The Swan Book

The Dust Ends





The night Bella Donna of the Champions died, boobooks called at her passing spirit, and when a swift wind swept through the distant woodlands of eucalypts, the rattling gumnuts could be heard as she travelled away. All night long, butcher-birds flew in circles and sung through the swamp. That was the parish! Traditional. Even first class. The country, finishing off the dead woman’s broken serenade to the swans while the humidity wrapped itself in a heavy haze over the swamp and caught all of the leaves falling from the trees.


Around the swamp, the air was charged up like an electrified cat, always stifling and crowded. Oblivia dreamt the old woman was in the kitchen talking about her life, but her voice was jumping simultaneously between stories about times and places in the world that no longer existed. All dead, just like me now. Extinct. Uninhabitable. She was breathless with excitement. It was as though the old woman still wanted to breathe life into the stories of all those people in her life that she had seen escaping from their lost countries, taken to sea by a swan.

But then, what of her life in the swamp? Our life here, the girl uttered in her sleep. And the reply came out of nowhere. Existence! Just a word echoed from faraway by old Bella Donna – a woman who was too worldly, too immersed; too spread everywhere, and she cried to the girl, I don’t know what is happening to me.

Only the girl felt the sadness of losing the old woman forever, whose voice became less afflicted the more distant she became, Well! Can you believe this? Old Bella Donna had just been to the cloud house of a white swan in a Zhongguo city glowing with stars shining like antique lanterns, where the swan was still writing about itself with a quill in its beak, the same poem of missing its home, that it had been writing many centuries ago.

I feel so light now. It was the feeling of sunlight falling through dark stormy clouds embracing the giant granite swans placed all about the Indonesian village of stone carvers. And off she goes again, but instantly returns and tells of falling down through the dusty rays of light that form a sea around the ceiling of an ancient temple. It was where the golden swan boat of an Indian Goddess swings from waves stirred by thousands of chanting devotees.

Finally, the old woman’s home was in sight, the country that was once covered with fir trees, where wild deer with bells in their antlers had run through fog snaking over the snow-covered floor of forests.

The white swans dipping for weeds in the river.


A crescent moon moved so low across the swamp that its reflection over rippling water looked like the wings of a magnificent white swan. It looked like the type of swan from other parts of the world where it might be called Hong, or Cigne, Kugui, Svane, Zwaan, Svanr, Svan, or Schwan. Its light glowed over the houses in the slum. Waterlily leaves shone in the moonlight. The light rode silver saddles on the back of hundreds of black swans huddling around the hull with necks tucked under their wings, where they dream their own names, Goolyen, Connewerre, Kungorong, Muru-kutchi, Kuluin, Mulgoa, Kungari, Koonwaarra, Byahmul, and the recital continues, collecting all of the country’s swans. Then waterlily leaves were blown over the water. Swarming insects backed away.

While circling in the skies, the swans dived endlessly through invisible crevices to other worlds. They were still searching for the old lady, always catching sight of her spirit, not letting her go. It seemed that the entire flock would not stop mourning for her. Everywhere, all over the swamp, there were swans behaving strangely, continuously sifting the water with agitated beaks, as though they were trying to find a way to reach the old woman’s spirit, sepulchred beneath.

Then one day their behaviour changed. The entire population emerged from the reeds where it usually built its nests to join bevies of others swimming in from distant reaches of the swamp, until they eventually formed one massive flotilla that skirted around the floating dumps. The formation moved in a tight huddle with curled wing feathers that rose aggressively, an armada of thousands that floated slowly, around the swamp, to follow a threat that was visible only to their eyes.

Suddenly, on necks held high, and feathers vertically angled like black fins reaching for the sky, a sea of hissing red beaks pointed towards what threatened it from above the swamp. It was all action after that. In a spear-like dash across the water, the shadow was pursued until the long drawn-out choreography of swans finished with downward pointing beaks nestled into their necks. The flotilla often changed directions in this pursuit without the slightest hint of any confusion in its vast numbers. They turned as one living presence that shared the same vein of nervousness. At any moment, just like a sudden change in the direction of the wind, the mass would retreat then, just as rapidly, swing back across the water into another attack, always watching whatever was menacing the swamp through the single eye of the flotilla, gauging its movement, so that their mass would slow down, speed up, or turn sharply, to match the wings hovering above and create gusts of wind rippling across the swamp.


Oblivia slept so soundly, she missed the dawn spectacle: the sand went berserk and smothered the whole swamp before shifting, and flying off. The Harbour Master was about, saying his farewells. He said he was heading northeast, maybe riding on the cloud of sand somewhere out into the sea first, flying to where winds build ferociously. That was the story. Then, just like that, the mother of all sand mountains disappeared.


The official people of the local Aboriginal Government came and tore the hull apart. Books, papers, the lot were tossed all over the floor as though they did not want their hands contaminated by the devil, while the girl huddled in a corner. They were searching for the crystal balls because they might be worth something – you never know.

They had rolled away in the dust storm. She stared into the direction to where the sand mountain had flown.

The officials thought the girl was a liar – were convinced of it, but there was no point in arguing with her so they took the old woman’s body away to be buried. Oblivia freaked, with the question burning in her mind: What if they come back? With the old woman’s body gone, she felt unprotected and alone. She waited for something else to happen, something bad, expecting more people to barge into the hull at any moment. At nightfall, she felt as though her body had disappeared into the slate-grey wall of the hull and she was drowning, gasping for air under the surface, then she heard Bella Donna walking around in the hull and reciting poetry about a slate-grey lake lit by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans…Oblivia felt her life slipping away with the words, as though the old woman was lulling her away. It would have been easy. But suddenly the mood changed to storm winds spun in the darkness, and Oblivia left so fast it was as though she had been picked up and thrown head first out of the hull, and was already rowing away from it. She ran off into the wasteland at the end of the swamp to search for the tree that she now doubted ever existed.

The swamp people watched her searching among the dead reeds from their homes. Who’s that down there? They couldn’t believe it. Don’t look. Can this madness ever end? I want to look. She scratched the ground with her fingers, searching for some evidence that would prove the tree had once existed. She needed to confirm what was in her head, of having lived inside the darkened hollow. She was digging holes like a mad dog. Don’t look. I want to look. There was nothing but dirt where she scratched more and more frantically, with her head screaming, over and over, I want to know, as though she was asking the ground to ask the people she knew were watching, but nobody went over to the park to tell the girl what had happened to the trees, whether the wood had been chopped up for firewood, or sawn for timber.

Nobody said: See child, the timber of the trees was used in that house over there. Nobody said: Look here is a chiselled digging stick whittled from the last slither of wood of the trees that had grown here. Either the tree never existed as far as anyone knew, or it was a sacred tree in a story only remembered through the ages by people who had earned the right to hold the story. Who speaks for the ancestors? Who speaks for a child wandering around alone? What was the problem?

There was a story about a sacred tree where all the stories of the swamp were stored like doctrines of Law left by the spiritual ancestors, of a place so sacred, it was unthinkable that it should be violated. Old people said that tree was like all of the holiest places in the world rolled into one for us, no wonder she went straight to it. Funny thing that. The tree watching everything, calling out to her when it saw some people had broken the Law. Something will happen to them. This ancestor was our oldest living relative for looking after the memories, so it had to take her. When the girl was found though, the tree was destroyed by the Army on the premise that this nexus of dangerous beliefs had to be broken, to close the gap between Aboriginal people and white people. Those stories scattered into the winds were still about, but where, that was the problem now. It made us strong and gave us hope that tree. The kinspeople of the tree had believed this since time immemorial. Really all that was left behind of the story were elders and their families whose ancestors had once cared for the old dried and withered, bush-fire burnt-out trunk of a giant eucalyptus tree through the eons of their existence. They were too speechless to talk about a loss that was so great, it made them feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity. They had been cut off. They called themselves damned people who felt like strangers walking around on their country. The reciprocal bond of responsibility that existed between themselves and the ancestors had always strengthened them. This was what held all times together. Now we are sick of it. Sick of that girl bringing up that memory to make us feel bad. All these people could think about while watching Oblivia dig the bare earth that day, was being reminded of the tree exploding in front of their eyes and there was not a thing anyone could do about it. Nothing at all. Couldn’t bring any of it back. That girl is doing this to keep reminding us. Something must be wrong in her head if she can’t even think straight. Watching the girl was one thing. They could not go out there and explain to this child what it meant to lose that ancestral tree.


Nevermind! Nobody forgets. You sprog, the old woman had once explained, fell over the escarpment of an invisible plateau. Its geology was composed of stories much bigger than a little girl getting lost like you. Now the girl searched beneath the cracked parchments of clay where the dun beetles and ants lived, hoping to find a nest of termites feasting underground on the root system of the tree. The ants and skinks slink away. She leaves after a while, still wondering how termites could have devoured every scrap of evidence of the huge tree’s existence.

Finally, the girl returns to the hull where the ghost of the old woman could still be heard talking to herself. The swamp people could never stay silent for long about her ghost either. Their voices swung bittersweet all over the swamp, and they were not just talking about each passing breath of their momentous lives. No! They were talking like the old woman. Her voice was triumphing over death. It made your blood run cold the way she returned like a witch inside of other people’s voices. But what did she mean, swinging her mantra in some foreign antique language, the one the old sea explorers used when they saw a black swan for the first time, Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno.

The girl listened while people around the swamp repeated the mantra to each other. She heard the same phrase sung every night because someone would start calling out the Latin words from a nightmare. Then, suddenly a very strange thing happened. Everyone spoke a few words of Latin in every conversation, and for a while after the old lady died and kept haunting the place, the swamp people started claiming that they were Latino Aboriginals.

It appeared that the old ghost had colonised the minds of the swamp people so completely with the laws of Latin, it terminated their ability to speak good English anymore, and to teach their children to speak English properly so that the gap could finally be closed between Aboriginal people and Australia. You could call it stupidity, naivety, logical, to allow oneself to become so integrated into the world of the old ghost woman, where all sorts were telling each other that speaking Latin made them feel holy. The swamp people, the eels, moths and butterflies, all wanted to go to Rome to live with the Pope. Some people even claimed that the swamp was Rome.


In the eyes of the beholder, all the architecture around the swamp had become the relics of the greatest city in the world. Old swamp people were becoming the greatest Romans of all times, even greater than the Romans themselves. The swamp had become a colosseum.


How bold to mix the Dreamings. Those laws of the two sides of the local world were always clashing. She decided to ignore the old ghost woman sitting in the kitchen of the hull speaking in Latin all night. She would simply remember the living Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions claiming that she had not inherited myths from purists, and not believing that the black swan belonged to the night dreams of some of her ancestors. The facts girl. Here are the facts. It was the Feast of the Epiphany in 1697 when the crew of Willem de Vlamingh’s Dutch ship claimed to have seen superstition come to life, when they saw alive, two black swans – a beautiful pair, swimming off the coast of Western Australia, and called it ‘the epiphany of the black swan’ – a celebration for science, a fact stripped from myth.

When the swans scattered, the sailors randomly ran down four swans, and once caught, they were taken on board the sailing ship. When they were taken out to sea, the swans became morose from their own stories being pulled away from them, but they were kept alive anyway, the birds of nightmare specimens in the hands of science, exhibits in Indonesia’s old Batavia, where the devil swan feathers could be touched by anyone in order to defy their superstition.


The girl lived in a limbo world. The directions of its map spread out like a peacock’s tail. Who created it? Well! There were these boys who once chased a little girl down. They kept roaming in her wilderness. Which little girl? What poor little girl? Talk is talk. Costs nothing. Oblivia hears it everywhere now: You remember Aunty. She was one of those failure-to-thrive babies. Had FASD. Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder or something like that. You should not believe all the talk going around. You don’t know if any of that is true or not. Aunty, it’s true, as true as I am standing here. It’s the truth of what you get with white government social engineering intervention mucking up more blackfella lives. She was a closing the gap baby. Us? Us left with the responsibility for looking after her. Oblivia hears voices all the time, and thinks a lot about how stories are made, considering which words would be used down the centuries to describe herself, and representing what? Swanee! Like a devil’s swan! The old woman had always claimed that she knew how to find the peculiar if she went looking for it. Destiny itself discovered the girl, and the old woman had explained: You child, are really peculiar. She once told Oblivia that she was joined with the undoable. It was the principle, she said, of the haphazard way sanity and madness were reaped from her having been gang-raped physically, emotionally, psychologically, statistically, randomly, historically, so fully in fact: Your time stands still.

Gang-raped. The girl hardly knew what these two words meant as she thought about herself in the sameness of passing time while sitting on the floor of the hull, pulling her head apart trying to remember what had happened to her, or perhaps whatever it was, it just happened to some other little girl that everyone was talking about and maybe it was not her either, or herself neither, but all girls. While trying to decide whether she was sane or mad like the girl she had heard about from listening to people telling their stories – whispering on and on about rape in a form of speechlessness, it was hard to hold everything back in her chest about the velocity of the things that she could not remember, about what those boys did to the girl she heard people talking about! Poor little girl! Which little girl? She did not know, and wished she had never been born. It was not your fault. Those were the old woman’s final words on the matter, after explaining in general terms the cause and effect of an outrageous history that had created a destiny, to avoid speaking of a shame that was so overwhelmingly connected to the girl’s experiences of life, and from her own shame of having to say to the girl that she had been raped by a group of boys, the plain raw truth of the matter being that this one boy, and that one over there walking about etcetera, were the ones who did it, and not speaking of what Oblivia could not remember from her childhood of something happening to her, where bits of truth were never enough while visiting her recurring nightmares, and not being able to speak of why she was waking up screaming and frightened of the darkness, and of being so petrified that she would be eternally connected to the age she had been just before she had been raped by holding on, and guarding that little girl before something bad happened to her, or even, explaining why she was found in the tree.

The girl continued to hear the hushed word gang-raped frequently, escaping through the cracks of the gossipy swamp – said without soul about an incident that had been forgotten, had to be forgotten, tucked away and hidden, but had returned. It was funny how some words can always be heard in whatever vicinity, no matter how softly they have been spoken. Just like eyesore words, standing out in normal conversations that attract everyone’s attention by bringing back the memory of a little girl who had once disappeared from the face of the earth for a very long time.

A gang of boys who thought they were men were wracked out of their minds on fumes from an endless supply of petrol, glue, or whatever else they played with when they had chased the girl down. They were given a fresh start by a youth worker who coaxed them from the rooftops of the houses where they hung out, hiding under tee-shirts pulled over their heads and sniffing petrol from Coca-Cola bottles. They were taken to an entertainment centre where they could practice snooker and blackjack, and this was followed up with more largesse to close the gap of failed policies for Aboriginal advancement from the Government in Canberra.

A grand football oval, a state-of-the-art stadium, was built by the Army so fast it was considered to be a miracle. This monument, a grand design in the landscape, overshadowed the slum, the shanty houses where those brain-damaged petrol sniffers ended up crawling around on the floor, along with whatever else was blown in by the wind. There was nothing wrong with grandness-emitting hyper rays of positivism to build muscle and brawn, sinew and bone, to breathe hot breath and punch the air. Life went on. Money well spent. Football carnival days were definitely the rage. Families cheered their boys. The floodlights poured gold on the big crowds.

The swamp people would not need to speak about anything else really except football, and they spoke it in ghost Latin that nobody else understood, when the swamp became Rome for a while, because the Army said, Rome was not built in a day. So let the Government do all the talking, all the planning, and the thinking and the controlling, and tell old Jacky Jacky what to do in Rome.


People tell stories all the time: The stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that. You see, the people of the swamp always claimed that the girl in the hull was a little foundling child, not the one who went missing – who was once lost in the bush. Yes! She had run far, far away, they said, and they said it was no good doing something like that. It only made people worry all the time. They did not fancy that she had hid in a hollow at the base of any old eucalypti tree. Yes! Fancy that.

The police and army search went on for days when the little girl they knew had disappeared. A line of emotionally charged people searched through every dwelling – pulling everything apart, then beyond, thrashing through the dried-up bush for five kilometres, working clockwise out from the swamp.


The thrashers told stories to occupy themselves: tales upon tales not to be taken lightly about things like this. In the unearthing of those sad old stories they found no lost child. All they found were new tracks of possibilities for things that had once happened and should stay buried with the past. These new versions of old stories did not fit the ground, because you know, old Law forms its own footpaths. A very bad feeling had spread among the thrashers. Soon they were saying quite frankly, Why can’t she stay lost? All this searching and searching, they claimed, and the only thing discovered was shame. It was decided to let sleeping dogs lie. The search was called off. The girl’s own heartbroken father was manngurru nyulu, and being so ashamed he felt weak, mayamayada, and now thought others saw him as being warrakujbu or mad, failing to take notice of his child, and had made a sudden request to all the lungkaji policemen, asking them to give up hope.

That was the moment when someone decided to make a nuisance of themselves, when that old bat Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had decided to step in, to plough the ground with her own eyes, and to be totally ignorant of the ins and outs of family histories – their ground. She went on searching for the lost girl, losing all sense of time, and oblivious of how she was riling up spite and hatred from people watching what they did not want to watch – someone searching for a needle in a haystack. Hey! Old dear. What? What? What did you say? You got to give up that ting you are doing.


Those old ears of hers, delicate white with networks of red veins, that had no trouble hearing everything else, decided to be stone deaf to all the sneering, the abuse yelling anonymously behind her back, the ins and outs of what people thought about what she was doing on their land: Why can’t she stay lost? She went on raking the ground, and continued ignoring those who said she ought to mind her own business.

She boasted obviously, not just round the hull, nor just to the swans, and expected eternal gratefulness from the entire swamp for finding the missing girl. The triumph of good eyesight. Who would have thought to look into the hollow of a tree? Evidently, no one!


In fact months passed after she found the girl before the old woman had thought of telling the parents she had found the missing child. Her little bujiji nyulu. The orphan. She had taken herself ashore from the hull on the Harbour Master’s advice – you got to tell the parents, her nganja, her kin, ngada, murriba, haven’t you heard of the stolen generations? Janyii ngawu ninya jawikajba, I am asking you with my own mouth – so she went over to the place where the parents lived, where she called out to them from the street, I found that kid of yours.

Now very old people with minds crippled by dementia, the bewildered parents were not interested in mysteries at that stage in their life, and were still fearful of welfare people like the Army coming back to plague them over their failure-to-thrive baby, and poking around with accusing fingers at their families’ histories for evidence of grog harm on the little girl’s brain – as if they didn’t already know what happens to the inheritors of oppression and dispossession. It’s not that shit happens as other people have said; it’s the eternal reality of a legacy in brokenness that was the problem to them. They came out of their little shelter, fearful that people would start accusing them of being drinkers again when they had never touched grog, that kamukamu-yaa, and whispered to Bella Donna to shut up. Budangku. No. They had long since finished, windijbi with grieving after accepting a plausible inquest report and had never expected to see their missing daughter again. Don’t you know? Don’t you remember? It was a story that created a lot of sad havoc about the place. Word spread of Bella Donna troubling the old couple without anyone really believing a girl was found in a tree, and since nobody was missing a child, a consensus was reached. They said: Tell her if she wants, she should keep that stray girl. Her business. Not ours.

Why am I lucky? This was how the girl was lucky. Lucky, that the old woman had not found a skeleton. Lucky, the girl remembered being told by the old woman, when there were women and girls around the swamp who had gone missing forever, although some of them might call up eventually on the one payphone, just to say that they were somebody calling someone, to let their families know they are doing fine, living somewhere else. We have escaped you know. But on the other hand, some don’t bother to contact anyone, and as far as anyone knows, nobody knew whether those women and girls who went missing were dead or alive. Nobody knows. Nobody knows if their bodies, still dressed in their best going-away dresses, were laying out there in the bush somewhere, buried in sand, or whether their skeleton was standing up against a dead tree, or they were looking towards the road to heaven, or towards the way to go home, or were just waiting to be found. You might see some of them out there sometimes. Who knows anything about the truth? There were many homes waiting for the public telephone to ring with news, or hating to hear any news, or yelling over each other in the night when the lonely public payphone rang, shouting for somebody to go out there and king hit the phone with an axe, or piss on it, or bowl the thing over, or fire a shotgun right into its guts. Lucky, that some people would say anything for silence. Lucky that Oblivia did not know why she was lucky. Lucky that she never told the old woman she was lucky.

The girl had a different version of the events that led to Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions finding her asleep in the tree. The old woman had always claimed it was in the nick of time: Child! Minutes! Otherwise! Otherwise it would have been a disaster, what would normally be expected – You would have been dead.

Oblivia frequently dreamt of a child like herself running for the hole at the base of a tree – a little girl in so many different forests, timber lots, old stands of ancient trees, that now, it was difficult to remember any sequences of geographies stored in her mind. There were dreams where the child flees through densely overgrown chestnut trees. Sometimes she runs away in forests that smelt of resin, walnut forests, olive groves, mountain bamboo forests and cherry blossom trees. She still felt the cold wind on her face in alpine valleys of bare limb larch trees while running beside deer being chased by wolves. It was geography that was constantly shifting, for sometimes she runs by huge sea turtles stranded high in the branches of trees of the tropics, where there had been floods.

Quite often, Oblivia remembered a child running in the middle of a bush fire, to where it had been deliberately lit at the base of a eucalypt and left smouldering over several months until a large, charred hollow had been created into which a girl would eventually fall. On her shoulders, the child always carried long thin burnt branches like wings, but she balked, pulled away before reaching the hole in the tree.

Yet no matter how hard the girl tried to stop before reaching the hole, she was pushed along until squeezed into the hollow, no matter how small it became in her mind, and it breaks her wings. Once inside, she would fall through heavy air, plunging into darkness and weightlessness, as if she had been swallowed alive.


The girl had seen many versions of this charred stomach, where the floor inside the tree was overgrown with large, sprawling grey roots that grew down the shaft and on the way down were covered here and there with the initials of previous visitors.

The child in the dream looked as though she was no older than eight or ten years old, maybe she was younger, five or six, and very different to the story the old woman had always maintained – that the girl she had found was much older. Maybe, life stands still in a Rip Van Winkle way of sleeping. The girl that had eventually come out of the bowel of the tree had no memory of the swamp. Did not recognise it. Had no memory of the past. Her memory was created by what the old woman had chosen to tell her. People only heard the swans calling. Nobody heard you running away.


Oh! Yes! And I worked my skin to the bone looking after you for a very long time until you woke up from a coma.

There were many lost girls. In the old woman’s stories, the girl was recreated in many lost childhoods. The ancient lost child of a Mountain Ash forest. The lost girl who had spent days running through a forest path of fairies where swan lovers flew one after the other, while circling above the swan poet’s lake. A little girl became lost while travelling old tracks through the marshes to hunt where swans built nests near underground rivers. You choose, the old woman had said.

It was difficult for Oblivia to believe that the old woman had been capable of looking after an unconscious child, feeding her stories for nourishment, more than food. She kept dreaming those stories like a child, even when she could see and feel the strangeness of an adult’s face reflecting back at her from the mirrored stillness of swamp water. She once remembered the old woman saying it was possible to hibernate underground in the drought, like frogs and swamp turtles, but Bella Donna was adamant in her discussions with the Harbour Master that it was impossible for a human being to shut down like a burrowing frog with cold blood. He did not like to admit it, but agreed. She would not be able to sleep through the drought like a frog, or like a swamp turtle, by conserving energy from living on a single heartbeat for whatever time was necessary to survive through hibernation. And Bella Donna had smiled at Oblivia, sitting on the floor, while the Harbour Master’s flashbulb eyes were burning at the girl with disgust: You were different. You were in a coma.

The tumultuous universe of lost girls could still be heard from old Bella Donna’s voice speaking through the walls of the hull. She must have left her voice behind after she died. Well! It was best not to argue with steel walls Oblivia thought, since the swans were milling around the hull, still waiting to hear the old woman’s stories. She had more to think about. The swans were hungrier than ever now.


In this winter the swans only produced one egg. This precious egg, their ode to the swamp, sat in a nest marvellously constructed with thousands of sticks, dried algae and leaves individually chosen and carefully placed. The two swans had worked for weeks in its construction before the egg was laid. It polarised other swans, glancing, idling the day at the nest, as though admiring the egg’s possibilities. The swan lovers constantly uncovered, cradled, and re-hid the egg under the leaf litter of their perfect nest where snakes slept for warmth. As time passed, the brooding pair looked as though they would stay forever protecting the dead egg, wishing it would hatch. Then one day, a group of haughty swans swarmed over to the nest and forced them to give up. More half-hearted nests were built crooked with randomly placed sticks and old bits of plastic rubbish, then all too briefly, only admired as foolish work of swans unable to predict what height the water levels would become with the uncertainty of rain. Whatever vague ideas of procreation had been in the initial motivation, these were abandoned for a different kind of infatuation – a love affair with the northern skies.


When swans mourned, their long necks hung with their heads almost touching the ground. It seemed as though the swans were now glued to the shores of the swamp where they looked dolefully towards the hull, waiting for the old woman’s world of stories to appear, hoping for the hot air of the mirage to be filled with a cooling sweetness.


Instead of the swans saving themselves from swamp people’s dogs, they continued staring like statues at the broken forms of silver reflections, shimmering over the water. It was like watching suicide – witnessing, the swans’ refusal to swim away. Black feathers lay scattered over the ground and were blown over the water. Seagulls flew in from the coast many kilometres away and joined the nightly attacks. The swan frenzy raged on and on with blood-stained dogs and seagulls, while bleeding swans mingled with the red haze of sunrise, still sitting on the ground, heads tucked under their wings.


The swans kept dying in their eerie pact, leaving Oblivia to crawl over dead birds, and having to bury them under piles of broken reeds. Swamp people watched. Will you look at the girl out there? Why? What is she doing now? She’s burying the swans. Pause. What for? Because they are dead stupid? So, so on, manija and so forth.

White smoke rises quickly in a breeze. It created a haze over the swamp from the bonfires the girl lit for the pyre of dead swans, and pushing the raft into the water and using the long sticks to poke down into the mud below, she carefully manoeuvred it back over to the hull to be closer to the stories from old Aunty’s swan books.


She is reading through the old woman’s collection of books about swans to find a way of bringing the swans back to the remaining waters in the swamp.

Swans swimming correctly and sedately in swanlike fashion, screamed in her head, good news, but the mud-caked flocks remained in sync with their perpetual north-south swaying, plodding through puddles, beaks sifting through mud searching for non-existent food.

The girl read about the many lives of swans flying around mystical, mist-covered palaces of princes who also become white swans. Curly wing feathers of black swans became the black curly heads of warriors in epic hunts, in places where the fearless steps of the bravest of heroes stalking along the banks of a coal-black river to kill a swan prince, might just as easily end in the hunter’s death, or a swan that became a prince, or dead princes lying beneath waters flowing with green-grey algae.


When the rains finally came, all of the winngil, big rain – the bush dripped from clouds sitting on the land, until finally, with so much water flowing over grasslands and running through gullies leading into the swamp, the old lake reappeared again. The swans safe now from the dogs, were cleansed by months of preening from rain pouring over their feathers. The breeding nests were full with half grown cygnets. Their packs again swarmed through the water where constant winds flowing across sheets of floodwater rippled each pulse of the country’s heartbeat. The air was electrified by the sun disappearing behind the madarri, clouds that packed the sky, and reappearing like a fiery pearl in the mouth of the creature formed by clouds that looked like an enormous swan.