The Swan Book Page 7

  Swamp people regarded this particular sight as something evil, created by devils, easy, easy now, and in this respect the swans coming to the swamp with no story for themselves generated a lot of talk. They were suspected of being contaminated with radioactivity leaking from some of the hulls. Of course it was mentioned, considered, even nurtured by the swamp-dwellers’ constituency, now permanently submerged and half-drowning in open wounds, by asking forlornly any question that would not be answered such as, Was this the silent killer then, the Army’s final weapon of mass destruction?

  No more! It was easier for the swamp people to shift unanswered questions to somebody else – Here! Chuck it over to him, passing the buck, and end up blaming the old Harbour Master for the pollution. They complained of not seeing him remove one speck of sand, and that the situation had gotten worse, and whinged, He was supposed to be a healer for the country. That’s what he came here for when he could have just arrived in a dream and blasted the mountain like that, like an email, and finished the job off like we asked him to do. Just get rid of the sand mountain, that’s all we wanted, and he could have done that from anywhere, instead of ending up coming here personally. We can’t look after him forever. Well! Pronto. We are waiting…and he should finish the job off straight away, not taking years to do something.

  The sand mountain that the Harbour Master lived on seemed to be growing even further towards the sky, while its shadow now rested over the swamp for a good part of the day. Anyone would have thought that the Harbour Master was actually shovelling the sand up to the sky himself. The shadow spread uncertainty as to where it would all end, as much as being a feast to be devoured by the swamp’s full-time philosophers, soothsayers and fortune-tellers emerging at the crack of dawn from their homes of cardboard and similar stuff – like worms crawling out of a hole, to look way up the mountain where they could see for themselves how it had grown a couple of centimetres higher during the night.

  All the great holy and wise people of the swamp would come and stand around on the shoreline looking across the water towards the hull, and while deep in whispered conversation with each other, you could tell by their sour facial expressions that they were not happy at all about what was happening to their land. The girl thought that they were accusing the old woman of upsetting the Harbour Master and jumping in with the status quo. It was during this time that Oblivia began to understand that nobody noticed her on the hull. It was obvious that the locals acted as though she never existed, was too unimaginable, unable to be recognised and named.

  Traitors! Bella Donna’s voice rang like a big tower bell over the water to any assembly on the foreshore looking her way whom she accused of not being patriots to the Australian flag. She had good communication skills for throngs. The whole riled swamp now ate each other’s venom for breakfast. They yelled at her: Yea! That’s your story. Patriotism! Ha! We’ll show you what bloody patriotism means. A blaze of colour of Aboriginal flags unfurled in the wind, some intact, some tattered, or just bits of faded material, even paper coloured black, yellow or red, were hoisted up on sticks of makeshift flagpoles in her face.

  Boat person! Loser! Terrorist!

  As the worldwide know-all of everything, the old woman claimed that most of the rotting boats dotting the lake had belonged to an army of textbook terrorists who invaded other countries. She had once chopped carrots for terrorists and claimed: I am recognised in all the seas of the world. She waved her stick at the sea-wrecks bobbing up and down or stuck in mud, noting with sage-like authority which of the old boats had carried people she knew, which had run from wars in far away countries and which had fled over dangerous seas trying to reach this unwelcoming land. She knew millions of people, shouting it around, I knew all those people who didn’t even make it. Those left behind to suffer the hand of fate. Those millions of refugees out there somewhere who were still dreaming of coming to your paradise, she yelled.

  Water levels went up and down, and during the winter months many wrecks were left squatting in the mud.

  What became of their owners? The girl mouthed this question as many times as Bella Donna spoke the words for her, hoping to coach Oblivia to ask more about her sea journeys.

  The earth buries the dead. Lovers to Lovers. Dust to Dust. Their families hate all of us, Bella Donna said, giving the same answer every time.

  Far off behind the dwellings on the other side of the swamp, on the top of the sand dune mountain that blocked the channel between the swamp and the sea, now that the Army had taken over the Harbour Mastering responsibilities, the old Harbour Master had become even more reclusive. His mind felt strange. Useless. He felt unable to control what was happening any more. He hardly ever scrambled down the sand ghost, or longed for the pleasure of brushing past the swans guarding the hulls in the middle of the night, and those old sailor spirits crying down in the mud, while rowing the stagnant waters to visit Bella Donna of the Champions.

  His worries grew proportionally with the sand mountain steadily reaching towards its zenith, knowing undeniably it would eventually be vanquished by its own weight. He fretted about this final collapse. What would he do? This was the reason that he could hardly risk leaving the mountain, yet he had to see the old woman to tell her of his dreams.

  He frequently dreamt that he would leave the swamp by clinging to a ghost flying like a huge Zeppelin of sand through the atmosphere, as the drought moved somewhere else. Culture was such a formidable thing to him now. He did not know how to hold on to such a thing anymore. This idea of the sand taking him away from his country was his constant concern – the thing he had to tell her – to be calmed. Only she knew how to look at him straight in the eye and tell him he was wrong, and when she smiled, it was as though she had looked through music – a pleasing melody, that had come out of his mouth.

  Whatever she heard reflected through the filter of foreign musical manuscripts nestled in her brain of tonally lifeless melodies, he could have been playing a shakuhachi in Japan, or whistling like an Asian songster, or seducing the world through a bamboo flute. How would she hear him? She was still attached to the libraries and archives left behind in the western part of the world. It was as though she had never left.

  Sorry! Really sorry! About the sand! We will both go together, he warned, turning away, and with a further thousand apologies, forced his rowboat through the league of hungry swans packed around the hull. Until finally, he ran back up the mountain to wait, too anxious of missing the moment when the ghost would decide to collapse and be gone with the wind.

  The girl felt the anticipation of change creeping towards the swamp. She already saw the old man as streamers of sand blowing their own espressivo andante of an exodus-song for homeland.

  Him sand – every grain is sacred. The Harbour Master was desperate to inform others to be prepared to leave on the big journey, calling on the locals, even the alienated and stigmatised truck people from the cities, and whoever went up to the top of the mountain to ask him why he lived his lonely life, separate and unsociable and isolated in this outstation from the swamp’s growth town.

  Well! It was truly something strange to do, the old woman even thought that, although she was also living apart from the rest of the community. But unlike the Harbour Master who everyone seemed to care about, nobody came over to the hull and asked her what her responsibility was.

  You should leave and the sand might follow you instead, she had suggested, and he laughed.

  She told him that people were wishing on a falling star for bulldozers to come and destroy the sand mountain.

  They say it was foreign people thinking in a pristine environment that was making this trouble etcetera! The sand got no mind himself. Nothing to do with it.

  The Harbour Master was insulted to be called a foreign person who did not know his own culture. He stomped around on the mountain. Sand rolled through the air, teasing the whole swamp before flying off somewhere. He could not get the insult out of his head.

  Old Aun
ty ignored it all. At times like this, she just played Hoffmeister type of music on her swan-bone flute to the swans.

  Pythons and lizards, the fattest catfish from the swamp, bats and marsupials, were thrown like flower petals up the sand mountain as offerings. All of it landed with a thud. Taipan snakes shimmering about, danced amongst dead catfish with bodies coiled and heads raised off the ground.

  Don’t expect me to drive it away, the defunct Harbour Master called down to the gathered people below who thought he, an old man, just an old malbu, could have so much power in his body that he could snarl like some unidentifiable animal throwing poisonous snakes around in the sand and move a mountain away with his bare hands. But! He said his sand was welcome to stay regardless of all the inconveniences. It will go away when it wants. Well! Anyone could be a genius about drought saying something like that.

  Bella Donna was sulking because the Harbour Master had become too tied up in matters that did not concern her and preoccupied with arguing with the community now doubting his powers as a healing man for their country. These days she even tended to ignore Oblivia, and the girl felt neglected, a bit miffed, and renewed her vow never to speak again. Who was she kidding? The truth of the matter was that Oblivia had long forgotten how to speak, and did not know she could speak, and had no confidence to speak. She was glad that the Harbour Master had stopped coming to the hull. She was happy to hear him arguing with everyone thinking he was a fake, because he probably was as far as she was concerned. The reason she thought so was because she knew the Harbour Master only had a big mouth and that was not going to move the sand mountain. No. The Harbour Master was not even a big-shot character from one of the old woman’s many treasured books. And certainly, Bella Donna had not incorporated him in the long self-edifying narratives about her journey to this, the concluding triumphant chapter of her life.

  It particularly annoyed Oblivia that Bella Donna remained fascinated by her ugly-face ghost-man the Harbour Master and that the old woman had stopped telling her stories. In particular, one obscure and favourite story about a little juka who was called God’s Gift. The old woman claimed she had seen the boy many times. She was always looking out for him and wondering when she would see him again. His home was the world itself because he was a special gift from God. She had heard about this boy people had been waiting for to care for their deer on the other side of the planet. His aura was seen standing among rays of sunlight shining through a dark misty forest next to snow-capped mountains where God lived. Or, she told of people having seen a vision of the boy living in the swamps throughout the world where swans lived, and also where God lived. She told stories of how the boy was thought to live in the houses of ancient cities where fig trees grew out of cracks in the walls and from the rooftops and, only rarely, could you get past the troupe of monkeys who were guarding him, to see him more closely. It seemed as though she had seen this boy all over the world, or wherever you found God.

  The old woman often saw him visiting family along the swamp. He was always visiting she claimed. Oh! You should meet him one day. He is a proper good boy. A boy the whole world would love. The girl scanned all the shack houses around the shore of the swamp hoping to locate the ones where monkeys lived and where fig trees grew from the rooftops, among the din of ghetto blasters and loud television.

  The old woman claimed that she had just seen him running around the swamp with his pet monkeys and even with a fox in his arms. God was here. Did you see him too? She thought anyone would have noticed somebody like that – a gift from God. Bella Donna would sigh and resign herself to failure, knowing that telling stories to the child was pure waste. The little girl had no imagination: Never sees a thing.

  Look out! Taipan snakes dancing all over the ground.

  It was impossible for Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions to conduct herself like normal people, like those who did not call out for all manner of things to be brought to them – calling to the skies to bring her swans. In that la la voice of hers, she snorted about the swamp’s negativity, Why be like other people calling all these trillions and zillions of flies to come here, dragonflies, sandflies, march flies, blowflies to swim in their tea cup?

  Believe it or not, everyone thought that the old white lady was one of those people who had invented climate change and that she really had brought the swans to the North to live on the swamp. The old black swans had heard her voice running along streams of dust floating in the breezes, that dropped in and out of the skies, and back and forth along telegraph wires, and through kilometres of pipelines, and on bitumen roads of state highways, until reaching the droughts in the South, where great colonies of swans normally lived. A flock of swans deranged by drought, then another, and another, laboured the distance, flew the same path to the swamp when it stopped raining, no janja for what seemed for ever, when the wetlands dried up. No one cared for the swans coming to the swamp’s detention camp. Nobody knew what it meant. The very presence of those swans living with Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions on a swamp that belonged to a few brolgas, linked them very firmly with what they called, some other kind of madness.

  In yellow froth and feather waters covered by films of dust, the swans led mottled brown and grey cygnets to the old lady whenever she appeared on her raft. They whistled soft music while gliding alongside their swan caller’s floating platform. Her raft, constructed of Melaleuca paperbark trunks, was tied together with randomly found wire and rope, and that it floated at all was thanks to a little bit of starlight for luck. She looked awkward – juggernauting long poles that moved the platform. It was like looking at a brightly dressed, long-legged water bird walking through the muddy water. All along the foreshore, the swamp dwellers watched through the permanent haze of insects at what was happening to their lot. The old loved weeping spring was now the stagnant water among sad old lilies and long wriggling serpents.

  Those black swans would glide from all corners of the swamp to the old woman. They moved through the water with their long straight necks held high and their fine black-feathered heads slightly cocked to one side to listen to her stories about the world she had known. Drops of water would fall from their red beaks, with the signature white bar above the nostril, while they listened to her. Continuously quavering, their beaks dipped slightly into the surface of the water, testing the level, sensing the evaporating moisture running away into the atmosphere. Suddenly, a swan would orate the reply by arching its neck towards the sky and trumpeting a long, mournful call. Soon all that could be heard for kilometres around were swan bugles heralded skywards in prayers for rain.

  In those days of graceful gliding swans, swirling around in loops in settled softness, there was often a serene calmness that ran throughout the swamp. The swans stayed all seasons, even until the swamp almost dried up when the old loved spring did not flow. Sometimes, the whole mass would suddenly disappear in the middle of the night and the swamp would seem empty and silent – as though they had never been there – then unexpectedly, they returned, homing to the old woman. Perhaps it was her stories. Or, she really could call swans.

  Among the miracles of over-crowding, conjuring more, praying for more – more swans arrived instead of rain on the swamp. Though they were previously unknown in this environment, the swamp people thought that the swans had returned to a home of ancient times, by following stories for country that had been always known to them. Swans had Law too. But now, the trouble was, nobody in the North remembered the stories in the oldest Law scriptures of these big wetland birds.

  The southern swans kept descending in never-ending ribbons from the sky, and some said it was because they had noticed their kinsfolk below, detained and locked up. Their migrating journeys to follow their people across the continent had already taken many months. The swans were gathering into flocks of thousands, crowded in the swamp in black clouds that the old woman poled her raft through as she fed them.

  Throngs of people gathered on the shoreline to throw nets, to catch one or tw
o fingerling fish – and watch Bella Donna. It gave them something to talk about. They laughed. It was fun to watch the floating contraption with pole sticks moving abruptly through the choppy waters where the swans swam idly up and down in the turbulence. But seriously, no one had ever hoped or prayed for swans to come into their lives. Why would they? Swan eggs. Cygnets. Good things. But not for eating in this place! These were Law birds with no custodians in their rightful place. No one was that far down on their luck.

  And to see the swans swimming about was considered a bit of luck for softening the look of the polluted mess of the place, staring at persistent drought, or having an accidental bomb fall in your face on a regular basis from the Army, or your spiritual ancestors dug up by miners and turning spiteful on you, or Army surveillances protecting your little children as though they were the parents who loved them. Everything had its impact. And bugger it all, apart from the things that were supposed to happen to close the gap of disadvantage in all of those makeshift dwelling places, a swan lake had emerged in the chaos. So that was one good story for local folk to say: Wasn’t that lucky?

  Yet what was the real lexicon about swans in this swamp? The swamp people, tight-lipped though they were about the presence of swans, really feared any ancient business that was not easily translatable in the local environment. There was total agreement on that. Old wise folk were talking strongly about it too, saying: We do have our own local birds. Can’t you see them everywhere if you bothered to look? All kinds. Of course they had. Currawongs abounded. Noisy miners ran through the place. Thousands of brolgas were standing around, tall and proud, and living happily with the swamp people for aeons thank you very much. The grey-feathered cranes with long stick-legs were the emblematic bird of the local environs. Brolga! Kudalku! Brolga! A bird of a big dreaming; a bird with a bare red-skinned head sitting on top of a long skinny neck joining a large body covered in grey feathers.