on a flying swan the size of a ship flying smoothly over the tops of waves. We imagined ourselves sailing on the magnificently crafted Subanahongsa swan barge. Our swan’s feathers shining like gold and precious jewels in the sunlight, and the pearl that hung from its neck, the size of a huge ball, shining in the moonlight. And so she claimed: We called ourselves the people who could call swans.

  Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions travelled the seas as wretchedly as any other among the banished people of the world, but as luck would have it, she came to live out her last days among the poorest people in a rich land. A hidden place. Another Eden. A place where hunger and death were commonplace to its elders, the landowners who knew that they were a social-science experiment with a very big cemetery. A small place where sometimes things got so bad when the swamp’s little gang of brain-damaged, toxic-fume-sniffing addicted kids ruled, that parents asked only for one moment of peace. Where any silence was considered heaven-sent. People were gambling the cards and playing like ghosts. They were gambling about the Messiah. Made bets to see who was the luckiest. Well! Song sung true! Messiahs come and go, usually in the form of academic researchers, or a few chosen blacks and one-hit wonders pretending to speak for Aboriginal people and sucking-dry government money bureaucrats. They were the only Messiahs sent with answers. You got to practise what you preach. Pray God, waste not.

  It was unimaginably miserable to be languishing at sea, moving from one ghost ship to another as the last living soul of the armadas, when finally, by simply saying enough was enough, this old woman invaded Australia. She saw the Australian beach lined with pandanus, smelt bush fires, caught the dust in the breeze laden with the aroma of over-ripe mangoes, gidgee kadawala woodlands and bloodwood corymbia capricornia, and she would listen no more to the law of breaking waves slapping against the shores of a forbidden land. She gathered up into a bag her old swan flute, a pile of books about swans, and those crystal balls. Then she walked straight across the Australian coastline and headed into the bush.

  Anyone there? she called.

  A bullfrog sitting in the janja, the mud, a lone tiny creature guarding the closed-gap entrance to the security fence of government transparency erected by the Army around the entire swamp answered, baji – maybe. It was happy enough to grant her asylum when she asked for a look.

  She turned up on an Indigenous doorstep, and the children called out: A Viking! A Viking! An old, raggedy Viking!

  All covered with dirt, grass and sticks, she looked as though she had forgotten how to walk or comb her hair and had swum through the scrub. Two laws, one in the head, the other worthless on paper in the swamp, said she was an invader. But! What could you do? Poor Bella Donna of the Champions! The sight of her made you cry. She was like a big angel, who called herself the patroness of World Rejection. She wasn’t some renegade redneck from Cammoweal or Canberra. This was the place for rejection: there was no hotter topic in the mind than rejection in this swamp, so to prove that they were not assimilated into the Australian way of life, the ancient laws of good manners about welcoming strangers were bestowed – Here! Stay! Have a go! We don’t mind.

  The old woman was terrified that she would be taken back down to the beach and thrown into the sea, and struggled to explain her lengthy and extraordinary ordeal. The crystal balls, her swan books and swan-bone flute in a canvas bag were all that she possessed, and these she tried to bargain for her life by pushing them into the hands of the elders. No one would touch them. Everyone backed away, fearing contamination from what were plainly the sacred objects that locked in her story. In quick gulps, she mentioned secrets – an important message about how she had been saved to tell the tale.

  She was quizzed by the old people with the ancient wisdom. They asked if her secrets were in their national interest, by which they only implied their own big swamp of a nation, not the shebangs of anybody else’s business. Well! Those hearts almost jumped straight from their chests from seeing so much horror in her eyes as she levitated the crystal balls, which created another illusion altogether, as though her world had once been like these balls, momentarily able to float in space.

  All of this kind of thing happening out of the blue like that was not the message from a Messiah that the Government in Canberra had told the swamp people to expect, but still, none could deny that she had been a sort of answer to prayers, even though she looked more like the local soil covering the roots of trees. She answered their inquiry by saying that her stories were of the utmost interest to the world. Well! they thought, why not. Our nation was small. Our boundaries not very large. It was very nice land. A bit flat. A bit hot. What they liked best, the kinsmen told her, was that they had not
hing to do with the rest of Australia. They thought that they might like to have a bit of a holiday from some ancient responsibilities, and told her: So stay. Have the floor old one. Tell stories.

  The maddest person on Earth told her stories of exile endlessly, but who listened? The swamp people were not interested in being conquered by other peoples’ stories. Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions knew times when no one listened to the inconsequential stories she sung to herself: when hungry people feed themselves fat on voices droning from the radio, and repeat what they hear, they are like canaries. The girl replaced any dream of a big audience. But Oblivia stared into space, not listening. It was just music. Wave after wave of it rippling through the swamp. The score of a long concerto in gibberish and old principles cemented in language that ears had never heard before in that swamp.

  First off! There was fright. Hell’s people were naturally jumping around with Bella Donna’s prolonged talking in this silent place of worship. She liked talking about surviving, intervention, closing the gap, moving forward as the way to become re-empowered, learning ‘lifestyle’, of aesthetically pleasing houses and gardens. This confused the swamp. They thought she was really a local-bred redneck after all. The old people asked her: Weren’t you supposed to be some kind of a holy orator who remembered each epoch-making episode and emotional upheaval of the Planet’s nomadic boat people? Heads spun with all the fires and violins endured in oceans as barren as a desert when she got back to the facts. She told it all: Feast and famine. Flutes of bewilderment. Drowning cellos. The voices of lovers. Crying births. Storms screaming. Wailing loss, abandonment, silence. Rejection. Bombing. Prayers. Theft. Beseeching. War. Puzzlement. Starvation. Staring at death. Organs from all over the world were playing in the swamp now. Thieving pirates. Robbers. Bandits. Murderers. And, somehow, more survival until: Glory of migrating swan birds filling the skies.

  Her poetry was about the grind. A treadmill recalling unlaurelled bravery. Notes for those dead at sea. Men, women and children captured forever in the ghost nets of zero geography. She floated on the calm of swamp brine like the halcyon bird that sung the myths of wind and waves for the polyglotic nations of the sea. The uncharted floating countries of condemned humanity. Twenty-first-century cast-outs ploughing the wilderness of oceans. But that was long ago she said. When the years passed and the floating worlds of refugees had grown white-haired, become weak and old of heart from waiting for any welcoming country on earth that was either big or small enough to let them in, all but one of those tens of thousands of obsolete people, the rejected of the world, had died.

  The swamp people said her stories were lies. The sovereign facts lying on their table said that there was nothing worth hearing about from anywhere else on earth that was like her stories. Their sun hissed down and crackled on tin roofs. They did not need more heroes. Their own healer of country was already sitting up on top of the sand mountain trying to figure out what to do with it. And they knew what it meant to be sweltering in the heat, and dirt poor. Politely, they asked the wambu wanymari sick white lady to speak elsewhere about the snow, frost and chill. They had never seen any of that. Go tell China! Africa! Bundaberg! Istanbul! Don’t come here with stories sounding like some kind of doomsaying prophet. We need our own practical measures to safeguard our culture. It is after all factual that terribly, terribly dry stories that flip, flop seven times in one hour straight are dangerous to the health of the mind. No worries. What if times were blind and tight? We were dead in the water in a dirty world, she claimed while wiggling her fingers at the locals. Forget the raving. Forget the ranting. We will not give away our rich provenance to the rest of the world, just to be like madamba – joined together like friends, no way, the local broadcasters replied in song sung blue, and weeping like a willow.

  Lesson over and another begins. Oblivia! You must always remember eyes and ears are everywhere. The old woman still spoke from a mind that lived elsewhere, with her speech that ran off to thoughts of hearing twinkling bells like the sound of a swan flying away. Oblivia listened to Bella Donna from a corner of the kitchen in the hull where she usually sat on the floor, without saying a word, imagining no one could see her. The old lady was retelling for the millionth time, the story of spending years in a row-boat far out in the sea with only a ghost swan sitting beside her for company, while passing old houses and dead trees stuck out from the water. I called out to see if anyone was there, she said, but only seagulls answered – laughing. Yes! Fancy that! Laughing at me. And kicking rats around the water for fun.

  Every now and then, every day in fact, the Harbour Master would come down from the sand mountain and row across the swamp, passing the rotting hulls, all the swans now living on the swamp that he called the wildlife, and anything else – decaying plastic, unwanted clothes, rotting vegetable matter or slime that bobbed, wanami diesel slick – on his way to visit the old woman who was looking after the girl he called The Human Rat. The stupid thing that got under his skin, who he was convinced was too lazy to speak, and was always sitting on the floor like a dog in the corner where she thought nobody could see her. Why did a thing like this land on her feet? Big question. This very thing made him wild enough to want to kill her because he thought she should be sitting up on a chair properly, if she was lucky enough to have one. He knew plenty of people who wished they had a chair to sit on. Why he even thought of himself, and he did not own a chair. If the white lady sat on a chair then the girl ought to be made to sit on a chair too, instead of acting like a white woman’s black dog by sitting around on the floor, and the old woman beaming, Oh! That’s Oblivia for you. These visits usually caused his mind to spew a bag of dead peace doves as soon as his eyes caught sight of Oblivia, and the more he saw her, and dwelled on all of her not-talking pretentiousness, and watched the old white lady struggling to teach the thing to talk, he was convinced that he had the girl pegged. Git up off the floor and show some backbone like the rest of our people, he snapped quick smart out of the corner of his mouth whenever he had the opportunity, behind Bella Donna’s back, and added for good measure, you make me sick. Usually Oblivia ignored him, or else she shot him one of her several nasty expressions – eyes down, eyes blaring, screwed up or blanked face looking blacker than black, or more generally she spat on the floor between them, and with a bit of spit dividing their mutual disgust of one another, quite frankly, that’s where the matter rested.

  But Oblivia watched the Harbour Master who she thought ought to be doing something more about the sand mountain – unblocking the swamp for instance – he was taking long enough, and he should be more involved in fixing and healing like a real healer, instead of swooning about like some stupid cringing dog after Bella Donna. He splattered his soul that was fat with complaints all over the kitchen table for the old woman to see what the world had come to, of how difficult it was to heal anything these days in a place controlled by the Army like the swamp was. He was not superman was he? How could he take the love of Aboriginal children the Army men had stolen from parents and return it to them? And moreso, he thought that instead of Bella Donna wasting her time on the useless girl, she should be consoling him and giving him some excellent full-bodied strength platitudes about how everything would work itself out for the best in the end.

  The Harbour Master could not help himself, even though he sincerely believed Bella Donna was really a spy working for the Army and telling them lies about the swamp people. Why did he believe this? He told himself it was because he believed that he could spot a spy from a mile off, and he had. He could spot spies anywhere, and they were everywhere, even ones as small as an ant racing about and minding other people’s business, or somebody obviously white and conspicuous like Bella Donna, although she just about knocked his socks off.

  Like! Like! Oblivia overheard his whispering, and her guts had groaned and moaned while her stomach muscles tried to shove a jumble of dog vomit words up her windpipe, although always in the nick of time, any of those screaming words that m
ade it up to her mouth, crashed like rocks landing on enamel at the back of her clenched teeth. So, by remaining silent, saying nothing and stewing with hate and spitefulness in her guts, she reminded herself with a shiver down her spine that she would rather be dead, than waste her breath speaking to an idiot.

  The Harbour Master was oblivious to that tongueless thing Oblivia’s attempts to communicate through a piece of spit and continued on with what he had come for – his total intoxication with the blissful Bella Donna who he claimed was on par with a saint, even if she was a spy and a traitor of the Aboriginal people. She was too much in his heart, so he kept telling himself, Don’t chase her away. Balyanga Jakajba. She’s staying here. Jungku nyulu nayi. She became his soul mate. She made his heart beat faster. Why ignore somebody who could wind his motor up? He was intrigued with Bella Donna’s mission to kill off any strength and sign of leadership in the Aboriginal world by running straight to the Army with tales of Black insurgents, Black uprisings, Black takeovers etcetera around the swamp to keep his people in control, under the thumb and weak, but at the same time, needing with every ounce of her being to nurture a sickly, damaged and most obvious to everyone else, crazy, warraku Aboriginal child who would never be cured no matter how much the old white lady tried to change the girl’s attitude by showering her with compassion, do-gooding, saviouring and so forth. A complete useless waste of time. But, he thought, what was the use of him being a fanbelt spinning around, that was always intervening and arguing with Bella Donna about her spying for the Army against any sign of Aboriginal strength, while mothering Aboriginal weakness, if that was the whole idea of racism. No! the Harbour Master reasoned. Who on earth was he to think that he could intervene in a white lady’s prerogative to think the thoughts of racial fanaticism? A plain man like himself only had simple thoughts on offer. He was not the anti-racist God almighty, and he almost drooled down both sides of his mouth while listening to each of her nicely spoken well-rounded vowels as she gave a total list of her acts of compassion as though it was her penance for having sinned, for having survived the horrendous boat journey of her life. Whatever she spoke of, he believed that he could easily have listened to her talking all day long, if he did not have to be constantly busy minding the sand.