The Swan Book

City of Refugees





Late at night gangs of street children heard the swans singing and followed them into the lane. Their world was the deep night while the city was in blackout to conserve energy. The swans were driven by nervousness, but their bond with the girl was greater than fear and held them to the lane. Hundreds of swans circled the building every night, flying in lines, sometimes coming so close their wings clipped the buildings and triggered a chain reaction of downward spiralling. Again and again they returned, and flew through the narrow corridor with even greater compositions of desperation than the previous night.

These aerobatics were how the swans communicated. With all of the nervousness generated at night, the swans kept away from the busy city during the day. Instead, they waited in the polluted waters of the bay, and in ponds in the ruined botanical gardens of the city, and any other abandoned flatlands with a sprinkling of water.

They returned in the quietness of the night and flew continuously through the lane, the closest they could get to the girl staring at them from her window. It was the flight of the obsessed. The continuous trumpeting of great numbers of swans joined harmoniously with their soft whistling to twist a melody that was sombre and grief-stricken, but this music was charming to the street kids. They barged into the lane and were ready to challenge any fear they had of being threatened by the roaming cardboardbox street dwellers that had claimed the lane as their own.

The life of the deepest part of the night in this pitch-black, power-starved city was always left to prowlers like the street kids looking for something to do. They roamed the shadows to feel alive. They were the sleepless of the world with no peace in their souls. They were the children of the homeless poor people of the city. Well! They were boys and girls of all ages and from all racial backgrounds mingling together like friends when they followed the swans through the city to the lane.

You know what they believed? That the lane was blessed. A filthy lane was the place to find Heaven. So! The kids arrived in hordes, groups of seven or eight that soon became hundreds. All the leaders had a bony Staffy, the dog of choice, Staffordshire Bull Terriers, with thick necks adorned with studded collars and led on rusty chains. It was miracles these children were after. And they felt closer to a miracle just from looking up to the sky and seeing the swans as they swarmed through the lane. They started calling the very ordinary lane a sacred site – The holy place.

They developed war games, firing non-stop rap songs in quick succession. Soon, they could not stop themselves from challenging one another to jump from the edges of buildings they had broken into, hanging out of windows on the higher levels to be at the height of swans in flight. They played a sound game by toying with the rhythms from the swans’ beating wings. Their chants dared one another to fight for territory, or to fly off, take off, fall to death, never come back. In this cacophony echoing through the lane, they spent hours learning to replicate the glory of the city’s cathedrals, as they swung between buildings on ropes worsted from rags of old clothes, trying to touch the swans.


The melee of sounds bounced back and forth along the walls, and exploded in the lane below so loudly, it could have woken the dead. The only ones disturbed though were the sleeping bodies inside the platforms of flattened cardboard boxes; the nests constructed by slow hands. This invisible world of the city, a place where decades of dampness, flooding and rain had ridden the lane with slimy algae, was now the street kids’ cathedral.

Those who slept there in rubbish-bag coffins stuffed with newspaper to keep warm, while water leaked continuously from the rooftops, were unable to get a decent night’s sleep. Nor could they die in a sweet dream. So, they just lay there, and cursed the fact that they were still alive.

The river of swans continued on, they flew trancelike through the gaps between the buildings. They circled and spiralled towards the moon, and gathered something in the air that had been locked out by the walls of the city. They were capturing from the skies the small packages of memory of the girl who was thousands of miles from her home. Perhaps this was what they sprinkled in the lane with feathers dropping, sprinkling dust down like magic so that her mind ran straight back to the swamp’s ancient eucalypt, tangled in vines from countless seasons of bush banana.


You know it doesn’t work like that, the Harbour Master often claimed while standing beside the girl in her apartment to watch the spectacle in the lane. Even the Harbour Master’s small monkey, who thought it was Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, and was always dressed magnificently in brocaded silk jackets, confirmed this was not like the real world whenever it was asked to throw in a bit of good advice. What a disappointment. It had no intentions of becoming the fortune-telling monkey of the lane.

The Harbour Master had brought his monkey friend back from overseas, after he had gone on a cruise ship around the world in search of Bella Donna’s homeland. Had no luck, he said, in finding the descendants of her swan leader. He spat in disgust about his adventure. It was only a love boat he said. The ship had no idea where it was heading. It was full of gypsies searching for something to happen in their lives, their world had been like that from the day their ancestors had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. So he got off the stupid boat with the pie in the sky people and hitch-hiked the rest of the way like a real man, hopping along the floating islands of boat people until he found success.

What he found was that there were swans in most continents of the world and finally, he believed he had found the old woman’s swans. There were not many left. The poor things had flown back to paradise, which was an oasis in the desert, just like the Middle East. He had watched these swans for a very long time while they stood around in dried-up marshland where decent people were reciting poetry, and for the hell of it, singing for rain, as though rain would open the gates of the most fantastic gardens of all times. All he learnt was that those swans were completely mad so he left them there. They were too blind to see that gardens were everywhere. The whole Earth was paradise in the eyes of its custodians.

Whereas, look at the monkey, he said. This creature had no illusions about paradise. He carried his paradise inside himself like a little holy man. Flocks of pigeons followed him wherever he walked though the seas of humanity. The Harbour Master said the monkey was his guru. He was better fun than trying to bring a swan across the world that was overweight with its own dooming prophecies.

The monkey and I flew back to Australia on a Qantas flagship – full of choir singers singing old Mamas and Papas songs over and over until you hated the sound, ‘each night you go to bed my baby, whisper a little prayer for me etc, etc, and tell all the stars above this is dedicated to the one I love.’

Once the Harbour Master returned to The People’s Palace and saw the large crowds forming in the lane for the coming night, he said that he would be staying around for a while. This looks interesting, he claimed. The little monkey thought so too even though he was really a serious creature that looked as if he belonged in an office where a lot of money was being made.

It was not long before the world of the lane did not intrigue the monkey. It silently chewed reused PK gum with its big brown teeth, and looked as though it was reflecting on its life so far thinking that all up, it could have been better. Still, nobody could say the monkey had a victim mentality because he was now a drifter, or because the world of the lane had overnight turned its fur grey, and before too long, the grey had turned white like a snow creature from the arctic circle, far snowier even than a Japanese Macaque.

The fact of the matter was that the snow monkey simply did not like Australia. It had turned ancient-looking with all of its yearning to go home, to go back to a city of millions, possibly a billion people, to some quiet little monkey house with a big rock in the front yard from where he could sit all day long and beg pistachio nuts from passing tourists. Gee! the creature said while shredding a lettuce into thousands of little pieces to resemble its own shattered mind, the lane was not like the jungle – not a proper jungle.


But that was not everything. There was much more to be said about what happened in the lane. Oblivia changed her mind about her nerves, and frequently, she left the building at night to rescue the fallen swans. Many fell in the street-kid game. The rescuing manoeuvres became a regular occurrence. Oblivia, the Harbour Master and the monkey would rush to the door as soon as they saw a swan falling.

In an instant they abandoned their fearfulness of the city, as well as the ongoing debates about whether they liked Australia or not, and stampeded into the crowded lane in the middle of the night. They would be off without a second thought, while hassling each other along the way to be the first one to open the door that kept out boogie men like Machine, so that they could be bop a hula down the gauntlet of at least a dozen flights of stairs – instead of taking the slower-than-death lift that still had an electricity supply attached to it, probably because only someone like Warren Finch could afford to pay the excessively expensive electricity charges in the city – then chase one another in circles to find the actual front door through the maze of fountains, cats and statues, while cold shivers rushed down their spines.

She knew Machine never slept and was always watching, but she did not hesitate in her hasty exit through the front door to the lane. Once outside, with the Harbour Master egging her to fight the people sleeping in the lane with her knife, and the monkey’s little fingers raiding everyone’s pockets for food, a Mars Bar or PK gum, she realised how easy it was to grab a swan under her arm and make a hasty retreat back to the building.

Whenever she found herself in the lane, Oblivia realised that she could move inconspicuously like any of the other darkened shapes covering the ground and no one would care less. This was so, even when the conglomerate of bodies huddled together under blankets, paper and cardboard frequently erupted and flew apart in waves of swearing and fights. They would settle again momentarily like a butterfly pausing to rest, when some old peace-keepers switched on the ghetto blasters roaring Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. She pushed and shoved people aside, all psyched to fight anybody that got in her way, but swans falling in the lane right on top of people did not exactly cause a world war. The multitudes sleeping in cardboard and newspaper bedding kept on snoring, having already anticipated a bit of night clubbing.

Before long, Warren Finch’s apartment became a menagerie; a swannery for stunned, injured and recovering birds. Oblivia was a recluse but no Greta Garbo locking herself away and letting bygones be bygones forever. She could not get out of The People’s Palace fast enough to save another swan.


Glass was a big problem. Swans in the swamps have no idea about glass. In each desperate attempt to reach the girl, some would crash head first into her window. Some would fall into the lane after being swiped by the street kids playing their game of hanging out the windows on the upper floors of the catastrophic city’s abandoned apartments that smelt of decades of rose fragrance, impregnated aromas of herbs and spices – cumin, turmeric, cardamom, or of cat urine – and where old people lived in dank smelling rooms.


When absolute silence entered the lane during the early hours of the morning, and the swans began to disappear over the rooftops, the rain-soaked street kids with vacant eyes left too. They would come down from the buildings to wander off to crash on the busiest streets in the city where they slept. These bundles of rags were barely noticeable pushed up against shop windows, and were almost absorbed into the scenery of the most prestigious department stores. There they stayed, and you would never know if they were dead or alive. Their lullaby was the continuous sound of shoes clipping the pavement. The general public watched over them like guardian angels rushing by, while ignoring the dreams pervading the air, that sounded like trumpets from heaven calling for a shepherd to take the children home.


So far, Oblivia had avoided the police. While the sirens of police cars raced towards the lane, the door to The People’s Palace would open immediately, and be slammed shut behind her after she returned with another rescued swan. The girl suspected Machine called the police. His turf war! Just as it was his door to open and close. His building. His dilemma of noticing that swans not only filled her apartment, but makeshift pens on the rooftop too, waiting to be returned to unknown places he had never set eyes on.


Oblivia could not understand how she kept seeing glimpses of herself on the television. The monkey had noticed her first because out of boredom it was flicking around with the control switch to find a nature documentary, preferably about monkey homelands or performing monkeys, and ended up watching an old sepia-coloured Marlene Dietrich movie. Everything was going along fine until the monkey yelled out in a startled squeal, Who is that?

This was when the Harbour Master began watching the movie to see what the monkey had seen, and he saw the same thing too. The girl was changed almost beyond recognition, as though Marlene Dietrich’s spirit had jumped out of the television and into the girl and then appeared in a news flash where she was standing right beside – of all the people on Earth for goodness sake – Warren Finch. This person whoever she was only flashed across the television screen in a split second. But it was enough. Enough to see that the girl was dressed up like Marlene Dietrich in sepia and parading like the actress, and was actually beside Warren Finch. This same news flash was repeated many times through the Marlene Dietrich movie.

The Harbour Master was nursing a sick swan on his lap, and so was the monkey, and wondering why he was looking after these creatures in a squalid apartment. He asked Oblivia, Where did you get clothes like that? This was what the Harbour Master wanted to know, after seeing the pale sepia-coloured satin dress most of all, as she and Warren Finch walked off in the distance, and noticing the matching high-heel shoes. He said she looked unbelievable. At first, he exclaimed, I told myself no way – I really couldn’t recognise it was you.

After this happened, all the Harbour Master wanted to do all day long was sit around waiting for a chance to see Warren Finch on the television, just to criticise him. Any news about the Australian Government was just grand. The Harbour Master believed that because of bloody Warren Finch, he had become a specialist in Australian politics – not that this was difficult to do, he claimed. They were all gutless wonders. He grumbled continuously about not being able to stand the sight of the man, so whenever he saw the new President of the country on television – because this was what Warren Finch had finally and seamlessly become (through an inspired shove of the exceedingly long-serving and unpopular Horse Ryder from Government during the course of one stormy night when so many trumped up and legit charges of conspiracy against the machinery of the party flew like a flippen maelstrom through the corridors of power in the country) – the Harbour Master and the monkey yelled at him for the complete sell-out that he was; a complete reprobate of the first order who had dumped his wife and turned against his own people. Ya moron, they screamed at the television.

The acclaimed monkey genius Rigoletto had become so obsessed with watching the news, he started to make specialised comparisons with how politics worked in the monkey world. He claimed that Warren Finch had stepped out of line with his own society. That he had left his people for dead. They were now joined to the throngs of banished people wandering aimlessly around the world, always searching and always lost, and who created more banished people wherever they went.

You give people no choice, the Harbour Master, sick of sitting in swan shit, shouted at the television. You want them to be like you – a lost man. Like you did to this girl here. What is she now? Hey? Tell me that? Come here now. I want to fight you.

Now Oblivia was left to rescue the fallen swans herself, because the Harbour Master and the monkey could not be bothered. They were too obsessed about having no real voice in the politics of Australia. Neither would leave the television for a minute. They were consumed in a running commentary about Warren Finch.

This massive consumption of electricity just for a television, and glut of injured or recuperating swans also consumed with television viewing, did not stop her from wanting to see herself on the television as well. Then finally – bingo! What a shock on the 7 O’Clock News. She quickly noticed the really small things that were totally opposed to how she thought about herself. Where were the downcast eyes for instance? Why the lack of self-consciousness? Where was the shame? How could she have agreed to allow people to stare at her like that? She had to adapt to the television picture of herself with fingernails painted red or pale pink, speaking through lipstick, looking from eyeliner and orderly designed hair, and how she moved with an air of confidence dressed in Marlene Dietrich clothes.

The Harbour Master said she looked beautiful but Warren Finch was an ugly man. These sightings of the President with his wife became more and more frequent the more that they watched the television together, so they had to surmise that Warren Finch was forcing the girl to go mad from seeing herself being paraded around as the wife he wanted her to learn to be. And equally alluring, they reasoned that these daily sightings of the Indigenous President of the newly created Australian Republic with his promise wife were intended to be very newsworthy to the viewing public that adored the country’s first couple.

Yet there was more to think about. It had taken numerous glimpses of seeing herself masquerading around the place as Marlene Dietrich, for the girl to realise that Warren Finch was stealing parts of her life for his own purposes. Yes, that was how he was covering up his mésalliance of a marriage with her. She did not know how it happened, but somehow, a part of her life was being lived elsewhere with her husband. She came and went into a different life which Warren Finch returned through the television screen.

The Harbour Master and the monkey were deeply committed to their investigative arguments about this theft of her identity by an impostor – or not – and argued with Oblivia who believed it was her all right, and this gave them the excuse to be more or less glued to the television because why kill the dream, when otherwise they would have to be rescuing swans. They complained: Wasn’t the place crowded enough? It was all they could think or speak about, including abusing that ugly man Warren Finch, saying we are sick of you, because they were stuck in an apartment with poultry swans. There were now so many of them nestled in the apartment it was hard to walk around the place without thinking you were in a stinking swannery. So the Harbour Master and Rigoletto, now covered in swan lice, sat tight in front of the television, unwilling to move unless it was absolutely necessary to feed themselves.


Oblivia had swans living on the rooftop where the cold wind whistled continuously, and now many needed to be released. She believed it was her job. It was the only reason why she was staying, and had not become a permanent television wife. Soon it would be the swan’s breeding season and each swan would have to be reunited with the rest of the flock before their instincts to breed became too great, forcing them to panic on the rooftop and in the apartment, while attempting to escape.

Oblivia knew that she must take them to clear land, or to a large stretch of water so that they could have the space to run and take to the skies. She needed help to find this space in the city that sprawled like a maze in her mind, with neither the Harbour Master nor the monkey interested in helping her. They were more interested in Warren Finch than swans, or becoming lost in the city, and said if she wanted help: Ask Warren Finch’s Mr Machine to take you to the genie shop.


Machine was sitting in an armchair on the ground floor with his favourite white cat wrapped around his neck like a scarf; it chewed the man’s hair as though it was feathers. When Machine saw Oblivia standing in front of him with a piece of paper signed by Warren Finch, saying he should help her relocate the swans, he shouted in shock. Well! Well! Well! He was surrounded by misted water spurting several metres high from a colossal fish mouth and falling, but that he was damp did not worry him. He just kept swinging along to the amplified sound coming through the loud speakers of Dean Martin singing Houston, while a pile of damp cats purring and snarling at the white cat tumbled all over him. What’s the matter? You want a tour of dilapidation? Want to see the ruined city or something?

Machine said he would need some time to study the street guide – an old disused book he pointed to on the table beside him that was half a metre thick. He thought it would be very difficult to work out the easiest directions to reach the magic shop she was talking about. Okay. This was a skewed dream of a city, he explained, with tidal surges at any time, and in saying he never liked people much, asked whether she realised that there were millions of them rushing around right outside their door – people doing anything to save themselves in the day to day? Mostly he grumbled about how the city was stuffed and nobody cared what it looked like anymore. Everything is falling down around you. Nothing is getting fixed up. Pigeons are flying everywhere. The sky is full of them. I have seen thousands of the things circling around this building alone. Their shit – falling everywhere. They call this globalised depression. I call it shit. Subsistence life. The trouble of being micro-managed by the government with intervention this, and intervention that, until passivity breeds the life out of you and you may as well be dead. You want to become like that? It was an absolute disgrace. You are better off staying where you are – inside. But still, because Warren Finch’s signature was on the note, he agreed to take her there, but only at night for these reasons: hatred of sunlight, and because he did not like walking around in the city during the day when it was crowded, although even the Harbour Master had told her that in reality, he had only seen dribs and drabs. It was a ghost city. Hardly anyone lived there any more after the thousands of unemployed people had moved away and disappeared into thin air apparently. Machine patted his knee cat and said: Be ready when you hear a knock on the door.

After several hours of waiting that night and being scared out of her wits, there was a scratching sound on the other side of the door. Quando! Quando? The Harbour Master interrupted what he called, another bloody quandary to deal with, and told her straight to F–N straighten up, and that she had better get used to answering the door. The lice-scratching monkey agreed, and claimed the Harbour Master was a natural mastermind at getting things done in a timely fashion.


So! Olé! She answered the door and found an owl sitting there. The little bird busy scratching with its beak was disturbed by the door opening and flew off in fright. It descended slowly down the atrium. Instinctively, the girl knew the owl wanted to be followed, and even more than this, she thought that Machine had become the owl – the one that had been promised to her by the genies. She quickly looked at all of the swans jumbled into the apartment honking over the top of the sound of the television: Take/me! Take/me! She quickly grabbed the swan with the strongest wings flapping in readiness for flight, and left dressed in her darkest clothes with the hood of her jacket pulled down over her head as she entered the lane outside.

Out into the rainy night, and walking quickly through street after street and lanes and darkened alleyways with the swan in Warren Finch’s napsack strapped over her back, with her mind swinging around in her head about why she had not been smart enough to see what was not visible to anyone else, such as the owl-like features in Machine’s face, she followed the owl that could have been him.

The owl kept a hasty pace in its flight. There was no time for faint-hearted indifference about whether she should follow it or not, though she was being taken far away from The People’s Palace. Any idea of how to return had not dawned on her yet, although she was keen to return as quickly as possible in case she had to be transformed into Warren Finch’s television wife again – because she was forced to go everywhere with him. In your dreams, the monkey claimed, Let’s escape. Why not kill Warren if we ever see him again? Then we can all go back to the swamp. How? How played over in her mind a thousand times a day. What a word how was. It could drive anyone mad. The owl flew on oblivious to any quandary she was having about needing to be somewhere else. Even if she had changed her mind and wished she had never left, it was too late. The owl kept her alert to its sudden shifts in direction, and often flew high to cross buildings while she had to run down and around them while lugging the heavy swan, to find a way to keep following. She was convinced that the creature wanted to lose her in the labyrinth.

The air was like ice. Massive clouds soared across the skies of the city. A hard wind blew the owl along until finally it landed on a lamp post in front of a long-abandoned, boarded and nailed-up shop where, on the business sign, painted monkeys and owls danced across faded yellowish words that she was barely able to read, The World of Magicians and Genies. The owl shook itself to end its flight, and then suddenly flew straight through a crack in the deserted building.

This was how the world stood in the darkness, but whenever a rouge neon light flickered brightly, it lit up the street, and she could see behind the boards and inside the shop. But genies were oblivious of time. A rose fragrance that had been sprayed in the shop for decades by those who had worked there, was still in the air of this otherworldly, something not of this time, unbridled to time perhaps, magic shop that brought it back into existence.

The first thing she noticed as light flashed into the building was movement on the floor. It was alive with the city’s lizards and skinks that had gathered in the warmth of the room. Perhaps, she thought, they were participating in a historical conference about old homelands when lizards lived in trees. The desks where the genies had sat looked as though they had been gathering work for hundreds of years, while the books that they had written in had grown into tall mountains. She could see the notes and drawings they had left behind, notes about the measurements they had been taking of grass owls, seashells, seeds, feathers and odd things like that.



There were elderly owls in the room. Not local. These came from other wild places in the world. The old owls sat very still and civilised on perches, so as not to waste their breath on life’s flippancies. Only the younger owls did that – flying soundlessly to and fro across the room – leaving and returning from the city streets. The room’s other large bird life consisted of several old rare and valuable parrots that preserved the entire history of their species inside their heads. Who knows why the genies wanted them saved? What could anyone do with information about what no longer existed?

The girl heard the parrots chatting about the ordeal of travelling across the world aboard bankrupt ships with the genies. These vessels were now rotting down in the harbour. Permanently anchored. Saved up for a rainy day. She thought the parrots looked lucky to be living in perpetuity in this ageless room. They would always remain perched on their ornate bird stands studded with pearls, but deep inside their little ticking hearts, she knew they looked around their diminished world, and pondered where they had ended up.

Sometimes the homesick parrots’ thoughts caught them in a nostalgic moment, and they would suddenly utter words from ancient languages. The girl watched the parrots waste their knowledge; their rare and valuable words disappearing into thin air. Never to be spoken again when the lost languages faded away.


Well! Holy! Holy! The swan flew in the dead of the night. Its faith was in itself. The great black bird had struggled to be free from the girl’s arms and like a racehorse, ran in the direction of the neon sun where three strange men had appeared. They may have only been drunks, or spies sent by Warren Finch to keep an eye on her, but slunk away when noticed, and disappeared in the fog.

The great swan was soon in the air, wings spread in slow flight, just above Oblivia who was running after it down the street. The swan was completely savvy about directions in the city and took shortcuts, for within minutes she was back inside the lane. Where you been? Odd Machine was waiting at the door, angry but relieved that she had come back. He complained about how lonely he was, but she sped past him and ran back up to her apartment. The healed swan joined others outside in flight paths leading to the eel pond in the botanical gardens in the centre of the city where flocks of great numbers were assembled for the night.


Now swans were set free every night. Oblivia had faith in the owl with the Dean Martin Houston song stuck in its head, as it flew continually waving and gliding and twisting its body as it looked around, to suddenly change course over buildings. She followed its flight through the darkness on whatever route it took, keeping the bird in sight, and knew that the owl would always end up in front of the abandoned magic shop.

It did not matter that the owl’s destination was just around the corner from The People’s Palace and that she was pursuing the owl over vast distances for nothing. She told the Harbour Master and the monkey that an ordinary, logical route was not the point. If she had walked there herself in the most direct route possible, she would never have found the old genie’s shop on the long abandoned street where the city’s ghosts came at night, and which was best to release swans returning to flight. It was the desire she followed, of completing an arduous journey that allowed her to see the right perspective of the neon sun shining through cracks in the boarded-up frontage of the shop, and she grew stronger by imagining the genies still working in their workshop on the other side of the boards, and by believing that the spirits in this place – all of the ghosts that had never been taken home – also ran with the swan along the street, and helped it to fly. It was a ghost street. Very exciting: there were thousands of ghosts there. She had seen them herself, she claimed, although the Harbour Master and Rigoletto were not really convinced about her story. They knew a thing or two about ghosts.


Rigoletto sang his anthem, questa o quella. Badly sung opera was enough for the street kids to stop using the lane. They left, while shouting that whoever was singing like a monkey should stop. The gangs found something new to do, and gathered on the street corners waiting, to follow the owl leading the darkly clothed and hooded girl with a swan under her arm, or sometimes slung over her back.

The street kids kept their distance from Oblivia staring at the boarded-up building. They punched each other in the head to stand back to pay a bit of respect for the traditional owner of the land. They wondered whether she was just mad, you know, having gone crazy in the city, and crept in closer to see over her shoulder.


None had the girl’s ability to visualise how the genie’s shop had once been, of seeing the tiny birds buzzing inside an antique Chinese aviary constructed of wire that had once been forged into decorative swirls. She ignored their voices whispering in her ear, What are you looken at, sis?

Inside the aviary flew the smallest hummingbirds in the world – but only if you thought of them flying, flying from cone-like nests in which they slept. The more she stared at the stillness of the nests, the more the hummingbirds would become animated, and would begin darting around the fresh flowers inside the cage. The street children were oblivious to the ghosts of the street crowding around them to watch the hummingbirds, but they felt that there must be something special about the building, and were organising a break-in.

Oblivia knows that her nights on the streets will not last long and she ignores the owl flitting around the light poles to catch insects, and the street children breaking into the building. She has too many other things to think about. For instance, she never knows when she will have to dress up again to appear on television – and what if Warren was already at the apartment waiting to pick her up? Already she feels that she will not be living in the apartment much longer. Feels it in her bones. Even the Harbour Master was packing his things.

Ships’ bells can be heard faraway in the harbour, and the black swan released from her arms stands alone and confused on the empty wet street. Each swan was the same; uncertain about its ability to fly again until the wind off the changing tide pushed it along, and its webbed feet would start running down the road with their heavy load. The wind gusting along this corridor grew in intensity, and soon picked up the running swan and pushed it into flight.


The neglected city had thousands of pigeons flying around the rooftops of buildings, and trees sprouting out of the sides of cathedrals, chestnuts growing from the alcoves; fig tree roots clung to the walls, and almond and apple trees grew from seeds that flourished in the damp cracks. In these trees while pigeons and pet budgerigars slept, down below the troupe of owl, girl and swans travelled with a multitude of ghosts. Their parade implied a pilgrimage, a dedication to their never forgone longing for what was and had been, a prolonged hurting, like the Portuguese word saudades, describing the deep yearning of those left in limbo, and the melancholy dream passing through every quiet street in the city. Then Oblivia would again feel an excitable urge exploding in her stomach, to rush back to the apartment in double-quick time before dawn, for she was always hoping to become the television wife, to see herself as greatly loved, with the jubilant political husband – Head of State world leader – to actually experience what it felt like to be beside someone like this, and which would prove once and for all it really was her in the picture, that she felt this love seen on television, and by establishing her authentically beyond any measure of doubt to the Harbour Master and the stupid monkey.


In those nightly pilgrimages they heard the Monteverdi vespers sung over the droning of ancestor country. The winds whistled through the buildings, and through the skies, she was able to see that many swans were gathering in each ancient breath, and their flight formed landscape through the perpetual rain.

Yes, the swans were multiplying, nesting among flooded trees, reeds and swan weed, and had already overfilled ponds in the abandoned botanical gardens and a small lake in the city’s zoo, then the city’s shallow lakes where they were breeding along the bays, gullies and inlets.

At night, squadrons of swans flew up and down the brown-coloured river that cut through the city, and Oblivia sensed they were in training for something even they had not quite anticipated. She thought that they were trying to tell her something. The thought shifted around in her mind – floated here and there while it grew, and then she was tossing it around something big, throwing it about, slamming it against the wall of her brain, until it became something ugly and angry, too hot to hold, too tough to manipulate and examine, the thing that she was too afraid to recognise – that not only was there was a lack of communication in her ‘so called’ marriage, feelings of betrayal, manipulation, and abandonment were the goal-posts where havoc scored inside her head.

The thought stuffing up her mind made her angry, and she tramped on in the nightly parade, unable to concentrate on the swans flying up and down the river. Well! What was the problem? Obsession. Television wife. She started to ask herself questions: Why was she always in a hurry for someone she only saw on television? Who she only knew through the television? Where each image was a portrait of a happy marriage? Even she believed it. And whenever she saw herself on television, she could only explain herself in sketches of what she appeared to be – the image presented, rather then remembering her actual presence as Warren Finch’s wife, and always, forgetting the details of ever being with this man who was her husband. She could not remember him – had no idea, even what he looked like unless she saw him on the television. But none of these things mattered really. What really mattered was that she could not admit to herself that Warren was using an impostor. Of course, the Harbour Master kept explaining with the impact of discovering nuclear energy, the big high and mighty Warren Finch doesn’t want to be seen with some complete myall like you for a wife. She is the pretend wife. Not you at all. But, Oblivia wouldn’t believe it. Could feel it in her bones that she was the television wife. She promised herself, the Harbour Master and the monkey, she would prove it.

Of course they wanted to know how she was going to do that. But her mind slipped, went slack, played tricks on her and, without the steam to propel the thought, she again concentrated on the swans, following them with poetry running through her brain, The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven: That image can bring wildness, bring a rage to end all things, to end…The swans continued the circuit and she followed while she thought less about the apartment, and more about the need to keep up with flight. They were communicating with her about flight, long flight, not about Warren Finch who was living it up elsewhere – resuming life as usual as the head of state of a dilapidated country in a dilapidated world.

The monkey had changed too. It decided to move out of the apartment because it had become too dirty. He had heard the girl talk about seeing poor, neglected monkeys in the zoo. He became very excited and left quietly in the middle of the night when the Harbour Master was asleep in front of the television. He went to the zoo and unlocked the door to the monkey house. From then on, he was the head honcho of a dancing troupe of monkeys that went to live as fugitives in the cathedral in the city, amongst the almond and fig trees growing from crevices in its sandstone walls. Free at last, the monkeys were popular buskers in the city malls. Always cashed up to pay the street children for protection.

The Harbour Master stayed home sulking about the monkey becoming independent and the apartment being emptied of swans. He sat on the couch. He was in rough seas with the Panasonic television that blared old cricket games in the apartment night and day. Games that had been played years ago, and in-between the news, where he could watch Warren Finch’s face growing older every day. But there was no great satisfaction in watching someone grow older. Well! Not the face that never reached the destination of fulfilment, where Warren’s continuing triumphs – each seemingly more glorious than any before – were always sensed as personal failure.

Yes, the Harbour Master still preferred to glare at the television. It was as though he was trying to steer the whole darn spectacular life of Warren Finch from the couch, propelling him along blasphemously, while hollering over some invisible howling rain, You know, people can talk and talk about how they are going to save the Aboriginal, world, ditto people…it goes on all the time, always wanting to save people who would rather talk about how they want to save themselves. When are you going to start thinking straight about that, Mr Warren Bloody Finch?

Well! Let’s end the bad vibes with the cricket bats and kneepads that were all flying about the room. Why be so unhappy? Any of Warren Finch’s newest major concerns were challenging to the old Harbour Master. He always had to prove how he had seen better, or knew about something that was absolutely more amazing in some off-beaten track of the world to laugh about. Still! You could not avoid the fact that Warren’s life was being lived at a higher percentage elsewhere with the glamorous ‘promise’ wife, the First Lady of whatnot, than being wasted in hanging around, and minding reality in a swan-filthy apartment.