The Swan Book Read online

  The Harbour Master was missing his monkey friend who lived in an overseas country and who he claimed was a genius of world politics. He was always sorry about leaving the monkey eating grapevines, or where wolves hide out in forests of chestnut, or conifers, or larch trees that he claimed were like Bella Donna’s rowan trees, a thousand years old. He missed not being on the scenery of world politics and speaking the monkey’s language, and often complained, I should be looking after all of my responsibilities instead of being caught up here having to guard the sand.

  But the joy of his pre-dawn gloriosus rowing, was to glide among the dumped military ships and vessels that had once been used by commandos, militants, militia, pirates, people sellers, cults, refugees and what have you: everything dumped there by the Army and a very good place for a spy to hide.

  This particular huge dark hull where he climbed up the rusty steel steps to come on board was the home of the old woman and the girl. He was their only visitor because he and the old woman had comparable memories of times when the countries in the world were different and, once he got Oblivia stirred up enough to spit on the floor, he got on with the job of reminiscing with Bella Donna about the world’s geographies and analysing the old maps they carried around in their heads. Some countries they remembered had even disappeared. They enjoyed a lamenting conversation of, Oh! How I wonder what happened to that country! No. Did that little country disappear? Nobody lives there anymore. It just does not exist. You really mean that old place no longer exists, it can’t be true but I guess it must have disappeared by sea rising, or wars. Had to happen. Talk like that. Lead-poison brains kind of talk. Conversations that meant nothing to overwhelmed swamp people who had always been told to forget the past by anyone thinking that they were born conquerors. They already knew what it was like to lose Country. Still, it did not pay to fret about the world when you were imprisoned. They were already the overcrowded kind of people living in the world’s most unknown detention camp right in Australia that still liked to call itself a first world country. The traditional owners of the land locked up forever. Key thrown away. They were sick to death of those two going on about what it was like having – Been there! And, Been there too. And, You should have been there before the whole place turned to nothing.

  I wonder why you never see a white swan landing on the swamp? The old woman was always asking the famous Harbour Master this question, ignoring many large flocks of black swans that now already lived on the swamp, and he in turn was always singing and talking about the Rolling Stones songs that his genius of a pet monkey once sang. Yes, for sure, he missed the monkey he called Rigoletto. Sorry he had abandoned it after the monkey kept making a nuisance of itself by predicting colossal wars that started to frighten the life out of everyone. Sorry he thought the monkey was mad. How does this swan look in your dreams? He seemed to have been waiting for the swan to arrive too. No! She had never seen it in her dreams. These two had travelled to so many places in the world, surely, one of them had seen it somewhere, from viewing the land in a boat of banishment. They looked for her lost white swan down in the chasms of gullies and valleys wrinkling the world, tramped through mill ponds, listened to the Mute Swans ringing the food bell in a Somerset moat, gone along the flaggy shore of County Clare and searched among the Liffey Swans dipping for weed. It was like a giant séance for gathering the thoughts of at least half a million swans from Europe to Central Asia.

  Bella Donna talked of having walked the stoney shores among the Iceland Whooper Swans of Lake Myvatn to Reykjavik, of having skated along-side swans taking off on a frozen lake surrounded by icicle trees in Sweden, of having lived among migrating swans rushing to fly from snow on the mountains in Russia. She spoke to the oo-hakucho wintering in Japan’s Akkesi-Ko, descendents of the great Kugui flocks that came from the olden times of the Nihonshoki in the eighth century and now sleeping on ice in the mist of Lake Kussharo. She had slid across the ice on Estonia’s Matsalu Bay among sleeping Bewick Swans, still like statues, escaping wolves on their long migration. In her imagination, she had flown among the thousands of black-beaked Whistling Swans lifting into the Alaskan skies and in flight to the Samish Flats of the State of Washington, and far off, she had heard the bugling of the royal swans owned for centuries by monarchs, gliding along the Thames. Did she look around China for her swan? She had sat silently in a small boat under a Chinese moon where the Shao Hao people’s winter angels live among kelp swishing in the sea of Yandun Jiao Bay. Long were the distances travelled, and all lonely! And all of them slow from too much hope in the heart, expectation, and the yearning to return.

  The two old people’s stories fly on through storming specks of ice, where the air had frozen into crystals that danced around the swan as it struggled to fly over the peaks of Himalayan mountains. They searched every abandoned, broken-down and flattened nest in the Eastern Kingdom on the Mongolian Nurs, and then hiked, wet and wretched across grassy plains, while a migratory procession of white Whooper Swans flew over Hulun Nur, to Cheng Shanwei’s Swan Lake. On lonely roads the old woman ransacked the nesting material of sweet swans running away from her over the ice on Dalinor Lake.

  The old man and woman daydreamed themselves into every swan image on earth, and off they went again. There they go – la, la, la, the wild girl Oblivia whinged under her breath, excluded from entering their world of knowledge. So fair enough to travel in talk, about what it was like being among a pandemonium of snakes while wading barefoot and broke into old desert ponds covered with tumbleweed, to find a black-beak Whistling Swan with its head curled under its wing asleep, frozen to death. In the end it was always the same. No swan. Not the one she was expecting. Flat broke from renting hire cars, driving them until they become rust buckets. Finally! Their journey ended at the river where a poet carried a black-necked swan in his arms that was too weak to breathe. Yes, ode indeed, lost swan. Then the old woman and the Harbour Master each crawled back into their own separate, quiet dry caves dug somewhere deep in their minds. A silent place where each had their own swan blessed with flowers and fruit carved into granite grey brains.

  He has the best intuition, the old woman said. Bella Donna was often full of her own gloating and fandangoing about geography and reminded the girl that she and the Harbour Master were very much alike. They were peas in the same pod. Exactly similar! Both had fled countries. Identical. He had always known the time to go too, uncanny, just like swans. Which goes to show that Aboriginal people who put their minds to it, can track anywhere. She could not praise him enough. She even continued rejoicing about the Harbour Master in her sleep, high praising the likes of him for his natural intuition about migratory routes, immigrating cycles and so on. It was for these reasons she had found a friend to talk to out here in a swamp that was in the middle of nowhere. This is why he is very famous. He’s the full packet, you betcha. And all that…

  Well! Nothing much comes marching in on thin air, even though the old woman was relentless in her belief that somewhere over the vast oceans lying between her and the old world, the grandest white bird of all laboured in flight to reach her. But what did its continued absence mean? She could not understand it. Or why she was being denied her only wish. The only legacy she had left. Had she lost the ability to call her dead country’s swan? Bella Donna offered the only possible explanation: Because it was dead too. The Harbour Master had to agree: Died on its way. Fallen from the sky.

  Like a proper English-speaking child, the voiceless Oblivia learnt to sit straight-backed at the dinner table and chew fish, while contemplating the adult world talking themselves silly with their stories. In her mind she mused, Brain rust rent-a-car mouths. Car dead. Brain dead. Aren’t there enough black swans here, all nesting in rusted car bodies dumped amongst the reeds? And together they go: Toot! Toot!

  It took her no trouble to imagine the bird falling from the sky. She could see its body floating in any stretch of ocean that lay beyond the horizon – even though she had never seen the sea her
self. She skipped a heartbeat. Any thought of distance did that. Her heart almost stopped beating every time she had to listen to their talk about travelling overseas to see swans. She was more comfortable with closer geography, with what lay in front of the horizon, as far as the top of the sand mountain, and into the ocean of the Harbour Master’s stomach. She smiled at the gargoyle with a small white down feather sticking out from the corner of his mouth.

  Bella Donna’s world of exhausted journeying continued to shrink until it became so small, there was only space left for her one lost white swan. It loomed ever larger in her mind, until finally, her mind contained nothing else but the swan. She would not believe it was dead. How could anything so special, that was celebrated by hemispheric legends on both sides of the equator, be dead? She gifted the swan with eternal life. She quoted Hans Christian Andersen. Hadn’t he written about a swan sitting on a nest of fledglings that perpetually flew off to populate the world with poetry inspired by their own beauty? Now her swan was the Denmark swan, and she wanted to know why it had not come to the swamp to create poetry. Well! Why not? How could a resurrecting swan, with the strongest pair of wings for flying half way around the world, be lost? Perhaps it was always shot dead on arrival? Fallen in sediment. Its poetry condemned. Evading its final splash down in front of her eyes.

  Oblivia thought about the invisible swan whose stories occupied every centimetre of their hull. Was it real? Sure! Acts of descendency were important ideas in the swamp; and even, whether it was right to think about stories of birds like a white swan in the swamp.

  One day Bella Donna’s old storytelling voice told the girl: A black swan flies slowly across the country, holding a small slither of bone in its beak. But then she hesitated, perhaps realising she was deviating from the white swan she had been longing for. Her voice stalled, tapered off into whispers that even the girl, now the perfect mimic of the old woman, could not understand. It was as though the old woman had become so old, she was unable to continue either to dither or to go thither in a fantastical story that began not at the beginning, nor at the end, but centrally, in ether. What was it? Ah? Was she unable to comprehend progress? Did she now doubt the white swan’s ability to navigate its journey? Or perhaps, she just told stories the way swans fly.

  Obediently, Oblivia listened. She had become more interested than ever in the old woman’s stories, even though she thought old Aunty was just facing another storm, and this made it difficult for her to speak. Where was it this time? She wondered if it had always been like this for old wanymarri white woman Aunty. All beginnings, wherever begun, lost? Perhaps even, that the old woman was neither life, dreams, or stories. Just air. The girl looked away and whispered into the steel wall of the hull: She was nothing. It might have been so! Fat plague of loss. The girl accused the old woman of being a victim by telling the wall, You dream like a refugee – of never being able to return. Being lost all the time. That’s all you think about. Think about that. The girl had turned examiner of other people’s consciences. But what would you expect? She knew old Bella Donna like her own thumb, knew exactly what it was like to be unable to realise one single idea without falling over a multitude of anxieties. In numerous conversations with the wall, she explained the crux of the matter – The old woman was a victim of her own mathematics. She had become lost in senseless tangles. An eternity of trying to calculate the exact weight of a swan travelling from so far away through such a long period of time. How long would it take to reach its destination? There are endless, infinite possibilities, you know. When she thought more kindly, the girl softened her image of the old woman flying around in etherland. Might be as good a place as any to be with her swan.

  You could see that the old woman had become a little bit day-dreamy, but she often tried to impress on the girl one single thing of importance: A love story can be about swans, but the swan looks more like death with a bone in its beak. It could be a human bone, or a bone from another swan. Its mate, maybe.

  The old lady’s fearful whisperings like this at night lulled the swamp people in their cradles, cocooning them like machinery rattling away, like swarming bees, and sea gulls squalling for hours on end in the distance, or else remembering hawks piercing the hot air with their cries all day long. But it was different for birds. The seagulls and hawks flew around the swamp, absorbed in their own business of surviving in a peaceful and orderly manner. The birds disregarded the monologue of northern hemisphere outsidedness humming like the engine of a boat, trying to move their relevance to their native country further away in the fog.

  When the girl whispered, the old woman interpreted – guessed what she wanted to know – and spoke for her, why can’t I see that swan with the bone if you can see it? Something dropped into the water. Plop! Was this a fact that had slipped from her hypothetical love stories? The girl thought that she could hear ghost music. A string of musical notes gob-smacked in bubbles broke through the surface of the swamp. Even the old woman noticed the music, but she continued on her merry way with her story, regardless: I have become an expert on music made from old bones, and I say it could be from swan bones, or bones of drowned people, or of drought-stricken cattle, imitating the scores of Mozart’s fingers racing across the ivory.

  The greatest love story this country has ever known began somewhere around here, the old lady said while sniffling back at the bubbling water, speaking only to herself, or to somewhere way past the girl, that could have been the Harbour Master listening from the top of his hill.

  A large flock of black swans whispering to each other in their rusted car-body bedrooms all over the swamp whistle, glide and bump over the waves driven along by the sudden arrival of gusty winds, while the old woman sings more: I got to roll you over, roll over, rolling bones.

  Far into the night, the swamp music continued telling the old woman’s love story through the girl’s dreams where, in the underwater shadows, she looked like a cygnet transformed into two people entwining and unwinding back and forth in the bubbling swamp, in waves scattered by a relic dropped from the beak of the black swan imagined by the old woman.

  Black swans kept arriving from nowhere, more and more of them, from the first one that had arrived unexpectedly and spoiled the swamp people’s dinner.

  After black swans came to the swamp something else happened… A soft yellow beam of light fell over the polluted swamp at night. It was the torchlight of armed men flying in the skies like Marvin Gaye’s ghost looking about the place, to see what was going on. Yes! Well! You tell me what was going on? The Army men sent by the Government in Canberra to save babies from their parents said that they were guarding the sleep of little children now.

  The swamp bristled.

  This was the history of the swamp ever since the wave of conservative thinking began spreading like wildfire across the twenty-first century, when among the mix of political theories and arguments about how to preserve and care for the world’s environment and people, the Army was being used in this country to intervene and control the will, mind and soul of the Aboriginal people. The military intervention was seen as such an overwhelming success in controlling the Aboriginal world it blinded awareness of the practical failures to make anyone’s life better in the swamp. This ‘closed ear’ dictatorial practice was extended over the decades to suit all shades of grey-coloured politics far-away in Canberra, and by tweaking it ever so little this way and that, the intervention of the Army never ended for the swamp people, and for other Aboriginal people like themselves who were sent to detention camps like the swamp to live in until the end of their lives. The internment excluded the swamp people from the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the control proliferated until there was full traction over what these people believed and permeance over their ability to win back their souls and even to define what it meant to be human, without somebody else making that decision for them.

  Now the swamp people’s voices were talking in the girl’s dreams, telling her: You
r tree did not exist. Screamed: TELL HER. No strong tree like that ever existed here. The girl panicked, would wake up in fright from not remembering anymore about how she came to be asleep in the tree. She started to believe what other people believed: She was telling lies.

  The light quickly travels across water, twice over buildings, through the football oval, and along streets, then swirling around, the Army men on the boundaries go through the exit gates, before turning around, locking the gates, and the lights march off again.

  The girl watched the other children. They play a game of pretending they are from another life – from the space age, living on Mars or some other planet, and run to be saved by the passing light.

  When the old woman was not watching, Oblivia studied the running rays of light reflected on the surface of the swamp, unsettling a black swan that lifted, tail splashing, into garnishes of serendipity. There were bones rattling like loose change when the torchlight hit flocks of white cockatoos, causing them to screech from the rooftops where they sat roosting – Sweet Lord. A light ran again across the water saying, say again: What’s going on?