The Swan Book

The Ghost Walk





Fresh food and the body of Warren Finch travelled together. The important public officials, passionately depicting themselves as unified people, were obsessed with imagination, narrow though it was in their minds. Well! Aesthetics was all. They were pretty tricky to wipe their hands of the rioting city, by finally deciding to get rid of the coffin-worshipping in the cathedral. It was a job that had to be done, and quite frankly, they finally agreed to be finished with hand-wringing over rioters. They were over it. So, while standing around in the cathedral like a cohesive think tank, assembled to argue and shout each other down about what to do with the coffin, they reached a brilliant decision in total ignorance of the havoc on the streets, where the Bishop of the Cathedral was spending most of his time amongst the rioting picketers and youths breaking glass windows with rocks, trying single-handedly to calm everyone down. You are in the Lord’s presence would you believe? He was just told to get out of the way.

It was not the Bishop’s fault that he could not bring peace to the city, so with hands clasped behind his back, he strolled back inside his glorious cathedral. Then, with a quick glance around the building he had known for decades for peace and tranquillity, he singled out the public servants amongst the people crowding through the roses to reach the coffin, and rightfully asked: What brings you down here? The most senior public servant, the Director, drew the clergyman aside, where he spoke to him in the abstract logic of public official language about Closing The Gap. The Bishop knew that this was the language of economic rationing but he could not reconcile it with the language of the Church, of creating or closing a gap to catch the sinners. There was no gap between God and the Church. Yet, all was not lost on him. He was able to surmise the Government had a strategy, and during the conversation of voices speaking hastily, he heard of an assembling plan that was frequently called, Highway Dreaming Code. Ah! It was high talk. Way above what a normal person could begin to understand. A hard-edged decision made on the spot.

The Bishop’s question of what are you going to do about this, with hands gesturing at the enormity of the crisis, initiated a quicker decision than would have normally occurred in the realms of public sector abstract dialogue – as impersonal as can be expected when talking about a coffin rather than a dead person – and it rightly ended with the officials complimenting him for reaching this solution himself. Dead right, Holiness. A last lap of honour. People need to see the coffin. This is exactly what the country has been calling out for. What could be more beneficial than respecting the voices of Australians right now? This would show all of those foreigners we are in charge in this city, and that is for sure. And they can all get their planes up in the skies and go home.


Warren Finch would be taken on a final journey to farewell the nation, and the beauty of the thing was its giving the Government time to make a final decision about where to bury the coffin in the end. The lap of honour could take as long as needed, even forever, if the need arose.

Naturally, the widow had to be consulted first, and the decision was explained to her in simple terms to spell blind her with the obvious glamour in it all, flying up the highways in a magnificent hearse. She instantly agreed of course to have the coffin removed a-s-a-p, from the cathedral. Okay. She was more interested in the angel swans flying on the ceiling’s frescoes, tethered with the ribbons of heaven, unable to fly off. She heard the angels breathing, their warm breath falling down onto her uplifted face, and she wondered if the angels would fly the coffin home.


In the streets outside the cathedral, the rioters were sleeping in the pall of campfire smoke, low fog, or was it just the mist of sleeping gas, when the big Mack truck arrived. Perhaps rioting was exhausting work, or perhaps the city’s angels had been rocking the night watchers’ cradle, but no one stirred from the haze, lifted a head to see what was happening, stood up and yelled daylight robbery when the semitrailer hearse crawled in with the stealth of a sneaky fox. Even King Billy was asleep.

The huge vehicle slowly made its way through the snakelike barricades along each side of the road. The three-metre high riot barriers had been set up before nightfall when riot police pushed and crushed people off the road. With the cordon up, a long chain of heavily-armed soldiers in gas masks moved in, and were stationed on each side of the road.

The coffin was soon popped into the deep freezer of the Fresh Food People long-haul semitrailer attached to the Mack’s cab – now painted up in blue, red and white, as though draped with the nation’s flag. The semi was fully loaded and ready to hit the road at a quarter past three in the morning. Soon, the driver claimed through his gas mask to the sleeping widow accompanying him on this journey, when we get the hell out of this, he would soon be going somewhere else. This was the first and last thing he said to her. He was more interested in the road and the schedule. He normally travelled by himself and now it did not matter who was in his truck or how important they were, he still worked alone. This looming giant gripping the driver’s wheel never slept. He stared ahead through black sun-reflecting sunglasses that rested on his white block-out covered nose. He wore his Aboriginal flag-coloured cap down to his eyebrows to block out the sun that would stream in the driver’s window, and to keep his personal world secret, beyond the reach of others.


The cab was over-crowded. Claustrophobic. As well as the driver with all the clothing he owned on earth shoved in a bag, his collection of holy beads hanging from the rear-view mirror, and leprechaun good luck charms all over the place, he had to share the cabin with the security, all big sweaty units squashed up against each other, and the recently widowed First Lady thing – although what room did a mere slip of a thing like her need?

Even the Harbour Master, reunited with the recalcitrant Rigoletto sulking on his lap, had invited himself along for the ride. They were both squashed in a corner of the back seat next to Oblivia and were whispering to one another about having seen the security men before. It was hard to place where, the Harbour Master said, but he knew them. The girl thought the genies had come back into her life disguised as middle-aged men who now suspected her of killing her husband. These security men sat around in the cab of the truck and acted like Supreme Court judges. They whinged about dragging a coffin around the country, which they said was a stupid idea. Their power radiated through the driver’s cab like hot air and the unmistakable, uncontrolled yearning of a courtroom that was seeking the truth about Warren Finch’s killer. Unquenched, uncontrolled yearning that lasted thousands of kilometres with Oblivia tormenting herself with the question – did she, or did she not kill her husband, and was she just chasing the hare king that day? The driver pulled his cap further down onto his eyebrows. It was academic to him. He was not wishing for anything. Didn’t care if she had an alibi or not, or whether it was easier to believe that she killed her husband than to believe she was chasing a hare king. He became lead-footed to cure any urge for wishing, thinking or yearning, pressing harder on the accelerator and sending the semi flying along the road. On and on they flew, hundred of kilometres of gum trees quivering in their wake, and flatlands of sheep and cattle-filled grasslands wondering what had just happened, while she tossed and turned over her alibi, whether she had one or not.


The road train carted the body everywhere – up the Hume Highway, down the Stuart Highway, around the Monaro – eleven highways in all. Twenty thousand kilometres of the nation’s highways had been split down the middle to divide the country like two giant lungs.

The See You Around journey was for all people who bothered to stand out in a chilly night, or in the midday sun, if they cared enough to line the streets just to watch the Spirit of the Nation roaring by. The whole thing was a rhapsody in motion and could not have been more successful, as the road train roared down the highways of country and western music – mostly legend music by the country’s great singers like Slim Dusty, Rick and Thel, a bit of Chad Morgan – Camooweal, Mt Isa, Cloncurry, The Barkley, Wagga Wagga, Charleville, Cunnamulla, Yarrawonga, Plains of Peppimenarti, and the Three Rivers Hotel. But mostly, the clockwork nature of the thing was to keep to the Fresh Food People’s schedule of deliveries to its supermarket chain throughout the country, picking up and delivering crates of fruit and vegetables such as asparagus, mangoes, pawpaw, bananas and pineapples; or the oranges, apples, potatoes, strawberries and peas from the packing sheds and cool rooms of its Northern or Southern growers.

Along the way, the coffin was paraded and displayed for all to see in this festival of grieving. The black sassafras heritage coffin was wheeled out of the semitrailer on a trolley and set down in the middle of a dead-grass flat, banana plantation, or salt bush plain, where speeches were made in the slow drawl of the North, or a fiddle played through amplifiers at each tinker-tailor gathering, in fiddlestick towns, depressed cities, cut-throat roadhouses, or else, the coffin was rested on a bench in a mine’s mess room, in machinery, produce, wool and cattle sheds, or laid on the best linen table-cloth over the dining table of a cattleman’s station home.

It was a hard schedule, and the silent driver drove that little bit faster to keep on track when memorials could just as spontaneously spring up out of the blue when influential, backblocks politicians at the end of a dusty road demanded their impromptu See You Around event with the Spirit of the Nation. The driver did not complain. He did his job. Dragged out the coffin. Wore the consequences for making up time after listening to another dozen pip-squeak speeches for a half-dozen people at another local church, football stadium, soccer oval, paddock, courtroom or meeting hall of the Country Women’s Association, Boy Scout, or other local hall of fame.

The ghosts travelling in the road train were not complaining. The security guards enjoyed the view and started granting three wishes to whoever required them. Who were they to give two hoots if the coffin was continually being dragged out here or there in a journey that was endless? But the driver wished for nothing. He just kept growing older and driving on. He pushed the now less than splendid, soiled and chipped coffin out one more time, waited for the mourning to be done with and souvenir-hacking to be completed, and pushed the defaced coffin back up the ramp and into the freezer. There was no time any more for deliveries. It saved time to cut the words delivery or pickup off the list. He kicked the security men out. Said that they were weighing him down. They were too congenial to their ever-increasing queues of wish seekers. He could not sit around all day for other purposes. Everything in the big freezer began to rot. The driver’s eyes grew teary from being glued to the dusty road ahead, and he kept singing the same old song, Yea! Keep your eyes on the road, and your hands on the wheel, we’re having fun etcetera whatever. But when he sang, he only heard the transport; the roaring road train’s engine, wheels rolling over the highways. The widow never heard a thing said about Warren Finch in the endless parade of speeches. She had left before the journey began.



Goodness poor heart, the ghost walk. There are those who will warn anyone making this strange solitary journey, and will say: You have got to take enough to make it through.

This was what happened. Oblivia disappeared from the hearse’s spectacular schedule after the wind dusted off an icy night. What was the reason? And what was it about those prevailing dreams children have about life, that make them to go ghost walking like this? Away! Anywhere! That’s what happened to them. Was there ever a right way of leaving?

In a panicky night off she went, entangled in the vortex of a thunderstorm dizzily spinning over many kilometres in the higher strata of the atmosphere. She just walked away without any thought of where she was going. Death, dying, or living had nothing to do with it. The truth of it was that wars do this to children. War children, like the torn world of Aboriginal children. Where were the kind crickets singing? Or, the big leaf under which to hide? The country’s hearth! Ah! She just walked around the smudged lines of the circles the giants had sketched in another of their hell maps.

She walked away from the semitrailer hearse, and listened for heartbeats: the silent chilled voicelessness of swans you hear in the weakened old and the very young tossed from the heavens, and those struggling to stay airborne with their wings stretched wide, locked against the force of the wind.

In a place where footsteps crackled on frost-hardened grass, her dreams were askew. Still! Quiet! Nevermind! There were people approaching, shadows in the darkness that looked like old Aunty and the Harbour Master with the monkey twisting around on his hip. The old woman was talking to the Harbour Master but her voice broke with the chill in the air. You’d be reaching for gold to find the place now. You could hear her continuing to recite bits of her old poetry, although she and the Harbour Master had already disappeared, and were walking somewhere that was infinitely far away.

In the morning there were only blue skies where the girl widow had walked off to find a flock of swans. For her, the mad hearse journey had finished. Who cared? The driver shouted to the thin vapours of air rising from the cold earth all around him, when he discovered she had left. You there? You there? Come back here. But tell you what? What did he care about anyone disappearing from his cortege if they had no respect for the dead? He had not seen the said personage contributing much to the memorial anyway. There were appointments to keep. A heavy schedule raced through his mind. He had a stiff in the freezer to think about. The haul going overseas once they got through Australia. So, with his cap pulled down lower over his sunglasses – man, he was hitting the highway. The rubber burnt the bitumen. A trail of smoke was left behind. You would think he was raising Lazarus from the dead.

She watched the semitrailer roaring up the highway from the ghost town’s park, amongst oak trees with exposed roots like the fingers of giants crossed for good luck. There he goes, she thought of Warren Finch, he’s still holding on to power, still searching for the ultimate paradise. Yep! The same stories you hear about power. A dead man was still making people run after him. It was the first time she had really thought about Warren Finch for a very long time.

Alone in this quiet forest where only a blackbird’s song rung out while the last stars disappeared, and the scream of the schedule became a dot on the awakening horizon, she suspected he was not dead at all. But who knows what thoughts will come right out of the bushland when you are alone? She saw for herself how Warren Finch could loom monumentally in the atmosphere like a gift from God. He was so indestructibly alive, just like the sky. Even in the middle of nowhere, he was still around, just as he was when she had watched the coffin absent-mindedly on the long journey, where he was being preserved as though he was some masterpiece in an art gallery. And just like famous paintings, he would never die as long as people looked at his dead body and appreciated the unique quality of his extraordinariness, and the propaganda of what he stood for in the world.

With leaves dropping from the oak trees at the slightest hint of a breeze, she thought about the frailty of perpetuity, and imagined she could still hear Warren talking on his mobile phone from the coffin in the semitrailer’s freezer, where he was continuously calling the driver and complaining about her disappearance. His muffled voice now giving the orders and snapping at the driver, the mobile capped to his ear, Where in the hell did she go?

Yes, she knew something. Warren Finch’s elaborate montage-self never intended to be buried. He was insisting that the glassy-eyed driver forget what he called the girl widow. She could look after herself. He was wondering why she was brought along in the first place. He yelled down his mobile from the sassafras coffin in the freezer. Well! Let it roar. You are doing the right thing driver. Keep going man – you got no time to frig around.

For what was death? It was just a matter of continuing on, keeping his ideas streaming out of centre stage in perpetual memorials. The fact of the matter was that it was hard to kill off someone who had gotten as big as the United Nations itself. Naturally, the gift from God would have to go around the world after this. No drama. Death was not an excuse for burying a person, and a bit of good history along with it. No – no drama at all.


Somewhere in this landscape, swans were stirring. It was a bright starry night. As the entire flock awakened, great hordes wove in and out of the tight pack with necks stretched high. These birds anticipated the movement of wind in the higher atmosphere. They gauged the speed of northerly flowing breezes caught in their neck feathers and across their red beaks and legs. The swans made no sound, but stood still while the wind intensified through the ruffling feathers on their breasts. Then suddenly from somewhere a startled swan flies up, and is followed by the roar of the lift off, and the sky is blanketed by black swans in the cold night, and Oblivia recalls the old Chinese monk Ch’i-chi’s poem of the flight of swans in the night, like a lone boat chasing the moon. She watched, and knew she had found her swans. They had found each other’s heartbeat, the pulse humming through the land from one to the other, like the sound of distant clap sticks beating through ceremony, connecting together the spirits, people and place of all times into one. These were her swans from the swamp. There was no going back. She would follow them. They were heading north, on the way home.

On this night, she travelled over hills of heavily-scented eucalypt forests, until she reached the shallow swamps of wintertime flowing through the scattered tea-tree country where most of the land was perpetually under water. The swans rest, but there will be days of walking through water to follow them.

She was not the only one who kept away from the heavy migration of travellers – poor families on foot, and those able to afford to travel in a vehicle like Big Red’s family – who had been forced to leave the ruined city. They were the people with passports and not a threat to the national security. They were not like potential terrorists: this colourful procession of licensed travellers – those who had passed the rigid nationality test for maintaining a high level of security in the country, and could pay the tax that allowed them to pass through the numerous security checkpoints on the highways.

Oblivia joined those who were travelling incognito on unofficial and illegal crossings through the swamps. There were so many people moving through the country, she was never alone. They were all searching for the same shallow pathways, and dazed like her, all following each other, while trying to take their life somewhere else. There were people dressed in dark clothes across the landscape, trying not to look conspicuous. Some were former street people. Others were the homeless people who had slept on the footpaths with cardboard blankets, or in empty buildings. Now in hordes and all travelling north, they crowded the swampy lanes on pitch-black nights and nestled close to one another for safety. Most had white hair, even the children, and similar stories of what happened, it was those snakes. It was the last straw. A moment was all it had taken, many had claimed, to turn anyone prematurely white; that night when the rain and wind hit the city like a brick wall had been thrown at it after Warren Finch was killed.



The navigators at the top of the line of the people travelling through the water were continually arguing amongst themselves about their weapons – if a bread knife was better than a sugar-cane cutlass for cutting through, or whether the thickness of a long pole was better cut by an axe, but whether or not they were arguing, they had to decide which direction either left or right that any idiot would take through the shallows ahead. And then they continued yelping: Yep! Good job I traded that bread knife. Yep! Good job I made that bamboo pole longer.

These men claimed to be the policemen over this stretch of country, although in the real world, they were only a bunch of intergenerational environmentalists, turned greenies, turned ferals, turned strapped for cash to save a multitude of furry or feathered threatened species in international forums, or their favourite rare trees. They knew the swamps. Their families had grown up with rising waters. When the opportunity arose to make some money, who could blame them for becoming entrepreneurial? Human removalists, they called themselves. It sounded nice. Sure it was not legit or leftie, but what was? Their mantra while leading the incognitos was a list of challenging superiority-complex questions, such as, what makes you people from southern cities think you can speak for us? What makes you think we can’t speak for ourselves? What makes you think you are better than us? Or, How would you know this country better than us?

They guided dirt-poor people through rough country, even though the plain and simple truth was that they were just people smugglers, not interested in public investment, or becoming security-conscious public servants. Whether they thought what had happened in the city was of any consequence, what did it matter? There were plenty of snakes around this neck of the woods too. It was all of this mixed up weather, they claimed. Anything was possible, but that was not their problem. Their job was simple enough. Ask no questions, and get enough people through expansive low-lying flood water in the flat lands in a transaction that implied: We can show you a thing or two about hardship if that’s what you want.

The job was simply this: keep the line from falling into deep flowing water: Stop anyone from being washed away. It was easy enough. The environmentalists and their families lived rough along the water’s edges like nesting swans or a colony of egrets, in makeshift rafts, or roughly-made reed huts. Even their babies knew how to cling to the watery nests, or the bosoms of their mothers. It helped to have lived numerous seasons with spreading water to remember how to stop being washed away. Still, it was always difficult to predict before a crossing began whether there was a likelihood of flash floods. The last-minute cancellation of a crossing was always imminent. Refugees would squat by the water’s edge in the rain until conditions settled, while the water-navigators argued the toss in numerous committee meetings about whether the water’s stability was a goer, so a journey could begin.

But it did not matter how adept these environmentalists were with the bush, or with travel through water, or whatever else they could do to save lives. They were not to be trusted in the least by the refugees of every nationality coalesced by flights from the ruined cities – young or old who were hardened fighters too. None of them wanted any extra favour for who they were or where they had originally come from, and being essentially numb about risk-taking, they asked no questions, and just told the people-smugglers to get on with it: All we want to do is head north. We don’t care what happens. Just do your job. Anything will be worth it. Just show us where the Aborigine people live. So for days, sometimes weeks, the lines of humanity walked knee-deep in yellow billowing water, and if the predictions were wrong, waist-deep or up to the neck of children, which left each person to figure out how to keep carrying the burden of treasured belongings. The leaders called, Say c’est la vie, or drown. Chuck it all. The trail was littered with submerged electronics, cartons of beer, some huge paintings that had become completely transformed by the mud, as did the books about birds or the high country, or any treasured books of philosophy, music, Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Usually, the only treasures that survived were animals. Many had brought along the family watchdog, their old daras, and these were left to swim alongside their owners or were carried, like those tagging along with the dog boys, hungry puppies stuffed under their jackets, among hundreds of street kids on the run. Someone had brought along their cow, the old beloved black and white bulaka. It was not like travelling on an aeroplane, or a catering bus. Forget that. Nobody had any food. No aeroplane. Budangku yalu julakiyaa. It was more like a self-serve journey, which meant everyone was constantly hungry, always too balika, looking for something to eat. The mortified travellers, who had not killed anything before, killed the cow finally. It was difficult to think of anything else. It was butchered in a frenzy in the water, and eaten raw, with no fire, budangku yalu jangu-yaa. Afterwards they had nothing. Not anything. Budangku yalu jumbala-yaa. Still, what was hunger to these people? They had always known hunger, and about this alone they cheerfully narrated their stories, rather optimistically, about how they were surviving on nothing: Yea! Who cares about hardship? It is just being cold and wet, that’s all, and being rained on, but was worth it.

The more enterprising street people who had pillaged poultry before leaving the city, had a ten out of ten chance of feeding themselves on the journey. These fowl thieves carried bantam roosters and treasured, egg-laying white silky hens stuffed inside their clothes, or a half dozen ducks, close to their hearts, and secretly hoarded the eggs.

The buskers of the city sung through hunger, and kept singing through the night to keep warm as the weary line walked on, while more water seeping out of distant hills and creeping along the crevices joined the flow of the flood on the flats. You could say that the country was a drain that wanted to drown strangers singing up its landscape.

Oblivia walked with her head down, but she also watched elderly men and women, and children holding cats, kinikini stuffed inside their jackets, trying to shield their pets from the savage attacks of dogs sniffing out anything they could eat. The dogs were often attacked with bamboo poles, which quickly escalated into brawls with the dog owners. The water leaders often lost control of the line when tempers flared over dogs, and the fighting broke into splinter groups.

Whenever skirmishes broke out, the line needed to be brought down to earth. A meeting was held in the water to break people into groups that related to each other. But lawlessness was what it was. People walked wherever, fought whoever and however, and often ended by walking off in all directions. Of course, there were consequences for anyone who thought they could make the crossing by themselves. Many were forcibly returned to the line. For others, it was important that the people they had paid to take them across did not walk off the job, or get killed.

With the journey headed deeper into the swamps, Oblivia walked with dozens of people with cages of birds whose song was a reminder of their old lives while they travelled towards the uncertain future. Nanny goats. Billy goats. A sheep. Someone with about a dozen p-ssycats stuffed under his jacket. Oblivia thought of the Machine. Perhaps he was somewhere, or still in the city. She carried in her arms a heavy fledging swan, having to mulamula it around all the time, inside her hoodie windcheater next to her knife. This was a half-grown cygnet that she called Stranger. The cygnet, like Rilke’s swan labouring with what could not be undone, had refused its destiny. It had no interest in swimming away, or to fly with its flock. The great flock of swans, wary of the dogs, kept a safe distance from the travellers, but Oblivia watched them swimming in the distance, or sometimes flying overhead, as though reassuring herself that she would not be abandoned.


Darkness would fall and the trails of bats, thousands flying overhead, heralded the worst time for the disintegrating line of people, calling to one another throughout the night, straying out of hearing range and becoming lost forever. Very soon, the weariness of the line became total exhaustion. Many felt there was no end, or way out. They became increasingly disoriented in the sea of water and began to hallucinate, many rushing towards the mirage of the Aboriginal people’s heaven they saw in the distance.

Only a few refugees from the city finally managed to reach the other side. The feral policemen leading the line, who abandoned the refugees that remained in their care, would eventually be arrested and placed on trial for people smuggling, but not for genocide, or mass murder, which were crimes thought to be so morally un-Australian, it was officially denied that anything like it ever happened, like in the rhetoric of the history wars era – genocide, a horrendous crime against humanity that was unheard of. It never happened. Not in this country.


The swan girl’s worry for the cygnet now hidden inside her clothes, under Warren Finch’s old windcheater, probably saved her. She walked with her head bent forward, trying to be unnoticeable amidst the dwindling groups of people. The Harbour Master looked very fearful with the frightened Rigoletto on his hip. He always knew where she was and crept up beside her again, and again. Get out, he demanded. You are First Lady, not bullock being led around. The line was struggling to stay together after days and days of tiredness and hunger, many falling by the wayside, unable to go on, with no one to help them.

There were murmurings, whisperings, and she could feel the primeval fear closing in as the crossing verged on mutiny. Anyone hiding animals was attacked. Groups of bandits moved alongside, picking off people they suspected were hiding food. There were numerous beatings of people unwilling to hand over their pets.


The dogs roamed freely, sniffing for food, attacking those carrying animals. The Harbour Master arrived wet and flustered with sheer frustration written all over his face. Why won’t you just go, he sneered at Oblivia, while adding, I am not staying. He pushed her, and she swayed to and fro, but held her ground. You are an idiot, he snarled in her face. Go now.

Oblivia feared that the dogs would eventually find the cygnet. All around, she heard the savage packs attacking people and their screams in splashing water. Even the swans overhead were terrified, and lost momentum in their flight. They swooped lopsidedly in terror. She felt fear with each step, expecting something to happen at any moment. It was too terrifying to be discovered escaping, she had seen other people being cast aside for not being obedient to the discipline of the crossing. But, when it was time to go, she disappeared quietly, in the moments when the black swan cloud flew across the line of travelling people, covering the moon-lit water. She closed her ears to the sounds of the collapsing world behind her, and kept walking under the cloud of swans moving slowly just above the water, their loud beating wings creating a mad turbulence in the water that kept her camouflaged. Never turning once, she would not look back.


The only person who lived on the water amongst the flooded trees where no one ever goes was an old Chinese hermit. He lived on an island of sticks that looked like an enormous swan’s nest. His white hair and whiskers were filled with sticks too. As usual, he was hoping to catch a fish, singing that old 1960s song Wishin’ and Hopin’, just like he always did to paint the sky gold with the memory of Dusty Springfield’s voice. He was thoroughly besotted with the singer, and his feeling had only grown stronger since the first time he had seen her singing the song illegally in a dream of long ago, which hum! made him run from China.

The fish were still not biting when the wing beats of swans flying low across the water through the dawn fog were so close to his ears that he could feel the spirit of Dusty Springfield singing her Wishin’ and Hopin’ in the breeze coming straight from their straining wings, and her trumpeter bugling in their calls, and the drums rolling in their heartbeats. It was just another amazing all-bells-ringing kind of day living with his idol and it was all too joyous, but then! down in the fog something moved. He thought he had seen ghosts. These ghosts kept walking towards him through the fog and shaking up the water, so he waited, and kept on singing his Wishin’ and Hopin’ song. It was too late for obsessing, to make his cares fade away because these all jumped and rolled in his stomach. When he saw it was just an old man carrying a monkey he thought he was lucky, but when he saw a girl who was the First Lady of whatnot, and with a cygnet as well? Well! He thought he was just too plain luckless for words.

He called to the strangers, This is where you must go to enter another country, but they just kept walking with the ghost wind blowing them towards where he pointed. When he realised they were not going to stop to speak to him, he called after them about his secret love for Dusty Springfield and how he was remembering her voice forever out there on the water. He believed they were ghosts though, and watched them go on their way until they disappeared into the watery horizon.

Later when he caught a fairly medium-sized fish, unlike the tiddlers that he usually caught to feed himself, he believed that the only real ghosts he had ever seen in his life had brought him luck. So, he sent a bit of his luck their way too, wishing the ghosts heading into the desert reached wherever they were going, and hoping that the Harbour Master found a camel to ride on the long journey – to show them that you care just for them, sing the songs they want to sing… The old Chinese man’s singing to his songstress in the sky must have been a lucky thing, the Harbour Master told the wet and sorry Rigoletto after they were saved by the weather. The group was still walking in floodwater when the skies turned black with heavy clouds, and very soon afterwards they were walking through a mad storm. A torrential downpour flew like a wild river in the wind. The big cygnet refused to swim and Oblivia had to stuff it back under her shirt. She could feel its heart thumping with her heart, but kept walking as though nothing was unusual in calamity. Well! The monkey knew about monsoons, and clung to the neck of the Harbour Master who was salubriously humming the highs and lows, and speed and caution, of Weber’s Op. 34 Clarinet Quintet in B flat – although he was packing it really. The wind and rain blew so hard onto their backs that they raced along in the direction the Chinese man had pointed to, and where, soon enough, they were thrown out of the water and at the two-toed feet of a big fat camel standing in mud.

Lo and behold! The Aboriginal man on the camel spoke wisely – because he was supposed to – as he welcomed the strangers to his country. His pet cicada chirruped a song from under the piece of canvas that covered its cage when the camel man asked his talking companion for long journeys, since the camel did not speak, Will you carry the monkey man and his soggy looking pet, or will we let the old camel do the job? The cicada did not appear to have a direct answer to such a stupid question, if you could interpret the melody that remained unchanged to an ordinary ear not trained in interpreting how insects speak.

The Harbour Master was very weak from his ordeal, but still protective of the girl, and being an important man of another place, he bluntly asked the camel man, Which one are you mate? Gaspar, Balthazar or Melchior? And is this the gate of Heaven or what? Perhaps the camel man did look like one of the three wise men.



He was dressed in a thick green cotton shirt and red trousers – clothes stained reddish brown from the bush, while over his shoulders fell a large animal-skin cloak that protected him from the rain. His eagle-feathered cap was also fashioned from animal skin but it was now soaked with the rain that washed down his face and through his black beard, and over the seed necklaces hanging over his shirt.

The camel man said he was neither wise man, nor in Heaven. Introducing himself, he said the name that people usually called him was Half Life, and he offered no other explanation. I’m from blackfella land. My kingdom is right where you lot are standing. You got anybody else coming behind you? When Oblivia glared at him as though he must have been mad, he sat the camel down and quickly slid off. The Harbour Master was the one he helped first. Old man you ride on top. No more walking for you now, he said. Girl, you get up there too with that goose. He threw the animal-skin cloak over them, and handed over his flask, as well as a large piece of wattle-seed damper from a bag kept around his waist. The camel, unhappy with having to be sat down in the mud in the twenty-first century, was fidgeting with its mouth harness, spitting and oozing snot from its nostrils, and turning its long neck around to sniff and fuss about having mud in its fur, but with a quietly spoken word from Half Life, the animal quietly rose to its feet.

We follow the track the ancestors of mine made. Look who is here, he told his country. There was nothing more spoken in the rain journey ahead. Half Life needed to sing to his kin people their country’s songs with his cicada brother, as much as to the camel that seemed to enjoy ancestor music while it went sauntering on its way.


All journeys on the ghost walk are hard and long. There was no way around it. One can travel forty days and forty nights across deserts in bloom or drought, or a month of Sundays of eating nothing else but hares and rabbits roasted over a fire at night, but it was all the same.

Just be careful with my people though, or they will spook the bloody wind out of you. My theory about surviving a day with them is always take short breaths so you don’t miss it if they try to floor the life out of you. This was how Half Life introduced his people. You have to be related to people like this to love them.


This is a real sacred place here, Half Life said as they came into view of their destination – a camp of his kin-people living in the ruins of concrete-block buildings and rusted car bodies that were half buried with red desert soil, and from which grew clumps of spinifex, salt bush, native herb bushes, or the odd bare bush tomato and leaf-eaten bush banana, and the scrappy coolibah tree here and there – nothing to build a door with. Burrs and prickles covered the ground like a dense lawn, as well as chewed-up pig weed and twig-like arid country plants for the bull ants to trail through. Only salt soakages lay beyond to every horizon.

This is big Law here. We always come back. Spirits of our people live here. Ghosts living in abandoned car bodies. Some of them inside those old crap houses. Built by that top of the country’s last government of self-serving politicians before it chucked the dummy and went bust when nobody bothered voting for them anymore. Nah! You wouldn’t be bothered voting for people like that. They were like a bloody soap opera. Well! It’s entr’acte times now. Better enjoy it before the next comedy of errors, another era with another round of tragedians and thespians mouthing off, and traipsing around on our block again, dragging us backwards through another bloody century of destruction. Our elders bring everyone here so that we can hear the Law of our people from the country itself telling us a strong story about what happened to them. What they do. Oh! Sad alright, some of those stories. But good ones there too. You can hear children dancing in the moonlight, rock-n-roll and shake a leg. Laughing. Those were the days. Make you want to cry how memories come looking for you. We move on again in a few days time. Palace next time maybe.


What was the point of complaining about how life had become? If all that was left of your traditional lands were tailing dams and polluted pond life, and the place looking like a camel’s cemetery? Still! No need to go around complaining because there is nothing left running in your brains except your bare-ass country and a pack of scrub donkeys, said Half Life. This is how we see life. Look around. Those donkeys follow us wherever we go. The ground looked as though it was crawling, but it wasn’t a miracle. It was a catastrophe. These were cursed people. Their worldly companions were a plague of Rattus villosissimus – the long-haired ugly rat – crawling grasshoppers, Locusta migratoria, and the flying ants swarming in the soup.

Oblivia looked at the ground-crawling camp and saw it was nothing special to freak out about, if that was what you thought about rat- and insect-swatting nomads looking as weather-beaten and wind-blown as she was herself. All of them living with sandyblight eyes among thousands of wild camels and feral donkeys surrounding the camp, which Half Life explained, just kept following them through life.

We are Aboriginal herds-people with bloodlines in us from all over the world, he added, and dreamily listed all the world’s continents that he could remember being related to these days, Arabian, African, Asian, Indian, European all sorts, pure Pacific Islander – anywhere else I didn’t mention? Well! That as well! Whereever! Even if I haven’t heard of it! No matter – we got em right here inside my blood. I am thick with the spirits from all over the world that I know nothing about. Nah! Man! We don’t live on their tucker though. Here it’s bush tucker all the way if we can yank it out of the mouths of these ferals running around and breeding up like plagues of rats, flies, insects whatever; no matter we got em, and that’s why we are trying to eradicate all these mongrel hares and English rabbits from being one less of a plague on the face of the country by eating every chemically deranged single bugger of them. It’s like their spirit will not go away unless we eat em. Of course that’s some other country mob business but what can we do! What Law? Nothing! We are retarded people now because of the history of retardation policy mucking everyone up. Leaking radioactivity. Crap politics from long ago. Must have been a madhouse then. Glad to be rid of them. That we survive at all is just a bloody fluke of human nature. Got the picture, if so, then you are welcome, if not, I reckon you got no alternative really out here and whatnot for understanding surviving.

Anyone could see that the community was one big, buzzing hive of activity where busy Aboriginal tribes-people never stopped working. They were as driven as the millions of flies that infested the camp, and you could betcha one thing: these people would strike an accord with the ghosts of a century or more worth of politicians and policy makers of Australian governments. It had been bigot country then. They would be smiling on these camel entrepreneurial people, and saying success at last. For here, every individual seemed totally obsessed with being some kind of economic independence human success story in an Australianmade hell. There were people bumping into each other all day long to discuss or argue about the plagues of feral animals. Who was looking after the barn owls? How the camels were penned or not penned, watered and fed, who could use which one or that one, or why one camel was more worthy or trustworthy than another. In short – worrying about every aspect of domesticating the animals once imported into the country by other people, that they were not eating.


Rigoletto hid under an iron bed and stayed well and truly out of the way while the mostly leather-skin-clothed women and children that looked more like animals to the monkey were endlessly chasing donkeys in the rain, or wrestling them like wet squawking sponges to the ground, or whipping them senseless to make them move away from the camp. Why these donkeys wanted to hang around these people was a complete mystery to the Harbour Master and he yelled out in vain, Why don’t you let the baby Jesus’ donkeys alone? So he was told to shut the f*ck up. What tradition, the Harbour Master wanted to know, talked like that to old men? He ended up arguing constantly with the women who had been looking after him but now treated him like a donkey too.

The camp itself was strewn with carcasses of hares and rabbits or any other feral creatures thrown on the woodpile. It was hard to establish if there were enough people who would be able to eat all this food before the camp moved on. Then there were the pelts in various stages of being tanned or turned into items of clothing – cloaks and caps like Half Life wore, as well as shoes, saddles and ropes. At night it was no different, for no one slept a wink in the bevy of ceremonial singing and hunting, or packing up and moving camp. Why waste time sleeping when far into a wet rainy night, all the able-bodied huntsmen and women rode off on their camels, with each person carrying a pet owl as their night hunter, and only returning hours later loaded with a hundred and fifty or more rabbits and hares strung over the camels’ backs? This was why the one big over-worked feral shebang was monotonously the same, routine and endless.

At least you got somewhere, and all we have to do is keep going, that’s all, the Harbour Master explained to the emaciated girl, although he could see the bony thing was not listening to him. He felt she was dying, and admitted that she had been too high maintenance for him as he sang to the country’s spirits, long, long songs, that went across the country to her homeland. There was nothing more he could do. She lived in her own world with the cygnet that had now grown into a swan. There was too much noise in the camel community, and it made it harder for her to hold her thoughts together before they were forgotten. She could hardly remember what happened on the day that Warren Finch was assassinated. The images were like those recalled from a dream that flashed in her mind and were instantly forgotten. Her life in the city seemed to have coalesced into a stream of forgetting, of what happened so far away, and of memories that seemed implausible, or too hideous, and almost irreverent to be thought about in this place. So Oblivia and the swan sat in their own little corner of this shifting world, out of the way of being trampled by the industrious people and their animals. The camel people were pursuing their own course, in its own order of mayhem and hassle, which was oblivious to having her, or any outsider in its midst.

Oblivia turned her head away when the groups of children came by all day long to touch the swan and to throw it some food, the bits of damper and grass seeds still attached to stems they had collected for it. They were full of questions, asking why she was looking after the swan, where she came from, what she was doing just sitting by herself for? Why are you mental? Irritably, she quickly shooed each group off one by one, with the language of a stick angrily prodded at them, only to end up with even larger groups of children whiling away the time by sitting in front of her and copying her every move, the hostile way she stared at them, and teasingly throwing stones over her head – giggling for the stick to be chucked around, until their parents called them off for more chores – to hurry up and get going, while leaving her to make her own decisions about life. It was up to her. Entirely. Everyone was free to have their own thoughts about where they belonged or what they needed to do. There were only two options: live or die. Make your own decision. They knew the girl’s heart was faraway from them, and assumed she was thinking about her own country.

Whenever Half Life walked by, he glanced at the huddle on the ground, noticed she was still there, and thought that perhaps he should see what was happening to her – whether her spirits were up or down. He thought she was crying. What would she cry about? Was she crying about that prick Warren Finch? Half Life had heard on the radio that the beloved missing First Lady, now hailed as the heart of the nation, had joined the illegals travelling through the country, and thought it could have been her, but he said nothing. Who needed the fuss? He thought that he could have done with a wife himself, but he was far too occupied with the work that needed to be done. They all were. He had no time for standing around talking about life, marriage, raising a family. This was sorry business. They were mourning here. And tomorrow, they would mourn somewhere else. No! He did not want any children. Would he have to guard them with his life on his own country, lest the government took them away from him?

All she did, other than burying her head inside her jacket under her arms folded around her knees, was to look at the skies becoming clearer, as though it was there where she had to search for a road out, the road that emerged half-heartedly before disappearing again, that would only become fully visible when the swans arrived. She had become more eager to leave, to continue the journey before it was too late. She grew impatient and weaker. Conjuring her journey back to the swamp was hard work. It exhausted her. She hardly ate, and could only think of herself as one of the swans flying towards her, while niggling voices in her mind kept reminding her the time had come if she and the swans were to make the journey north to the swamp before summer set in, otherwise they would all die on the way. You want to die out here? Like all those other women?

She thought about death. Visualised the journey towards dying, and thought this was how Warren had planned to abandon her after all – just like other men who had dumped their disappointing wives in the bush. Left them to die. Only their bones were leaning against a tree somewhere, and those poor things still waving towards home for an eternity. At this point, she thought Bella Donna’s story must really be about the last swan arriving back at the swamp with one of her bones in its beak, bringing it home. If this was so, so be it. She would be dead, that would be the end of her grand old love story, a fable of what happened after Warren Finch was killed, when his ‘promise wife’ was so heart-broken, she ran off and died in the desert. The missing First Lady. The enigma. Her body never found. She would be like Lasseter’s Reef. Adventurers would just about kill themselves in the desert while trekking around the place searching for her. She would become a legend in the bastions of Australian civil society interested in the anthropological studies of Aboriginal people, just as long as it appeased the dark theories of a discipline that kept on describing the social norms of Aboriginal men as dangerous and violent. They would speculate about her bones in absentia, and wonder whether she really was a child bride – just a little girl – so they could experience the sensation of charging Warren Finch posthumously with incest, pornography and raping a child; or whether or not the bones were of an ancient woman, or of an assimilated woman; or of somebody with sapwood-imbued bones who really could have slept for a very long time in a tree – just like that Rip Van Winkle fellow – yes, the bones of a girl who had never really matured, never fully grown. Well! How could you tell? It was hard to imagine. Why wouldn’t she show Warren Finch who was the greatest? Yes, it was easy to think about dying. Would you call just lying down in the grass to die revenge, pay-back, or a suicidal act?



So she waited more and more impatiently for the swans to arrive, becoming more fearful, and feeling more dependent on them to guide her safely through the laws of the country, the spirits who were the country itself – if they were still alive, and flying towards this isolated camel people’s camp, a speck in the vastness of an undetermined landscape for those unable to read it, frightened at the prospect of having to attempt the journey alone through unknown territories without a guide to clear the path to her country. Then one day, when the caravan of people, camels and donkeys finally realised its intention of leaving when the soakages dried out and actually left during a surprise rain shower and followed the rainbow, nobody noticed she had been left behind.

The Harbour Master was the first one you could blame for negligence when he left with the camel people. He was a ghost of a man too preoccupied with losing the magic of lightning-speed travel. He was old-fashioned. One of those types too overcome with disappointment for this new world. He had to reach his destination in God speed. How could he think of travelling an eternity with camels and donkeys for God knows how many days, months, or friggen years? Sweet Dreams Baby! His destination was what? thousands of kilometres away – think of Heaven. And Heaven was not the next waterhole up the road, which dying camels and old nomads thought was good enough to call it a day after walking all day long in the sun. His spiritual resting place was his own chosen place, where huge angels that were called something good like Prosperity and Eternity watched over monkey country. His eternal resting place was not going to be in any barren wasteland that kept being killed off by political stupidity.

Anyhow, you only had to take a look at little Rigoletto in the pelting rain for pity’s sake. He was too wound up and frightened about being trampled by wet, frisky camels running about, to come out from his hidey-hole under the iron-frame bed. The little monkey sat motionless with his arms tightly folded around himself. He looked like a rock. He clutched his possessions to his chest. What? The stories? Worried in case a camel or donkey would try to eat his stories?

Yes! The Harbour Master could only dream of getting away from the spinifex shrubbery, the claustrophobic way this landscape can close in, surround, ensnarl. He clung to the monkey hope of living the high life on the balconies of the eternal white marble palace. On the Taj Mahal, Rigoletto would move gracefully through time, shaking the hands of passing tourists with his lips stretched back and through baring teeth, telling a good story. This dream of escaping was worth…Millions! Can you imagine Rigoletto? Millions of people handing over peanuts, bananas, pomegranates, oranges and the whole apple cart to hear a little monkey snarling through one of his favourite stories about living a thousand and one nights of hell with the Harbour Master. We will never go hungry if we live in a palace, would we, Rigoletto? But to get there, they would have to survive the journey through a lot of country with the camels Half Life described were destined for the ships exporting them to foreign markets. It seemed like a bit of a plan.