The Swan Book

Marsh Lake Swans





So holy and beautiful to behold this country where the swans flew hillock over hillock as far as the eye could see along a rolling landscape of saltbush, stubby plants, pittosporum, emu bush and flowering eremophilas.

Their flight having begun at the old abandoned botanical gardens in the city so long ago, it was a journey foretold, clear in the oldest swan to the youngest cygnet – the flight through thousands of kilometres from the southern coast to a northern swamp.


Bushfires came in walls across their path. As the grasslands burned, the swans flew high, sailing through winds gusting above the smoke in a journey a thousand metres up in their dreaming of home. Each kilometre was achieved by wing flapping and slow glide through floating ashes that flickered with fire and dazzle-danced the sky in the full-throated blizzard of heat flying over the hills, before falling on the country beneath. The swans, their strength crippled, breathed hot smoke-filled air, and the smell of their own singed feathers crawled into their lungs. Wrapped in fear, they whistle up the dead to see how they are going, before surrendering to the air, plummeting thousands of metres down into the fire. It tested the will of their wings flapping slower, almost unconsciously, instinctively remaining airborne.

It happened this way, until the remaining bony creatures find they are descending into the stagnant, blue-green algae blooms of a flooded plain where the trunks of dead trees are a reminder of what was once a forest. Then they continue, the swans flying through seasons and changes in the weather, and over travelling refugees, and the fence posts of flooded and then bone-dry lands. It was as if the ancestors had pulled the swans across the skies, passing them on to the spirits of gibber plains, ironstone flats, claypans, salt lakes and drifts, towards a sacred rendezvous – a tabula rasa place – where all of the world’s winds come eventually and curl in ceremony, and where Oblivia waited at the camel camp amidst the drying soakages, to be cleansed for entering another country.


She whistled to them; tried to blow music from the flute, a swan tune that dances around the hills. It was old Bella Donna’s swan-bone flute she had always worn around her neck just like the old woman did before she died. The flute was made from the wing bone of a Mute Swan and had been in Bella Donna’s overseas family for generations. It could have been a thousand years old. Only the cygnet the girl had carried in the crossing had gently played with the bone in its beak, otherwise these days, the girl treated the small wing bone like a necklace, a walkuwalku hanging over her clothes or over her back – the only belonging left from her home on the hull. She knew the sound was known to be sacred to swans. You can’t use something like this for fun. Her music danced on among the din of winds rustling through the grass and ruby saltbush; and the swans flew down to rest among the arum lilies on an insect-infested marsh lake.


Miracles are funny things. The Harbour Master looked around for his miracles every day, but only saw the reality of living rough as guts with the herds-people sipping tea in the rain with all those camels moving about them with a plague of stink beetles, and women and children slinging stones at the donkeys they said were feral-ing up the place. He said that those favourites of his the Prosperity and Eternity angels had lost their minds if they thought this was it. But what was life if you could not have hope? Maybe the angels had forgotten to bring his miracles in the way of first-class airline tickets so he and Rigoletto could fly off to the heavenly marble palace. Maybe they had lazed about and dropped the bloomin’ requested miracles off at the wrong place. He blamed history for making him think these mongrelised depressing thoughts.


The swans welcomed into the country’s song now spent days in the swamp while it never stopped raining. They danced the water, stirring it up, even at night with wings spread wide, lifting and dropping as they ran along the surface of the water, as though dancing in wing-exercising movements. In this way they communicate with each other – while the girl watches, knowing how she must read the country now as they do to follow them home. Then once more, the swans fly, and dance the rainy skies above the swampland, and return, skimming across the water to land.

This ceremony of swans continued, where together in mass blackness, they swam in circles. Reeds and water lilies become trampled. The swans pause, then lift themselves out of the water to stretch the white tipped wings that beat quicker, faster, as more circles are made with wings and tails splashing, and synchronising heads dipping under water, webbed feet kicking up water as they move, then the pulse is broken, and the huge body of swans breaks up and reforms.


Wings beat the water on one side, but when they switch sides, the beat of the other wing changes the tone of the music. They are almost prepared for flight. Oblivia follows them into the water and the swans observe her as though she is a newly-hatched cygnet. Hour by hour, after dipping deep in the water to forage for weeds, they glide towards her to drop their offerings with little bugling sounds, until they can see that she is surrounded by floating weeds. She sleeps on the wet land among the grass at night, while the majority of swans continue the unbroken ceremony, but there are always swans resting beside her, necks curled over their backs and asleep, raindrops falling over feathers, heads nestled under wings.


It was at night, after an icy wind had descended from out of nowhere in the middle of the day to push the temperature down to zero, and the ground had become frozen, that finally with the wind running along the ground like a spirit, the swans flew away from the leaf-littered water.

The night was alive with the sound of thousands of wings and noisy bugling when the swans were ready to go. From up high flying slowly, they were buffeted in the wind, looking down to the land stretched before them. Circling in the sky, the black cloud began diving, and swooping low over Oblivia, they pushed her to go.

Again the Gypsy Swans moved to be gone, but only if she was following them. There could be no going back through the face of a gale. No more circling in wind. It had to be now. Oblivia thought that she was in the sky, flying, and could not remember the journey. She and the swans were caught in the winds of a ghost net dragged forward by the spirits of the country. The long strands of hair flying among the swans, holding them together, and those long strands capturing her, made her fly too, close to the ground, across the country.

When dawn broke, the winds had disappeared, and the swans and the girl had arrived at another water-laden swamp land of water lilies and ant-covered grasses spilling in the air with a million flies and moths, and where only bird-infested coolibah trees dotted the landscape. It was land screaming with all of its life to the swans, Welcome to our world. All the spirits yelled to the girl to eat the water lilies. It was land where the swans would rest, then dance this country too, where the same frosty evening would take hold, before bringing the old wind people up, and again, the swans would have to leave, lifting off, circling and pulling the girl along, before the wind set the pace and blew them forward. The journey could only continue this way for the months it would take before the winds stopped coming at night.


Then the winds grow warmer and disappear in the atmosphere laden with dust. Without a breeze, the land becomes so still and lonely in the silence, you know that the spirits have left the skies. It does not rain any more. The land dries. Every living thing leaves in the seemingly never-ending journeys that migrating creatures take, just like those herds of deer that Bella Donna remembered for marching flat out across vast deserts and forsaken tundra, to where the swamp had perished.

All now shared the spirit of the drought, like the skin-and-bone swans still trying to fly until all that was left were the empty bags of feathers that fall from the sky. Most did not fly again. Oblivia thought she could call the swans away and continue on. Her thoughts were full of their stories. She stood in the mirage and recited the poets’ lines to the swans’ beauty – Keats, Baudelaire, Neruda, Heaney – but their poetry stayed in the stillness where she stood, recalling McAuley’s swan flying to quit the shore… That headed its desire no more.

There were stranded swans scattered all over the open bush, among the spinifex, caught on power lines, on the edges of dried-up soaks and inland lakes. If you were there you would have seen them everywhere. But the main flock struggled on, continued flying during the night.

In hotter skies, their wings beat faster in desperation until finally, they become completely disoriented. They lose faith in their journey. They lose each other. The remaining swans fly in every direction in search of the last drying water holes. They stand on baked earth and hiss at the sky they cannot reach, then the time arrives when no more sound comes from their open beaks. The weak, feather-torn necks drop to the ground, and eventually, with wings spread they wait for the spirit flight.





Epilogue

The Swan Country





All the raspy-voice myna birds have come here, to this old swamp, where the ghost swans now dance the yellow dust song cycles of drought. Around and around the dry swamp they go with their webbed feet stomping up the earth in a cloud of dust, and all the bits and pieces of the past unravelled from parched soil.

A crew of myna birds foraging the waste toss useless trinkets this way and that. The prickly pear trees that had grown up, and all the rusted junk scattered across the bone-dry swamp, were the sort of places where only the myna birds lived.

From a safe distance, you could hear these birds swearing at the grass in throwback words of the traditional language for the country that was no longer spoken by any living human being on the Earth. While crowding the stillness the little linguists with yellow beaks sang songs about salvaging and saving things, rearranging sound in a jibber-jabbering loudness. All the old sounds were like machinery that rattled and shook while continuously being reworked into a junket of new pickings. In this mood – Well! You had to hear these soothsaying creatures creating glimpses of a new internationally dimensional language about global warming and changing climates for this land. Really listen hard to what they were saying.

One day, all that will be left of old languages will be what has been vaulted up in the brainwashed minds of myna birds. They listen to every single sound, but all that they will remember of the English language of these times, will be the most commonly used words you would have heard to try to defeat lies in this part of the world. Just short words like Not true.


Oblivia sat on the hull with her old Stranger swan dozing on her lap, and through the reddened haze of midday she gazed across the ravaged landscape that had once been a swamp. Trees that were long dead creaked sometimes, but after a while, only the duststained First Lady of whatnot spoke to the drought.

She was not surprised when the drought echoed her words in the North country’s open space. Why wouldn’t it speak back to her? It was a close relative who had always lived in the same house. They echoed each other: Listen, Hard Up! No-hearted cruel thing! Lucky for me with no words left to come into my mouth that I got back.

Having lived in the dry country for several thousands of years, the ghostly spectre of the drought woman had seen as many generations born and die and when those beautiful swans rose up one day to the skies and disappeared, it broke the water lilies and weed-covered lagoon, pulled itself out of its resting place, and filled the atmosphere from coastline to coastline of rotted tree stumps, flat plains, or solemn river bends across the country. Then it continued in the southerly direction that the birds had flown.

In its far-flung search for the swans, the slow-moving drought left behind smouldering ashes and soil baked by the dryness, and the whole country looking as though it had been turned over with a pick and flattened with a shovel. When the swans were found, the drought turned around on its hot heels and howling winds, while fires blew smoke across the lands on fast moving currents, and came back to the swamp.

Oblivia claimed that party time was over at dustbowl, and told the drought she was jack sick of it.

You got your old job back. I am giving this last black swan back to you, and to tell you the truth of the matter, I am done with carrying it around with me. You look after this swan, she ordered. His name is Stranger. Thinks he doesn’t belong in drought country. See if you can make more swans from this old pensioner.


The drought woman seared the atmosphere like ancient chastising aunties anywhere across the world from the back of beyond, and screeched: Don’t drop the swan.

A jamuka whirlwind jumped in Oblivia’s face from out of nowhere, swung through the door of the abandoned hull of the warship still sitting in the dry clay, and stood in front of the First Lady thing nursing that black swan on her lap. Oblivia always sensed the way old fingers work, that were now invisibly examining the swan she was holding next to her chest.

Feathers ruffle across the bird’s back, on its breast, along its neck – in a manner suggesting all was not well, of things not being done good enough, of things not being taken care of properly. A pondering turbulence circled in the hull, where pots and pans were slammed, creating an impression of foul nature for as long as it went on being a din, while another sound coming up from underneath, a jarring song, was being sung with words that were vaguely familiar to her. Strange melodies abruptly begin and end, as heavier things of her old abandoned home are slammed on the floor.

A creepy voice full of dust said exactly what Oblivia already thought about the old wreckage of scraps: There and there for one thing! Feathers properly wind damaged, frayed, singed and all that – can’t walk. The drought woman told her of all people, You have to carry the swan. Oblivia thought she was being put upon by some proper big dependency that was now far too much for her, and she snapped at the swan, That was the big problem about being a survivor swan – outliving your lifespan, getting too fond of gobbling up the muck in the sewerage ponds of life, and not laying down and dying like the others!


The old swan leader kept throwing back his head over his wing, and his long neck flowed like a snake resting over his black plumed body. His eye canvassing the landscape like a stranger trying to find the quickest way out of the place. The huge bird was never the same after losing his flock. It found being alone unbearable. It never stopped looking for the other swans. It was the kind of creature that belonged in old Banjo Paterson’s poem about black swans, perpetually straining for the sound of wings beating, of lagging mates in the rearward flying. The old swan’s red beak clicked twice, then as time passed, as it does but not for nothing, it clicked three times, or perhaps, twice again. The swan had some strange equation going on in its head. This continuous clicking of his beak exaggerated even greater numbers of swans he anticipated would return in his ghostly rendition of what life once was.

Oblivia sensed that he was waiting for the equivalent of one thousand years of swans, an immense flock, one that was capable of overcoming all adversity, but she told him straight in the eye to give up. They have all gone now and finished up, and none are coming back. Talk like this grieved the swan. It swooned and dropped its neck to the ground. To see the swan like this made the girl feel sick of the virus thing talking in her head, and telling her that she and the swan were joined as companions, of being both caught up in a mal de mer from the yellow waves of dust spreading over the land. The old swan would have to fight to win back control, to settle the dust, and return the rain. He was old now, but the girl tells him: If I could fly high up in the atmosphere like you instead of swilling around in dust storms, I’d make it rain.

But how in the hell would I know? Its belligerence was unbelievable.


It was not interested in saving the world. Defying everything. How would she keep telling the swan another million times that the lake was gone, having to hold its beating heart closer to prevent its wings from spreading in a swim through the dust, treading it like water, and whispering the truth: Deader than a doornail! Drier than Mars! Don’t you see that it is all bulldust out there?

Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.


They say that the gift from God kept getting out of his grave after Warren Finch was finally buried in his country, beside the river of that time long ago when he first saw a swan. The story goes, He wanted to give his promised wife some gift. Oh! Yes! He still had power of eating the brains of politicians. That was why there were no smart politicians in the country any more. It was really true.

It was just fate that brought him back. On the face of it, his body could have been anywhere else on the planet by now, if the semitrailer’s axle hadn’t broken down on a bad day in the North, and the mad driver hadn’t called it a day by dragging the heavy sassafras coffin out into the boiling heat that one last time, and telling Warren Finch, I am going to bury you here you bastard, and be done with it, then I am going home.


This might be the same story about some important person carrying a swan centuries ago, and it might be the same story in centuries to come when someone will carry a swan back to this ground where its story once lived. Well! Talk about acts of love. A place where white whirlwinds full of bits of dry grass and leaves blew in ashes from a tinder dry giant eucalypt, where a swan once flew in clouds of smoke from fire spreading through the bush land, with a small slither of bone in its beak.

It has been said by the few heart-broken-homes people, mungkuji left for that kala country, who come back from time to time to visit the swamp after Warren Finch had the place destroyed, and they had seen the girl wife, First Lady of whatnot, Oblivion Ethyl(ene), that she always stayed like a wulumbarra, teenage girl. Well! She walks around the old dry swamp pretty regularly they say, and having seen her where there is a light moving over the marshes in the middle of the night, like a will-o’-the-wisp, they thought that they had heard her screaming, kayi, kayi kala-wurru nganyi, your country is calling out for you, which they described was just like listening to a sigh of a moth extending out over the landscape, or a whisper from the scrub ancestor catching a little stick falling from a dead tree, although nothing that could truly be heard – just a sensation of straining to hear something, which understandably, was how anyone should whisper on this spirit-broken place, from seeing their old homes scattered to kingdom come, of being where the Army owned everything, every centimetre of their traditional land, every line of buried song, stories, feelings, the sound of their voices, and every word spoken loudly on this place now.

There is a really big story of that ghost place: a really deadly love story about a girl who has a virus lover living in some lolly pink prairie house in her brain – that made the world seem too large and jittery for her, and it stuffed up her relationships with her own people, and made her unsociable, but they say that she loved swans all the same. Poor old swanee. You can see swans sometimes, but not around this place. It is a bit too hot and dry here. Jungku ngamba, burrangkunu-barri. We’re sitting down in the heat now. It’s really just sand-mountain country. Like desert! Maybe Bujimala, the Rainbow Serpent, will start bringing in those cyclones and funnelling sand mountains into the place. Swans might come back. Who knows what madness will be calling them in the end?





A Note on Sources





Quotations embedded in the text of The Swan Book are from the following sources: Robert Adamson, ‘After William Blake’ (p v); A.B. Paterson, ‘Black Swans’ (p 6); Bari Karoly, ‘Winter Diary’, in Leopard V: An Island of Sound, London, Harvill, 2004, (p 25); W.B. Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ (pp 28-29); Richard Wagner, Lohengrin, Act 1 (p 28); John Shaw Neilson, ‘The Poor, Poor Country’ (p 53); Seamus Heaney, ‘Postscript’, in The Spirit Level, London, Faber, 1996 (p 77); James McAuley, ‘Canticle’ in Collected Poems 1936–1970, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1971 (p 111); ‘Song (March 1936)’, in Tell Me the Truth About Love: Fifteen Poems by W.H. Auden, London, Faber, 1994 (p 135); Paterson, ‘Black Swans’ (p 157); David Hollands, Owls, Frogmouths and Nightjars of Australia, Melbourne, Bloomings Books, 2008 (p 165); The Kalevala, trans John Martin Crawford, Cincinnati, The Robert Blake Company, 1910 (p 168); William Wordsworth ‘An Evening Walk’ (p 175); E.B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan, New York, Harper Collins, 1970 (p 195); W.B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’ (p 202); Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself, 33’ Leaves of Grass, Book III (p 218); Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Dying Swan’ (p 239); Douglas Stewart, from Images from the Monaro: For David Campbell, in Letters Lifted into Poetry – Selected correspondence between David Campbell and Douglas Stewart 1946–1979, ed Jonathan Persse, Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2006, p 226, (p 239); Shivananda Goswami, Baul song, in Mimlu Sen, The Honey Gatherers, London, Rider Books, 2010 (p 239); Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Now, When you Awaken, Remember’, in The Butterfly’s Burden, trans Fady Joudah, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 2007 (p 240); Heaney, ‘Postscript’ (p 240); Leonard Cohen, ‘The Traitor’ from Recent Songs, Columbia, 1979 (p 240); W.B. Yeats, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (p 264); Hank Williams, ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’, song by Fred Rose, recorded 1951 (p 284); Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Swan, to Victor Hugo’, trans Roy Campbell, in Poems of Baudelaire, New York, Pantheon, 1952 (p 290); Ch’i-chi, ‘Stopping at night at Hsiang-Yin’, trans Burton Watson, in The Clouds Should Know Me By Now – Buddhist poet monks of China, ed. Red Pine and Mike O’Connor, Boston, Wisdom Publications, 1990 (p 302); James McAuley, ‘Nocturnal’, in Collected Poems 1936–1970, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1971 (p 326).






Acknowledgements





I would like to express my gratitude and respect to my countryman Kevin Cairns, Chairman, and the Board of the Waanyi Nation Aboriginal Corporation, for your kind permission to use the Waanyi Language Dictionary.

Thank you to Aboriginal traditional landowners and elders of the Coorong, Ellen and Tom Trevollow, for your generosity, friendship, and guidance.

My gratitude to Professor Raoul Mulder, Department of Zoology, University of Melbourne, for research material on the behavior and ecology of black swans; Ray Chatto, Parks, Wildlife and Conservation, Northern Territory, for invaluable information about brolgas in Northern Australia; Bernard Blood, Curator of Lake Wendoree in Ballarat, for your wonderful story of swans returning to the lake after the drought.

I have watched swans in many places, and learnt the best place to see swans on the Liffy in Dublin from a truly amused interviewer at RTé Raidió na Gaeltachta. I learnt from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Postscript’, displayed at Dublin airport, that if I wanted to see swans, I should look on the Flaggy Shore in County Clare. Many friends, colleagues, and family members very kindly and thoughtfully told stories, sent information, and swan presents, including music inspired by swans, or poetry, photos, pictures, objects, books, and life size statues of swans. Thank you Hal Wolton, Sudha Ray, Forrest Holder, Jeff Hulcombe, Ann Davis, Murrandoo Yanner, Evelyn Juers, Andreas Campomar, Benoit and Christine Gruter, Steve Morwell, Kevin Rowley, Pip McManas, my sister Robyn and brother-in-law Bill, sister-in-law Larissa, brother- and sister-in-law George and Barbara Sawenko, Francis Bray, Kim Scott, Terry Whitebeach, Stewart Blackhall, Robert Adamson, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Steve Morwell and Karina Menkhorst. Thank you to Nicholas Jose for showing me the nesting swans along the Torrens River, and Bruce Sims who went on visits with me to the Melbourne Zoo.

My daughter Tate travelled with me on a special trip to the Coorong, and also came on many walks along the Torrens River to see nesting swans and find the man who nurses a wild swan on his lap. My daughter Lily enthusiastically found images of swans that she sent to my computer in the middle of the night, and we had several special trips to the Melbourne Zoo where we visited a lone Mute Swan befriended by goldfish. Thank you to my step-son Andre for telling me the story about the swan that lost its way on a busy highway in Melbourne.

I am indebted to many people who offered encouragement and support, including my former colleagues at RMIT, and especially Antoni Jach. Thank you most sincerely to Evelyn Juers and Alice Grundy for reading the final manuscript and offering invaluable feedback; and to Darren Gilbert for permission to use his wonderful image of the swan on the cover of this book.

I am very grateful for the support of Professor Wayne McKenna, the University of Western Sydney, and Professor Anthony Uhlmann and all of my colleagues in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the university.

Ivor Indyk, my publisher, editor and critic knows the work that went into this book. Thank you.

Thank you to my husband Toly for our trips to Lake Wendoree, and for many thoughtful references you found from the beginning of a journey that continued through many parts of the world.

Of course, all of those swans, and also our kelpies Jessie then Ruby, and our cats Pushkin then Luna, for the company.


This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.





‘An indigenous Australian literary vernacular of consummate skill that is not afraid to relax into poetic reverie but can, and does, snap taut at a moment’s notice.’

MICHELE GROSSMAN, Australian


‘Wright’s narrative voice is remarkable, shifting like a cyclone from full velocity to poetic calm. It’s got the feel of the voices you hear up north: the rapidfire delivery, the long digressions, the meandering storyline and, above all, the wicked humour.’

SALLY BLAKENEY, Bulletin


‘Wright breaks all the rules of grammar and syntax to sweep us along on a great torrent of language that thrills and amazes with its inventiveness and humour and with the sheer power of its storytelling. It’s brutal and confronting and it’s sad and funny at the same time.’

LIAM DAVISON, Sydney Morning Herald


‘This is not myth as Western culture understands it: not an imagined dimension, but a literal if incorporeal one that bisects and animates the physical world; it makes for marvellous theatre.’

ELIZABETH LOWRY, London Review of Books