The Swan Book

Brolga and Swan





Vignettes of flying grass seeds spiralling into columns on colliding paths, though neither a girl who hibernates and is kept alive through dreams inside the trunk of a tree, nor a boy who grows on his dreams of looking down on the world, could understand how destiny works. This was so: the girl refusing to have visitors walk into her dreams; the boy trading reality for dreams where he thinks he is a saviour. How children relegate fate as though it was a toy – something to pitch against their repulsion of each other while playing with a vague knowledge of the future they had watched in a dream. Their story was unfolding dangerously through the complex design of children growing up in untidy times. Of times inscribed in the warped, dull state of a publicly determined fate. Or Law that stretched back to the beginning of time.

Oh! helplessness of helplessness, there were pirates of high places rattling knitting needles with the skills of an idiot, and measuring the overload of historical repetitiveness, where children like leaves into the wind were seriously jeopardising each other’s existence.


In this breeding season, thousands upon thousands of brolgas of the crane genus Grus rubicundus congregated noisily across the plains. They hovered in the sky above Warren Finch. Masses of brolgas danced before the boy by mimicking his movements and endlessly paraded in the dry cracked clay pan all along the horizon of yellow flattened grasses. As this supreme ceremony of Country continued there were many groups of hundreds of cranes lining up, to prance springlike off the ground, to bow long thin necks at each other, lift heads to the greatest height possible to toss sprigs of grass, and to stretch grey chests skyward, wings still arched, while other troupes bounced with light grace a metre high up into the air and landed just as lightly, as though their bodies were pieces of floating paper. The sky was turning grey as thousands lifted and flew high into the atmosphere, passing others descending on ribbons, each hovering, waiting to find space to land.

The boy went down to the river where the yellow water was flowing. He thought of himself as being a human raft while he floated through the shimmering haze at the hottest part of the day and stared upwards to the sky where the old brolgas, some said were at least eighty years old, were gliding in the thermals of hot air.

On this day, the tantalising movements of the old brolgas were stealing his thoughts away, lifting his daydreams up a thousand metres, and floating them there, all his secret splendours of the night suspended in the sky, chanting Swans beat their wings into the height. Too bad! Serves him right. He should have been paying attention to what was happening right down around his own two feet.

His mind sailed on and on into the thermals until he was in a trance floating along the river, so captivated in his thoughts now, he was almost touching the flying woman he had seen in his dreams. He felt good. He was in amidst the teeming brolgas searching across the landscape for the distant music of the night-time minstrels, those black wings whooshing through a dry breeze, and remembering how he had once heard a traveller, a travelling Indian woman’s voice swaying like that through a slow Hindustani raga.

His head was high, lost in the vastness of the clear blue sky, when he saw in the corner of his eye a flash of black, of last night’s dream, now down-stream in the river. His thoughts crashed in one swift jolt into the water, and only the brolgas were spinning alone in the ghostly quiet of the thermals.


He let himself be carried down the river, half-walking waist deep, half-swimming, not noticing the riverbank owls, julujulu, in the trees, because he was thinking that his dreams were starting to come true. He was very young. How could he understand that his dreams belonged to the future? Again, he glimpsed what he chased, a small object up-stream that was still too far away. Curiously, the object did not appear to be moving, although it always maintained a safe distance from him. Once out of the water, he walked along the bank towards the small, insignificant dot until he reached a point, past the owls roosting in the canopy of paperbark trees reaching across the river, to where he could see a black swan, visible only whenever the sunlight found its way through cracks in the shadows.


Warren Finch, who had never seen a real live swan before, could hardly believe his eyes. He was impressed with the sight of this magnificent creature, a Whispering Swan, sunning itself on the river. He could not understand how the swan could be in his country, or why he was glorying in this creature of more temperate regions.

The swan was gliding away, more interested in its surroundings, a sea of lily pads in a garden of long-stemmed purple waterlilies. Warren was already claiming the mysterious swan as his own, for it had appeared in his dream of the previous night. Could there be two realities? Bird of the daytime; woman of the night? He moved carefully towards the bird, but the riverbank felt unstable and he was unable to concentrate. He did not want to listen to reason from the old brolgas above, that the swan did not belong to him at all. He was whispering words he had heard, sweetheart swan of sweethearts, and hoping that if he could pacify the swan with the power of his voice, it would not fly away. He knew where it belonged. Its home was right across the country in the South, thousands of kilometres away. He thought it might die.

He moved to find the quickest way up the river, taking great care not to snap the twigs on the ground, and all the while, almost believing that he was flying. He was up in the skies. The rhythm of his breathing was like a tabla beating to crush the occasional alarm calls of those soaring old brolgas. There was no stopping his desire: he wanted to touch the swan. Some old excitable fool that lived dormant in his heart was up and about. A rogue spirit that had become as transfixed as the boy had of seeing a swan.

Quite possibly the bird was injured. Absolutely! Rogue spirit agreed. Let’s go. Let’s get closer. Quick! Quick! I will race you there. Warren could justify trying to aid an injured swan. It was an act of compassion, condoned. Cause. Cause it’s true. Any human on Earth would have thought so. But the swan seemed content to stay where it was so the boy could not be sure, and of course he thought, it would be best to capture it. There was nobody around except his rogue spirit to tell him to leave it alone. He forced his way through the brambles growing densely beside the river and up and down the river gums. He ignored the thorny vines lacerating his body which could have been the country trying to teach him to stay away – if he had been thinking about education. Finally, he reached the closest point of the bank to the swan, but still, the bird was far from his reach, idling about on the other side of the river.

His eyes rested on a levee, some floating monument of sticks higher than the bank itself, all of the yimbirra refuse that was slowly on the move from up the river. It groaned up to where he was standing. He could see the inflammation banking right back up the river until it was out of sight, and it surprised him that he had not noticed it before. He thought of the big woman’s nest as he leaped straight onto the summit of sticks, branches and rubbish stacked no less whimsically than a million flimsy thoughts describing the nature of the world in his head at that particular moment. The old fool in his heart steered while the boy walked over the top to the edge and leant over, arms stretched towards the swan.

Now he could see that there was something troubling the swan; its wings flapped frantically at the water while its feet ran on the spot, tangled in a bundle of fishing line knotted in the roots and tree branches. The sodden and limp swan now sensing its end was certain, was pulled helplessly through the waters.

A wall of floodwater exploded through the piles of sticks, branches, tree trunks, old tyres and broken down motorcars, that went flying through the air behind the boy, and you know what he had? Only that old fool at a steering wheel.

The swan was drowning for Warren Finch, and all the boy saw were pictures of Aboriginal spirits with halos of light, just like Van Gogh had painted. The boy had not known what struck him. He had been so excited about the swan that he had not heard the river shouting behind him.