The Swan Book

The Street Serpent





This was not all you will see in the city, this junkyard from where swan flocks ascended into the heavens, and flew the brisk breeze amongst swallows and pigeons up where ghosts shouted down: What a load of rubbish! But the swans overcrowding in the botanical gardens were edgy with hunger. They searched for swampy waters and found nothing. These old luckless things could only return to the abandoned sprawl of overgrown gardens, to roam among the butterflies and insects. A place that served no purpose to city people who grew nothing, but ate their food from packets. They called this sprawling greenery a flippen and friggen untidy mess! And saw no point to having this old-fashioned, overgrown park in a city where there were people starving – better off living off the Government, and safer on the streets, like those living in the lane.

You could watch people like that walking by the old city’s botanical gardens that made them think of a nursery rhyme for children, of still believing the city’s legendary story that this tangled mess of brambles was the home of an overgrown Lepus europaeus called the hare king, but otherwise ignoring the place, applying the same sense of invisibility usually given to anything useless, obscure and made redundant. This landscape was once prized throughout the world as having the richest library of the most precious, rare and extinct flora on Earth.

The people in this city did not regularly use words like once upon a time for being nostalgic and remembering things, but once, when it was hoped that the bad weather would change back to normal climatic patterns, the city had also hoped that the historical richness of the site would never be lost. Whatever was within man’s power to save his environment was done for the rare old trees, flowers and shrubs, but in the end the struggle to save greenery seemed meaningless. The long drought killed kindness in hardened hearts. Then, when the drought was replaced by soddening rains, year in and year out, the canopy grew into an impenetrable wilderness too dangerous to people, and the precinct was just another place locked up forever.



Oblivia ignored the rusty old signs. What were signs to her? These ones were wired all along the fence of wrought iron. She did not bother reading the warning of the dangers of entering, or notice what the penalties were for trespassing in neglected areas such as these old botanical gardens. The signs that might have once stopped homeless people squatting, now robbed the city’s memory of the gardens. Who in the street life of the city would guess why such a wasteland had ever been created? It was as though places of antiquity had lost their usefulness to those who lived for the moment, the here and now, and where the gates were forced shut by boa-constrictor thick renegade vines, wound like a monster’s woven carpet throughout the wrought iron lacework.

The swans circling in the sky above the neglected gardens guarded the green leafiness of their island in the city, while people who had come from other parts watched the phenomenon like it was a thing of wonder. The Chinese people, who had long lived in the city, praised each sighting of swan flight for its momentary beauty, and called the swans hong in their own language. A story floated around the Greek side of the city, of likening the swans circling the island of wilderness to a long ago belief of a mystical island surrounded by white swans where Apollo was born. These were all poor people’s stories. A good feeling was left in the air from seeing swans, they said. The air felt lucky. Even – prosperous. Safe. Warren Finch was in the city. Everyone felt in a blood-tingling way that something big was about to happen.


All of the broken birds had been set free from the apartment in The People’s Palace, and now, in the botanical gardens, Oblivia was watching the assembling swans swarm in numbers so vast they blocked the moonlight. But this freak of nature plagued her. When had her swans bred? Where had time gone? How many seasons of swans’ breeding had passed by and she had not noticed? How long had she lived in the city?

This was the reason why she never went to the genies’ magic shop any more. It was not just that the owl never returned once all of the swans had been released, or even that the owl’s memory had receded from her mind as silently as its flight. It was how she had been kept captive, while time had been stolen from her in those long nocturnal journeys following the owl around the streets with a swan under her arm. Now she knew there had been many seasons of swan-egg cradling and cygnets reared which signalled above all else, that she had spent more time in the city then she had ever expected.


The girl had not even thought about saying goodbye or sayonara to Machine, nor said yunngu, that she was going away for good, nor a simple ciao to the Harbour Master. Leaving was leaving. Nothing more than a curious unemotional response – a flatness of spirit for the flight inward when being removed from places, as it had from being pulled off the hull and before that, from the tree. She left Machine to piss around in his own fairytale. Left him mooning over his cats. The Harbour Master? Left imagining why his monkey had just trucked off for nothing, and to blow his mind away with whatever took his fancy about Mr Fat Cat, Indigenous leader of the country, Warren Finch on television.

She had just kept walking, barely noticing the network of overgrown hedges reaching for the sky inside the wrought iron fence surrounding the botanical garden. When she was far away into the park steaming with early morning mist, she no longer heard the skin and bone dogs barking on the street outside. The street kids and their dogs still followed her from the lane as though she was some kind of reclusive ghost kid, just like an Aboriginal tinkerbell fairy. Would she lead them somewhere? That was the thrill of it all.

But now, outside the botanical gardens, they held back and just hung about on the footpath, too augured in dusty city mythologies of what lay beyond the gates – where they heard thousands of noisy myna birds pealing hotly at one another from orange aloe flowers growing all over the place like weeds, and flying aggressively through the dense undergrowth. Their dogs panted for water beside the legs of their owners, while all the while the ghosts from the park were out there in the street in broad daylight, whispering scary stories close into the ears of the children about this and that, but mostly about the troubles of dark nights in this wilderness, and scaring the dogs stupid too.


Where was the guidance from elders? It was the cruellest fate for children of bad weather times, whose brains had been clogged with mysteries of their own making, more than you could imagine – where would you believe? The skies were haunted with the ghosts of swallows and pigeons flying about. Among the throng of children out there on the footpath, their Mohawk-haired leaders of skin and bone were swearing black and blue at their mad dogs snapping at the air. These animals saw invisibility better than anything real, and everything untrustworthy, while all the while, they went on lurching madly about on their chains.

Well! What would you expect? This was not an ashram out on the street. Theirs was a city that bred the jumpiness of sissy-girl boys who normally saw ghosts flying about – right above the streets. They always pointed out the ghosts travelling through the mist and smoke rising over the city – and even travelling procession-like in the sky trains of diseased bats. Well! Lucky virus bats were asleep. They were dangling upside-down through several groves of trees in the old botanical gardens.

And what of the Aboriginal girl they followed? That skinny thing in dark trackies, hoodie covering her face with the swans flying around her? Well! If you think like a sissy-girl, then she was not real neither. They saw her as a spiritual ancestor because they knew what an Aboriginal looked like, since they were modelling their subsistence as it were, albeit only on junk food, on the country’s original inhabitants. She was their backfill now.

Erratic, unexplainable weather makes you feel no good in the heart, and this was how they felt about Oblivia with the ghost swans that seemed to multiply into clouds when they flew in the night. They talked about how she was the first Aboriginal spirit they had ever seen, the only way any could return as far as they knew from the total cleansing of the city of all those people ‘rounded up’ and impounded in the North country in the old days, many years ago.

The dogs continued barking although Oblivia was now far away in the undergrowth with the fluttering butterflies, leaving the whole shebang kid-and-dog thing chasing one another up and down the footpath in the bedlam of yelling and dog howls. Those darn dogs, uncontrollable if not kept properly tethered to their chains. Dogs more wild for chasing ghosts than anything else, driven mad by the smell of swans and bats. Oblivia ignored the noise and kept going. Soon, she would not hear the little war with other gangs converging on the footpath.

Hey! What’s happening sissy-girls? We were here a long time first.

What is a long while? Ten minutes?

There were rules about standing your own ground, even if you were a sissy-girl when anybody could be hookin’ em and trickin’ a good gang.

Hey! Wait youses.

Nah! Let that blackfella fairy go. She’s ours. Not yours. We will fight you for her if you like.

Come on then…

The river of bats streamed over the battle on the footpath without noticing a thing, and kept flying towards the epicentre of the darkened parklands. The colony had come from city suburbs where it had flown the previous evening at dusk to find gardens with fig trees loaded with ripened fruit. Down below their roosting trees, Oblivia continued to crawl through tunnels in the undergrowth that foxes had once clawed apart to chase the aged hare king. She passed several grassy fields trampled by the swans, and finally arrived at the grasslands where the colonies of swans were gathered around a marshy lake infested with insects. Who knows the truth, but it was in these grasslands where swans had preened themselves and slept in waves with long necks curled s-shaped over their backs, that life seemed the cleanest, and where the air filled her mind with a sense of peace.


She ignored the bats snoring in skeleton trees, to listen to the conversation of the swans’ agitated whistling, and swinging necks lunging and hissing, before falling into quietness, when suddenly, the cicadas roared from the treetops. The alarm radiated over the entire precinct of the abandoned jungle of undergrowth and sprawling treetops. The butterflies of blue, yellow and black jumped in midair. The swans scrambled, tumbling with quivering wings spread, fanning the rising mist to take off, and in a stormy rush, all were gone.


The Harbour Master was bone-idle, sitting up there in the apartment of The People’s Palace, and actually minding his own business in his smelly old singlet and shorts when all of a sudden, a news flash appeared right there on the television, and he saw the assassination.

Those people in charge of television programs should think about what they are doing to an old man. Poor old thing was shaken. Who had been half asleep and dreaming about Rigoletto, and half watching an opera program on the ABC. When he saw the assassination he instantly felt sick. Soon, all there was to see on the television was news replayed a thousand times about the assassination. This was the fact of the matter. Warren Finch had been shot in the streets of the city, and his life was fading.

The old Harbour Master’s face was concrete grey and motionless, but his head was spinning. He was like the rest of the world – spellbound and compelled to watch hours of repeated footage about Warren Finch’s life on news media television.

He thought that he saw the girl-wife, a glimpse of somebody that looked like her anyhow, running beside the ambulance trolley that was carrying the heaviest public life in the world as though he weighed nothing. Bodyguards he recognised as those genies threw themselves in front of cameras to shield anyone getting a proper view of Warren Finch. All seemed to be lost now. All lost. But somehow in all of those thoughts of loss that now blanketed the world, something extraordinary happened when a burst of energy filled the apartment. Could it possibly be? Warren at last visiting…The apartment felt as though it had become alive.


A sensation of phenomenal energy swishing around madly – horizontally bouncing from one wall to the other, and each time it passed, cold air slapped the Harbour Master across the face until he had been struck countless times.

It had to be Warren Finch who lay dying on a stretcher on television too lifeless to look at his watch or answer his mobile phone, but he had come back to the apartment like a crazy person with no time to spare, and acting like he could not find his favourite pair of socks. Well! He left everything in his path upturned and strewn, because sure enough, he would not be staying long. His voice was another matter: it was like a large ball at the end of a piece of rope being dragged into the ear of the Harbour Master, as well as Machine downstairs with his cats – Where is she?

Then the Harbour Master snapped. He felt very alone with the solemn television presenter who was trying to become his friend while he spoke intimately about the life of Warren Finch who lay covered in bloodied sheets on the stretcher, and as the journalist was trying to speak with the ambulance men frantically working with drips and life-saving equipment, they moved to take Finch to a hospital. But, the old man was no longer in the mood to know whether Warren Finch was dead or alive. He packed his bag in a jiffy, all his clothes (not much), found the monkey’s exotic clothes of course, and after a quick, final glance around the apartment, he left very speedily, through the gushing fountains, and the mist settling on the mossy statues. He walked straight past the openly crying Machine who was hugging his wailing cats, and was all too occupied watching the television to notice the front door slamming and the Harbour Master screaming, Where is the wife in grief?


The swans have all gone to the sky, but the sound of their wings beating quickened every beat in the girl’s heart. Swish! Swish! The sounds resonated, but she felt only the familiar claustrophobic sense of being trapped in a confined space, a place where her vision had been reduced to a keyhole view, of being slung back into the roots of the ancient eucalyptus tree. It was a view she had seen before, a blanket of swans forming into a giant bird in flight.

But this world was falling apart, and the girl’s heart raced like a trapped animal looking for the fastest way out. There were voices everywhere now with the news spreading quicksilver through the dense population in the streets. Yes. The city itself was screaming for her, beckoning, beseeching, or if you like, crucially confronting her with its great pain by trying to pull her into its troubles. Ahhh! Ahhh! NO! She’s looking the other way. Is she actually doing that? Her husband is dying for pity’s sake. Don’t go. She is running away. Come quickly! Come back you somebody. Somebody! Stay! The city people cried a million buckets of tears for their famous Warren Finch to live. But! But, this President’s wife, she was a very good question indeed. What was she doing? Where was she? The problematic promise bride who had turned up from nowhere! Her name being just too plain forgettable and foreign – the real heart of the issue: who would remember such a fictitious, ridiculous name? Where are you, you person?

She barely heard the quibbling of thousands of people calling for her around the city. It was really more the memory evoked from long ago, that warned her to keep running from painful voices falling over the reeds in the swampland to reach her – bowling over the beauty of wild flowers that were kind of special, and crackling branches of trees where dozy fruit bats had fallen flat on the ground.

Now she could be seen by the swans in the sky as she ran around the marshy lake in the botanical gardens, and through the hare king’s bramble tunnels where she sees the grey hare run off in front of her, and heads after it loping through paths that the foxes had dug. All the while she is looking skywards – trying to keep up with her swans flying overhead in the cloud, and needing not to lose them, she must stay under their shadow. It is as though she is running in somebody else’s dream, where someone like Warren Finch is calling – fly me to the moon. She sees the three genies too. They are like giants standing in passing clouds, talking to one another while they struggle to steer the swans flying wildly away from the city. Listen! Can’t you hear? She’s making a wish. She wants to fly with the swans so that they do not leave her behind.

Swans were not the answer in times like this. The big birds were struggling up there in the sky. A changed wind blowing in from the opposite direction was so strong that the wings of the swans were being buffeted. The wind circled like a cyclone and carried everything in its path towards the centre of the city, including people hurtling through the streets who had wanted to see their visiting Head of State. The swan wings became sails that were being blown backwards in squalls moving towards the noise of thousands of screaming people caught in the storm in the streets where Warren Finch had just been assassinated.

Whether she ran or not in dreams of other things, nothing could change the fact about running against the wind, for she was back next to Warren Finch. Beside him, she felt strangely re-united to the moment when he had left the apartment on the day long ago when she had arrived in the city. She still feels the strength of his control even as he lies flat over her lap. She cannot move from his weight, but her mind switches uncontrollably in a futile struggle. She shivers with the shock of finding herself beside Warren, replacing the television wife, even though in her mind, she is still chasing after the hare king through raspberry brambles. Alone and exposed, she recognises the faces of the street kids placed here and there among the crowds falling over her, hears the approaching sounds of sirens of police cars and ambulances speeding through the city. She feels terrified because they will think that she has killed him. She does not remember, does not know what has happened anymore. Was she just chasing the hare king? Everywhere the voices of police on loud speakers rip apart both reality and dreams, and she focuses on the helicopters hovering haphazardly low, with rotor blades whirling where the swans are flying above her.


The pains of distance roar through her like a flood emptying into insignificance, that leaves behind, as in dry plains, a surreal indifference in the midst of chanting crowds that have become hundreds of thousands deep, and still throng on the streets, as police desperately try to force through an ambulance. Hemmed in by the cries and screams, she is stuck, unable to leave, and cowers into Warren’s limpness. There is no chance of escaping, except when she looks upwards to the swans correcting their flight above the narrow street with the sudden disappearance of the wind. He is going now.

The doors of the ambulance were quickly pushed closed, but nothing can move through the outpouring of grief from the surging crowds blocking the road. In this bedlam, where there is no control over what is happening, the security people manage to create a barrier and have the body loaded into a helicopter precariously hovering above the buildings. The girl-wife is left behind while the helicopter makes its way to the hospital, but the crowds break through the barrier in efforts to express their grief to her. She is enveloped in a sea of hands. Strangers one after the other shake her hand, tearfully hug her, and pass her on to the next person in grief, and the next, until she is lost and drowning in the crowds. She is pulled by this tide of grief through the city streets, packed with people crying and praying, people determined to express their gratitude to her, for the man who had watched over the global security of all peoples, whom they had known as Warren Finch.

The long day slipped into evening and by this time there were the hands of the monkeys, street children, the Harbour Master, security guards, police, the genie minders – strangers steering her into the night.


A mother of all storms could grieve too, along with all those sad old country and western songs piped through the flooding city streets that carried, among other drifting things, an abandoned Chinese dragon that only yesterday had played a bamboo flute sweetly from its mouth to evoke a desert homeland, when the mythical creature danced a thousand-year-old ceremony through this foreign and soulless city as a welcome to the new President. Well! Its festival was over. So were the drums, and the clanging cymbals, the big brass band, the Scots Highland bagpipes, and all the jazz and gospel choirs, as well as the spinifex dancers with clapping sticks in front of the swans dancing with wings spread wide. These people had welcomed the President of Humanity they treated like a living God with death. They were all probably sleeping now.


Oblivia, the missing wife of the assassinated President, emerged through the large open mouth of the dragon. She looked around, still not knowing whether she had killed Warren Finch or not, and then stepped out into the ghost fog that rested its old body over the city. There had been another cyclone during the night and a tidal surge had flooded many of the city’s streets. She held onto the golden tentacles that flowed along the side of the multi-coloured creature with mirrored scales, while it rocked and moved effortlessly through the darkness.

Only the monkey living in the main street’s Cathedral was up this early. It was listening to the silence of traditional Country – the only sound it believed belonged to this city. The monkey was way up high, sitting in a small fig tree that grew out of the steepled roof of the sandstone cathedral. He began saying his morning prayers to his distant monkey God, this God and that God, the God of the church where he lived. Prayers that took forever, until he could no longer concentrate on what he was praying for, or even believing which God loved him equally with other Gods. He started looking down through the lonely fog spirit travelling through the city, hoping nostalgically for a dawn chorus of songbirds that no longer existed. Then the monkey had to remind itself that some old habits died hard. The white furry creature sung a religious hymn of joyous awesomeness about how he too had become invisible like the gods, and how he actually felt magician-like. He could disappear then return to life again without even knowing it had happened.

It is only Rigoletto, a flock of common myna birds squawked as they flew out of the cathedral’s nave, that religious monkey from Asia. The monkey ignored bird chatter, particularly that of starlings, crows and myna birds. He believed that he was too good for screechy types of birds. He preferred to think of himself as an old gentlemanly monkey that looked down at life, like he was now looking down at fog ghosts, but this time was different. He saw the Chinese dragon floating along the street with a cold-looking bony girl clinging to the side.

From so far above, he was not sure whether it was the girl he was supposed to be looking after or not. Rigoletto’s eyes were not like they used to be, even if he could clearly remember a time in his life that was spent snatching fruit, and stuffing his mouth with a whole peeled mandarin while performing multiple somersaults on the top of a stick all day long for tourists. You need good eyes for that. He often reflected about this magnificent feat, and about how this so-called land of opportunity had robbed him of his spontaneity and each point-zero-zero-zero-one-half-of-a-percent of a dollar he could have earned from performing the trick right throughout Asia. He doubted whether he had the heart for showing off this kind of trick now. He felt that a big devil in this country had gutted him of every bit of spontaneous happiness he had in his body. Now he casually looked down with an accusing eye at the fog ghosts just to show – he knew it was her.

Rigoletto sprung from his perch in a heavy free-falling fashion that felt as though his body was full of lead, and in no time at all, he had scaled down the wall of the cathedral and half swam, half ran through the storm-water, until he too was holding on to the dragon’s golden tentacles to save himself. He worked his way along the dragon until he was behind Oblivia and peering over her shoulder and looking at her face, to make sure it was her. Lo and behold, it screeched. It was the Harbour Master’s gardée.

This made the monkey very angry. He leapt in front of Oblivia, splashed about in what resembled a sort of dog paddle, and dealt with the crisis by thrusting himself as stiff as a board in and out of the water, and screamed his native language into her face to ask her what she was doing, which in Australian English meant: You are crazy. What in the bloody hell’s name are you thinking? Don’t you know what you are doing? Haven’t you got a clue in your head? He swallowed a lot of water from screaming his lungs out for nothing in all forms of language. Swallowed language. Moral language. Peace and harmony language. Religious language. Angry language. Law language. Culture language. Political language. Enthusiastic language. Monkey language. The wings of language will never again fly so triumphantly in the soulless country. If the monkey wanted Oblivia to go back inside the dragon where she would be safe, she paid no attention to a single thing it said.

Instead, Oblivia looked straight through the monkey as though it never existed, and concentrated on the low fog shrouding the high-rise glass buildings on both sides of the street. Her eyes focussed on the darkened haze of a cloud of flying swans with steam flowing out of their nostrils, their wings labouring in flight from pulling the strings attached to the dragon, pulling it ahead.


She heard a voice coming from the water – coming all of this way from somebody’s final resting place. Warren Finch’s voice, teasing as he tried to hop on board the dragon of great hope and expectations, almost as mighty as the dawn swans flying Apollo’s chariot while he pulled the sun across the sky. Are you trying to escape?


Then he was gone. Or it may have just been the monkey Rigoletto complaining as he swung himself behind her again, and when he had a good grip of some golden tentacles, he kicked her for all of his troubles, and as many times as he could to force her towards the dragon’s mouth. But nobody feels the kicks of an invisible, oppressed, and foreign-to-boot monkey that did not like living in Australia. The defeated monkey ended up sitting on top of the dragon sulking, while nervously chewing bubble gum in its big teeth.

As he looked around the deserted and broken city, it was only a cheap form of advertising that managed to fly around his head. The flittering myna birds had spied an audience to spread their same old government propaganda about generous household assistance that they had been trained to sing for peanuts. Worthless incentives. The monkey had no need for a government. He stubbornly turned his flat face this way and that, looked into space, and was not buying any of it. He was more concerned about myna birds alerting the security people.

Rigoletto already knew that the flooded city was being scoured from top to bottom to find the girl-wife from a call he had received on his miniature mobile phone. The phone’s ringtone went ding dong all night, until he answered it. It was the Harbour Master hollering into his ear that the girl was all there was left now for the people of the world that had gone into mourning after Warren Finch’s assassination.

Listen! the absent Harbour Master chattered into the complaining monkey ear: She was his wife so of course they want to find the only living thing that they think was close to their dead legend who they reckoned had championed peace for people across the world, even if he didn’t, and was only a self-proclaimed Indigenous hero who had made it all the way to the top in a suit and haven’t I told you before about the importance of looking well dressed in a suit, because it goes to show that even an Aboriginal man in Australia can get elected by the common Aboriginal-hating people to be the Head of State of Australia, and that was a very good thing, even if it was the best thing that ever happened to the flippen what have you country, and now some mongrel moron still had to come along and murder him out of jealous racist spite. So, don’t groan – of course she has to be found, even if you and I KNOW she was not close to him, and she can’t save them from themselves, but she still belongs to these people because she is still the First Lady of whatnot.


Any little monkey could rattle off a litany of worse things happening in his world, but Rigoletto sat with steely red face on the dragon, and thought very seriously about prescribed responsibility as the worst kind of thing that could have happened to him. It was the only problem he had with being a pet monkey. He knew that he was supposed to step in like a man instead of just being a monkey and become the girl’s guardian if the Harbour Master was not around, although very clearly, he recognised that the act of guardianship over others did not come naturally to him. He hated being trained to act responsibly. There was nothing in it. He was not the Harbour Master’s pet monkey by any stretch of the imagination.

It was moments like these where a few guilty pangs forced Rigoletto to forget he was supposed to be a pet by acting like a wild animal. A wild animal was not supposed to look after people. It was supposed to be the other way around. Where was the beauty in a monkey worrying about people? His brain bolted from the reality of floating along a flooded city street on a magnificent but ruined dragon. His idea of beauty lay tens of thousands of kilometres away where long-necked swans foraged for insects in muddy rice fields with the swallows, in a world that enjoyed listening to exquisite plum-blossom music being played on a bamboo flute. He held this thought. He hummed through bubble gum sticking between his clicking teeth, and did not lose any sense of the flute’s musicality in his own rendition of the plum- and cherry-blossom music that he had locked in his head.

These were only the delusional thoughts of a monkey that had enough troubles occupying his mind than to be bothered with fantasies being projected on him by the Harbour Master like, You poor, old, good monkey. He had the worries of a thousand monkeys. So da, da, de, da, and la, la, la! Presently, aloft on the dragon, his main worry was the soaking wet Rigoletto jacket. Would it shrink on his furry body and strangle him? A monkey sitting on a dragon in the middle of some common big-storms-of-climate-changeraising-sea-levels event was nothing to worry about. He hugged himself tight. Rigoletto had seen flooding on seaboard city streets all over the world. It was really just as natural as seeing water flooding in the lanes of Venice, Bangladesh or Pakistan.

Where are you Harbour Master? You got to come back. Rigoletto’s experience of global warming was academic, not practical. He remained on guard while Oblivia continued to be dragged along with the dragon through the water, knowing that very soon she would be found. She was part of the most important story happening in the world right now. There could be no other way for the girl-wife. If she survived…