The Swan Book

Travelling Road Show





It was a terrific funeral. Everyone was saying just how marvellous it was. Best speeches. Good old-people’s songs like: Through the ages I will remember blue eyes crying in the rain…someday when we meet up yonder, we will stroll hand in hand again. Still the best bloke, that old Hank Williams, and others like him. But things took a turn for the worse after that.


The biggest cathedral in the country, where Warren Finch’s body lay in state, kept overflowing with mourners. All sorts turned up to pay respects, including the everyday local mourners of the city. All those homeless people who would not go home. The poor from the streets and alleyway communes started elbowing for space with overseas dignitaries, Heads of State of other countries – many with fragile diplomatic relationships with Australia. The Earth’s powerful demanded appeasement. They wanted their very own religious services. It all added up. No wonder the country was broke. Still, the country pulled together. It showed some respect and unity for the situation. Then other important people started filing through the door. World musicians wanted to play together for world peace. The world’s most popular professional actors brought glitz and bling to mourning and paying respects to the big actor himself who had known them all. Even King Billy kept calling into the city more and more tidal surges flooding through the streets, and up the steps of the cathedral.

All services for the dearly beloved, the mourning, the last respects, country and western music, hymns and special foreign music, were heard continuously, and on a daily basis. In actual fact, nobody thought a thing about the consequences of unabated mourning. Certainly, no one questioned the excessiveness of sorrow, and whether there was going to be an end point of mourning for Warren Finch. That was until finally, one day in the middle of a lot of smoke, what looked like most of the countryman’s wildflowers and gum leaves arrived with scores of his ceremonial elders from his Aboriginal Government, and they sung his world. They said that they were smoking his spirit back to their own traditional country. His spirit was no longer in this place. This was when the sky practically fell down, when they – these people (his own people) – wanted to remove the coffin from the cathedral.

Total pandemonium broke out between all the different types of mourners until officials one, two and three, with more to follow, told these cheeky people from the bush of some far-flung part of the country with an unpronounceable name that nobody had ever heard of, that Warren Finch’s importance as a man far outweighed any of their cultural considerations, and hum! Peace Brother! Go in peace. Let that be the end of the matter. Yet it was a stalemate! Stalemate! These people from the bush would not listen to anybody. They would not leave the coffin, and they just stood there amongst the choir singing, and made even greater smoke with their leaves, even though anyone could see that a long queue was forming behind them with urgent people becoming very irate.


The bush people wanted to talk about culture. No! Ears were only listening to the church choir. Everyone wanted to get firm now about this disturbance. These Aboriginal people were told to stop being un-Australian, and to leave – their time was up. Did they not understand that everyone had to take equal turns to stand next to the coffin? Move on! Why? the Aboriginal elders asked, His spirit is gone now. Up in Country. But their explanation would never do. Even if Warren Finch lay dead in his coffin, he was still Head of State until someone else could take his place. Was that possible? Yes. He could still give advice and blessings to his government, just like he did when he was alive. And even though he was dead, he would always be one of the most loved world leaders that ever existed in the history of mankind. How could anyone argue about this? Who could replace him?

The more his Aboriginal people argued and argued, persisting it was their right to take his body home, as though his body was like that of a normal body of a kinsman and should be given a proper burial – the more they were treated like selfish people, and the more the idea of a final resting place became full of contention and attributed to the whole country’s denial that Warren Finch was really dead, when they preferred to think of him as just sleeping like Sleeping Beauty.

Well! Grass grew. And the bush folk had made a permanent campsite beside the coffin.

Finally, in a nasty episode of aghast, there was a string of official and much publicised questions raised about who these Aboriginal people were – who did they think themselves, and why had they turned up in the first place, and who had given them room to do native things without permission in the most important cathedral in the country, making everything feel tainted in their sorrow? Were they really Aboriginal? Did they really belong to Warren Finch’s ancestral country? Anthropologists, lawyers, and other experts like archaeologists, sociologists and historians were called to examine the genealogies of these people. An emergency legislation was bulldozed through parliament in the dead of night which claimed that Warren Finch was the blood relative of every Australian, which gave power to the government to decide where he was to be buried.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Roll in laughter, because it was funny, and thought inconceivable that Warren Finch could be buried in some wilderness place with no public access, where only a handful of Aboriginal people who knew the country would know how to get to his grave to say some prayers that they had made up themselves. There would be national prayers in time, legislated in a National Warren Finch Prayer Book. Would you trust Aboriginal people to stick to Australian law? The police were obliged under the regulations of emergency laws to intervene in the lives of all Aboriginal people, to throw the bush people out of the cathedral. Then, when there were no words left, and nowhere to live in a city that despised the presence of Aboriginal people, Warren Finch’s clans-people went home.


The body remained in the cathedral, stuck there indefinitely in the smoky pall of burning coals – the incense of frankincense and myrrh, and emotional glue swelling in the broken-hearted city. The highly decorated coffin of the best black sassafras timber had been made by a master craftsman one hundred and fifty years before, who had willed the magnificent coffin to the nation for burying a great Australian man. This was the occasion, and the coffin was surrounded by burning candles, and adorned with the fresh bouquets of roses that kept arriving in the cathedral from rich people with enough money to keep sending roses grown on the plateaus of who knows where. The roses were piled into a mountain that mourners stumbled over, and spread like a range out into the frequently flooded streets.

There were no plans to bury the body. This was because no one in charge of the rare occasions of important world leader funerals seemed to consider it was necessary. It was not easy to make the final decision because as time kept passing with endless rows of grief callers parading by the coffin in the mass flowered cathedral, it was very easy to forget that the body had to be taken to a cemetery. Outside the cathedral, it was impossible to move through the city streets packed with fresh and decaying flowers and, every day, another round of mourners carrying Farewell Warren tributes on paper and cardboard signs held aloft on sticks.

And still more mourners came to see Warren Finch’s coffin, pilgrim mourners weaving themselves through the country until they reached the country’s most major cathedral, and kings and queens, counts and countesses, and other important overseas people who used up vast amounts of their country’s wealth by emptying barrels of jet fuel to fly over vast distances and oceans to get to the cathedral. With the airport busy with flights, the tourist economy blossomed, so the Government kept welcoming visitors from the other side of the world. The mourners stood wherever they could in a slow line to the coffin.

As some more time passed, the infrastructure of the dilapidated city became an ever greater, uncontrollable mess. Rubbish everywhere. Power shortages. Infrastructure collapse. The sewerage system backing up and becoming clogged with nowhere to go. Stuff like that. Every foreign country dignitary expected to raise their own flag on the one flagpole outside the cathedral, have their own religious service, or the cathedral cleared of other nationals including Australians, or wanted a massive high-culture ceremony involving hundreds of their own nationals.

Whatever the homage, no-one cared less if nobody else understood their foreign language, since the internal affairs of Australia figured way down the scale of worldly matters after Warren Finch’s mysterious assassination which appeared more like stupidity, something that would have been easily avoided even in the tiniest and war-torn poorest countries of the world.

It was a form of greed really with everyone wanting a share of the grief, lingering and dilly-dallying in their worship around the city while negotiating greater opportunities for migration into the country to save it from this anarchy, and some settling in as immigrants and asylum seekers themselves, as though they wanted to become local, and not wanting to return home. Their airplanes parked all over the place stayed at the airport. There were highbrow questions raised about this: What was the role of a griever? It was not clear because no one had had to think about something like this before. Not in this city, state, or country.

The glut of reverence seemed as though nothing was good enough for Warren Finch after his death, a fact verified by the girl-wife who agreed to these proceedings. The Government people kept her whereabouts top secret, but she was just sitting around under lock and key in The People’s Palace apartment. The red-headed family marched in and took over the executorial role of Warren Finch’s immediate family. The pathetic, mourning Machine who was full of excuses for the girl escaping to the botanical gardens was ignored. He was told by Big Red to mind his own business, shut down his fountains spraying water all over the place, stop playing Dean Martin music, and to remove his cats. And to do it pronto.

Every day the security people in charge of the widow moved through the quietened building, to take her to the cathedral. The girl-wife widow, First Lady of whatnot, perhaps Presidential killer, became the object of consultation about the mourning business, where she was to shake hands and nod to whatever dignitary mourners were saying in their own languages. I am looking for the swans, they are leaving, she often told these people, mouthing the words soundlessly as usual, and gesturing with her hands.



The diplomatic embassies looked puzzled as she tugged on their suit sleeves or ceremonial robes, yet they always followed her gaze around the nave in the cathedral, along the rafters, up in the hollow shell ceilings painted with frescos of angels with the wings of swans. These are swans in a cage, the French diplomat proclaimed to his people, and in the style of their old poet Baudelaire, they then murmured to each other, And this swan, is castigating God. The Harbour Master and the monkey Rigoletto always sat spell-bound in a pew near the back of the cathedral. They were quite caught up with the razzamatazz surrounding the coffin, and the poetry the Frenchman recited, A swan escaped its cage: and as its feet/ With finny palms on the harsh pavement scraped,/ Trailing white plumage on the stony street,/ In the dry gutter for fresh water gaped…

But, here we are, the whole country still cried and fretted for the loss of the irreplaceable Warren Finch, and asked: Is this the best we can do? Anyone would think that he had been the only Aboriginal person on the planet. The only one who had a voice, and could voice his opinion. He had become the only public Aboriginal voice of the era. The only one Australians would listen to, and reported in the newspapers, or had given their airways to whenever he spoke publicly. It certainly seemed as though there was national deafness to hearing what other Aboriginal people had to say of themselves. Perhaps it was the tone of voice? Or the message that could be heard, or could not be heard? Or the fact that the entire Aboriginal population bar this one individual did not have enough of the evangelical in their voices for proclaiming themselves sinners of their own race, like Warren Finch did on their behalf? Whatever the case, it seemed that the country was locked up inside a curse of national fever-pitch dimensions in its grief for this one Aboriginal voice now dead, but still heard throughout the world. How can you describe such a tribute in sorrow? Imagine grief as art, where perfection above all else, was to be achieved. There was no doubt about it, that Warren Finch’s life of striving for perfection had rubbed off on the nation that now emulated his life with perfect grief in pondering and procrastination, How perfect could national grief be?

A whole month more of silliness went by along with continual efforts to embalm the body to prevent decay, and then another month of flags continuing to fly at half-mast, until the major shock-jock news commentators took control. It was a field day of open slather about keeping an unburied body lying about in a public structure. In their broadcasting studios, they governed public opinion by plying paranoia into talk-back fever. The communication networks grasped the country in a teary anguished embrace of voices, crying for their opinions to be heard and listened to: Why wasn’t Warren Finch good enough to receive one last lap of honour? Wasn’t an Aboriginal person good enough to be treated fairly and given the respect Australia gives to all of its other citizens?

The city responded to its own questions by creating workplace strikes, protests, and rioting on the streets. The squatters burnt the abandoned buildings they had been living in. In the lanes of the city where the homeless lived, the grief found its own language. This nocturnal world destroyed everything that resembled its insular lifestyle by creating bonfires of every piece of cardboard shack they owned. Embracing grief escalated into a stranglehold of destruction and looting over the city. The streets overran with picketing mourners spurred on by a bellyful of Government conspiracies in their heads. The mouth-to-mouth talk rampaging through the streets was very simply this: Warren Finch was not dead. In the uprising that now demanded the government stand down, it was as though the protesting city thought Warren Finch could be found amongst the wanton destruction of public property, or under barricades of trashed cars and buses, or beyond the lines of soldiers that had been called in to deal with the troubles.

These were only normal people of the times. People who were struggling to keep up with what was happening around them, so hard to keep up with the memories – the missing, yearned-for things in life, which now included Warren Finch. They prayed for the people who had gone missing, those that had been snatched off the street, those that had had the life beaten out of them by thugs wearing balaclavas over their faces at the end of a lane, or those seen shot and fallen to the ground on a lonely wharf in the middle of the night, then disappearing without trace. In principle, it was normal to live in hope, to hope that loved ones would return to life in the lanes and squats of the abandoned buildings, or hope for luck through sprawling suburbs where fate was as slender as a spider’s thread blowing in the breeze.