The Swan Book

Swan Maiden





The moon was hidden behind the cloud of swans swarming over the swampy lake, where in the darkness, thousands hissed as they dived at the water and stabbed their beaks around Warren Finch in a rowing boat heading towards the hull. Battalions of swans swooped at the boat. Warren Finch could feel the warmth of their soft bellies as he brushed through their barricade.


One thing leads to another, and before the girl could really understand how to think like an adult, a complete stranger had boarded the hull. The man said he was looking for her.

The girl was fearful of the oars moving through the water and the noisy ruckus from the swans. She thought it was the owls she had heard earlier calling across the water. Now her invisible life had been split apart by a strange man’s presence in her home, and in that moment of visibility she felt ashamed of how she looked.

You must be the swan maiden. His voice teased. She met him with a knife in her hand. He was still excited about how he had been challenged by the swans. How romantic! It amused him to cast himself into the story found across the northern hemisphere of the hunter who captures a mythical swan maiden in a marsh. He removed the knife in an instant, simply by reaching out and taking it from her hand while she was still in shock. Don’t hesitate if you want to kill somebody, he said. You want to do it straight – Pow! Slam! Into the heart. Get it over and done with – just like that.

She looked away, but remembered hearing a voice once that was similar, and tried to understand the circumstances of how she had heard it. She could not remember because a flood of stories, swollen and submerging under their own weight rolled into waves that pushed her further away from its memory, until finally, the whole heavy weight of remembering collapsed, and she felt as though she was suffocating in her own life.

In these images returned from the past, there was the face of a small girl urging her to run, to become once more the story of when she was alone, sleeping inside the tree. But Warren Finch’s gaze was like ice. A wall of ice in the way of running! His eyes held its glare. She heard him saying that her solitary life on the hull had now finished – a girl should not be living alone in this place. She did not want to hear him. It was not safe, he said. He looked her up and down like a cattle buyer. Not right. She was running away through the path made in her thoughts to the tree that stood clear in her mind. But stories were switching themselves around like rope thrown out in a crisis, and in the midst of trying to grab a story to save herself, the reality of swans called from outside in the sea of blackness around the hull. They reminded her that the tree was destroyed, there was nowhere to run. The swans’ clamorous trumpeting made her realise that nobody ran from Warren Finch. Already, he possessed her life.


He liked to view people like an X-ray machine – technical, and without emotion, as though this was the way to examine the function of an asset. She looks deranged. Unhinged. She still acts like a child. But she must be about eighteen, nineteen, even twenty. What’s wrong with her. She can’t always be like this. The girl felt sick in the stomach. She was like a lizard trying to disappear down a blocked bolthole. Was it worth opening her eyes to see if she had succeeded, if neither he nor she existed? Working quickly, she installed the spirit of Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, but the loud-mouthed Harbour Master returned too. He said she must be joking. He laughed: How can her memory rescue you, girlie? He warned her to get away from the past. The girl fought back by reciting, in Bella Donna’s high-tilting voice, the many swan maiden fantasies that have vanquished men who hunt swans. She screamed the story of the hunter, that of a fisherman, another of the man in the woods – of their capturing swan women that always eventually escape. Stories she knew well about escaping. Screams these into Finch’s face to cover the sound of his voice.


He was trying to put aside his thoughts, the reality telling him to walk away, his ego telling him everything would be fine. She’s fine. She’s okay really. It is all this. This place. How would anyone feel? Nothing that can’t be handled with a bit of care. It will be fine.

He would make it so.


The thing about a levee is the way that it breaks apart with too much flooding. This was the type of thing that excited the Harbour Master about taking over the scene. He had to come into Oblivia’s mind and see what was happening, to sort it out, and he burst in and asked the girl what the hell was going on. What on earth are you thinking? He was in full swing for musings, and told her to stop digging into the ground. Your roots are piss weak! Won’t grow in this soil. It’s got no seed. Can’t grow it. His voice invaded every crevice in her mind, from knowing the girl did not know anything about God or the spirits or the Holy Ghost, and knowing she was too exhausted to dig around for any more old stories.

What is his name? Warren asked about the swan hunter in the story she was trying to concentrate on. She does not know, shit! The Harbour Master was the boss and she was trying to hear what he was saying. Warren interjected constantly. Then he asked kindly: Would the hunter ever return the swanskin? The question puzzled her. She did not know if the swan wife would survive without her magical swan cloak in a place where her kind of story about swans belonged.


Either the girl escapes or not! The words jam in her head. Drum beat to erase the existence of Warren Finch from her mind. But droning wings from clouds of swans drum fear louder, insisting that she Get him out of the hull. The breeze caught by their frenzied wings flowed along the soft-feathered breasts and bellies of these boats that glide in the sky until finally, the wind rushed inside the hull and whooshed the girl into its embrace.

Are you awake? he asks, speaking loudly. His fingers click – Ethyl! Is your name Emily, or is it really Ethyl? He casually walks around the hull home, still with the knife in his hand, while glancing at the shabby books stacked on top of each other, or lined up in shelves, others that lay open on the pages of treasured passages, on which he reads a few lines to discover something of the girl’s intimacy with the swans. He flips pages with the knife and reads at whim wherever his finger rests on a page, and in the silent room, only the sound of flicking pages is heard as he moves to another passage.


He continued reading and the girl looked away. She was ashamed. Her head screamed for this invasion of privacy. There was a complete casualness in his approach as he moved on, And they fade away in the darkness dying. Chinese poetry of swans, Baudelaire’s swan poem, and those on the floor in foreign languages he casually moved aside with his shoe. Then he looked at her as though she would tell him why these books were on the floor and why she had chosen others to read.

Finally, he looked at the messy room and saw that she conducted her daily life like a child. They exchanged looks as though each was vermin. She was a frizzy-haired, stick-like kid – ought to be a young woman, but dressed in a rainbow-coloured T-shirt and baggy, grey shorts. The girl thought of escaping but under his gaze she was petrified, and incapable of lunging past him and out the door.

You are Em-i-ly Wake, or are you somebody else? he asked, looking at her again as though she could be of mild interest to him. She did not know the name. Never heard of it before. It occurred to her that this stranger could tell her who she was, the identity she had sought by searching through words written on a page. Em-i-owake. She tried to say that her name was Oblivia Ethylene Oblivion, although generally, she thought Em-u-awake was something someone had said to her once.

Go slow Warren, he said quietly to himself, while simultaneously checking the time on his watch. Do you know who I am? My name is Warren Finch. He asked if he could sit down, and sat down anyway on the only other chair, on Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions’ side of the table. This surprised her. She never used the chair. It still held the essence of the old woman’s authority. He told her to sit down too if she wanted. There was no warmth in his voice but the girl slid sideways onto her chair. Her gaze travelled over the floor and out the door to the swans calling and thrashing and rushing through the water. She did not hear a word he was saying.

The swans swarmed in their panicky flight around the hull – great wings flapping wildly, as when they were alarmed by predators on their territory, and the great white swan that had haunted the swamp for old Aunty’s spirit.

Already she felt the swans becoming disconnected from her. They were marooned in flight, unable to break apart from their fear. She saw in their erratic and chaotic struggle their desperation to flee, and understood the very same nervousness running through her own body. They were trying to persuade her to leap from the hull and fly with them. No, they would not leave without her. She wanted to run but she faltered, kept hesitating, not fully comprehending the extent of the swans’ electrified sense of danger, the sudden readiness to lift in one synthesised movement greater than that of their predator from the first sense of a deadly strike in the water. But the eagle was already in the hull, and ready to swoop.

I suppose you don’t know who I am, do you? he asked again, his eyes steady, ignoring the upheaval around the hull.

Sit there. You and I have got some things to talk about. And bloody relax. I am not going to eat you.

This was the first time she had looked a person straight in the face. She recognised his clothes. They belonged to rich people like the ones Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had described. The people she had chopped carrots for while they protested about the state of the world and all that. He caught her glance and his face softened momentarily, as though it amused him to catch the rat girl off guard. She looked away quickly.


We are married already, equally co-joined through Country, Law, story. Our marriage marks a new epoch in our culture. Our challenge will be the lying reality. Something to overcome, Warren Finch told Ethyl(ene) (Em, ya, I, or u awake) Oblivion(a), soon to become Finch.

The girl did not think so. She leapt the plank he had laid with words and dived into the sea tide in her mind – that big deep sea, where she struggled to hold her head above the surface. Around her swarmed old Aunty’s stories of thousands of drowning people blowing swan whistles, and the boys of long ago with their faces covered by white masks. They pushed her aside as they jostled in some kind of game, reaching up with their arms to snatch from the air a face, Warren’s face, so that he became one of them. The memories splashed everywhere, suffocating the air in a jostle of whistles. She saw the boys laugh from the blank space of their mouths. She felt relieved by hands pushing her down into the bowels of the giant eucalyptus tree where it was just stillness.


Stupid to take nothing. Somehow, in his struggle to overpower any of her attempts to escape him, Warren Finch had gathered up many of the books in an old fishing net she used to scoop up tiny silver fish bait that swam beside the hull. Apart from books, the only other things she took from the hull as he forced her over the side of the vessel were those tangled memories that filled her mind.

The swans swam all around the dinghy, cooing to be pacified by her. When she did not speak to the quizzing eyes that needed to understand the stranger and her odd behaviour, their grey, black and white-tipped wings flapped frantically and they lunged with their long necks into the boat and bit Warren’s arms as he rowed.


She would hear the swans in the swamp for the last time from where she sat in the back seat as the car drove off, hemmed in between two of his minders. Swans ran along the water in the swamp, and flew in a cloud that looked like a black angel lit by lightning, but receded into the distance and their bugling faded into the thunder and the skies dark with midnight storms.


You can take it away, and with that, Warren Finch switched off his mobile phone. There was no need to speak. There was the journey ahead. He had just ordered the total evacuation of Swan Lake. The Army would do it. The whole shebang would be bulldozed that night. He imagined total annihilation. The swamp dredged. The unpredictability of seasons passing, weaving the light as he fell asleep.


The girl watched from the road as the kilometres passed, noticed the vegetation changing from one geographical region to the next, while stacking objects in her mind. The woman’s voice on the radio was singing…Pick me up on my way back. How would anyone sing the particularities of 3003-4-5 cans, 51-2-3 abandoned car bodies, 600 road signs, 86 carcasses of dead animals where wedgetail eagles swooped down and soared upwards, 182 old car tyres? There were lowland territories of emus, swarms of budgerigars, twisting green clouds over spinifex kinkarra plains, isolated groves of old eucalypts, river crossings with ghost gums dikili, solitary murrinji coolibah trees around dry dips in the landscape, salt pans, salt lakes, forest stands of gidgee in dry grass, lone bottle trees and fig trees growing out of rocky hills, salt plains, landscape blackened from bush fires, kulangunya blue tongue lizards, or frog calls, diamond doves, runs of spinifex pigeons. She would remember it all, by repeating the list over and over again, as the number of sightings increased, until she succumbed to exhaustion and sleep.

In her dreams she struggled to find a lifeline to grip. No safe anchor in the exploding water, where the chaos was so terrifying, the girl jumped out of her sleep. The car was still travelling, and it startled her before she remembered where she was.


The headlights flashed over telegraph poles beside the road, an endless line running behind them, which in her mind began forming a swan map of the country. She could imagine the swans flying above the wires strung across the poles in their slow migration along the Dreaming track from another age, while heading the journey up to the swamp. Now, she began fretting for them. Occasionally, the lightning lit up a landscape wild with wind and she remembered how the swamp drummed with rain in nights of storm.

In the relentless movement of travelling through a rain that had captured the country, her world became shrunken, pieces of memory flew off, became eradicated, until even the polluted slicks running across the swamp had disappeared into nothingness. She sensed everything known to her had disappeared and blamed herself. Had she really negated her responsibility for the greater things in her care? She could not ask what had happened to the swans. Would not ask to be taken back just to see whether they were safe. Her stomach had no momentum for pushing words into her mouth so that she could speak to anybody. She would have no words sophisticated enough to say to high-up kind of people like these men. Outside the claustrophobic car, the never-ending rain was falling heavily, so even if she had spoken, nobody would have heard.

Warren Finch slept in the front seat. He had fallen asleep from the moment they started out, but the three bodyguards talked on through the journey. A thick haze of cigarette smoke danced around in the car, and they sat in this smoke like genies squashed in a lantern. The three men talked non-stop about how things happened a lot to them while working for Warren Finch, and listening to them, you would think that they had never known any other life. They had never been born. Never had a home. Never had a family.

The girl fought the sound of these voices that talked on and on about things she did not understand. It became more and more difficult to stay awake, to remember the road, to count the signposts, her only way of finding the way back. She lost track of her calculations – the categories slipped into lesser numbers, and were forgotten. Now, she thought she was becoming delirious from imagining devils monotonously speaking in the talk of the bodyguards.

In lightning strikes their faces looked freaky. Nobody looked real with their skin replaced by a watery substance trapped in opaque layers of silicon. The lightning convinced the girl that these silicon remnants of ancient waters must be spirit genies that had decided to dress like men and were now working for Warren Finch, and pleasing his every wish. The girl wondered whether he knew of their true identity. It was no wonder that his pugilist scholars could do all manner of tasks, far more than any normal men. This was why Warren Finch was not sitting up awake in the front seat wishing to be rich and powerful and a genius. He already had his three wishes.

Who uses up their three wishes? A wish for this and a wish for that in each puff of cigarette smoke filling the car! The girl thought the sleeping man was running out of wishes, and she tried to imagine where the genies would live after he set them free. When that happened she would get her wish too. She would steal the magic lantern car and drive it straight back to the swamp to calm the swans swimming aimlessly around the hull. She would arouse the paralysed huddle on the foreshore with heads tucked under wings, waiting for death.

In her dream, a migrating swan moved rhythmically through the night as it passed across the changing landscape while following the lights of the car below. It glimpses Warren Finch sleeping in the front seat, and caught off guard hits the power lines and flips in flight. With wings faltering it ascends disoriented higher into the sky and spins off towards the stars while struggling to breathe. Oblivia was slowing down her own breathing too. Hardly breathes at all now, she is in a flight to death. She slips into unconsciousness while following the broken swan flying off through the darkness. Then the swan is pushed aside by the Harbour Master walking towards the car from a long way off and suddenly he is in the back seat of the car, where he squashes himself on top of the two men and the girl. Oblivia wakes up in fright, opening her mouth wide as the Harbour Master punches her hard in the chest. He is pushing air through her lungs, while squeezing the wrist of each of Warren Finch’s men in turn, until they are in so much pain, they are forced to wind down the windows to let in some fresh air, allowing the rain to belt into the car. Stupid girl, he says, and he remains in the car throughout the journey, watching the rain and taking note of the country, making it almost impossible for anyone to move in the back seat, especially Oblivia, who remains calm. Warren Finch kept sleeping, but the genies felt spooked by a foreboding in the car, a heaviness that stopped the talk, and made them think seriously about why they had bothered taking this journey right now, at this time of year, the stupidity of the whole trip really, and why they were not somewhere else instead.





Owls in the Grass





The Grass Owl has always been regarded as one of Australia’s scarcest owls, rarely seen and with only a handful of nest records, yet here was a concentration of birds, with evidence of multiple nesting.



The girl finally discovered where the three genies lived. After travelling many hours they reached a night world where men in singlets ruled lonely roads. Sweaty men yelling out over radio and satellite phones to each other to dig out the rulebook: That one written in hell. From then on it was hell on earth on this lonely single road, a highway stretching a thousand kilometres over the heart of the country.


This was the place where the mind of the nation practised warfare and fought nightly for supremacy, by exercising its power over another people’s land – the night-world of the multi-nationals, the money-makers and players of big business, the asserters of sovereignty, who governed the strip called Desperado; men with hands glued to the wheel charging through the dust in howling road trains packed with brown cattle with terrified eyes, mobile warehouses, fuel tankers, heavy haulage steel and chrome arsenals named Bulk Haul, Outback, Down Under, Century, The Isa, The Curry, Tanami Lassie, metal workhorses for carrying a mountain of mining equipment and the country’s ore.

A crescendo of dead – the carcasses of splattered or bloated bullocks and native animals lay over the sealed or unsealed corrugated roads, where the eyes of dingoes and curlews gleamed in the headlights.

The genies stopped frequently to check the road kill. Hunger filled the car. The girl watched as they collected those still with a trace of life: small rodents, mangled rabbits, various marsupials, broken-back snakes, a bush turkey, a smashed echidna. All of these bloodied, broken creatures still warm, were thrown in the back seat of the car. Along the way, the Harbour Master decided he could no longer be bothered staying in a car loaded with road kill, so he got out, and walked off somewhere out there on the open road.


You could only expect to arrive in the most isolated destinations like this after midnight, one of the genies murmured to the others in the car, after driving hour after hour through flat and wide country to reach a place where the winds collided and spun the soil into clouds of dust. Home at last. The genies walked off into the bush. They spoke to the country. Let the country know they had come home. Who the sleeping man and the girl were in the car.

The genies constructed a campsite on ground thick with rats, and smiled whenever they passed the terrified girl sitting in the car watching the earth move with their footsteps. Child! Pretty rats. Ratus vilosissimus. Bush rats! The air was dry and smelt of dust, rats and the heat of many days that had stayed in the ground. The rats scattered in rolling waves at every movement while scurrying in and away for all the fur and offal thrown to them by the genies preparing the road kill for the fire. Doom, Mail and Hart could not put aside something that had been niggling them ever since they had arrived on their country with the girl. None of them knew the stories from her country. They did not know anything about her, nothing of what she held within her, or the spirits of the law stories that she now brought onto their own territory. How would they know how these stories connected both countries? What other questions should they be considering if her stories did not connect with their country, not even one story-line connecting their lands together, if that was possible? They did not know. And the girl? She had not spoken a word and as far as they knew, she was not able to speak.

These questions started to haunt them, and it seemed as though the ancestors were already asking them to consider the consequences of trespassing spirits, and how they connected themselves to land and to her, and what knowledge they would turn to on this country. They were not senior story-men, nor in positions of authority as elders holding the law of the country on which they stood. Not like Warren, still asleep in the car, who was a senior lawman with much authority on his own country.

Well! It was pretty serious stuff to worry about, and they thought Warren was stupid for bringing her along in the first place with the excuse of using all of that promise marriage stuff – where did that come from? And simply by glancing from the girl and at each other, they agreed being back on their country was going to be one hell of a sobering-up exercise for each of them.

Since they were already calculating the cost of having her on their country, each man instinctively understood how these things work; of being responsible for looking after the girl. It was pretty obvious to them that there was something different about her – not because of Warren, but her strangeness made them feel uneasy, and convinced them that she had spirits looking after her. This was the thing that they had felt in the car, and now the whole mess of not knowing what to do about her continually bothered them. It was because of their foreboding about what they did not know about her, that they were already thinking about leaving, and realising if they continued thinking like this, it would get to the situation where it would be impossible to leave, because if not today or tomorrow, any one of them could suddenly be seized, and driven into that state of impossibility. Leaving would become a rock hanging around their necks. Leaving would become tied to a sense of foreboding, seen as being riddled with bad luck, where anything could go wrong with the whole situation of watching, caring, and thinking while they went about their scientific work on the environment – the annual task, the one small important thing that they had been asked to perform by their own nation. Now, instead of the work being a joy, with a sense of respect, and honouring their country, they would always be waiting…watching and waiting while nothing happened, until their own berserk, cart-wheeling prophesying was fulfilled.

The dust rose like shadowy priests wandering through the darkness. A celestial haze stirred up by the cattle. The cattle called to one another in response to their leaders, collars swaying around their necks ringing their bells. The girl was too frightened to leave the car, but Doom ordered her to get out. Don’t be stupid. Nobody is going to hurt you. Blood boils in her face as she stands back in the shadows, too afraid of becoming lost and disoriented as rats scurry in and out of the ghost bush, where darraku was everywhere, and feeling that kundukundu scrub devil reaching out with the wind, and she feels him scratch, kurrijbi all over her body, scratching along her arms and legs, he ensnarls her into the foliage.

The cattle bells roll, and remind her of Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions singing sacred texts to unlock the terrifying memories of her people. Again and again, by ringing the bells she brought them to life, legendary heroes that stretched right back through the ages to the time when wisdom-singers like Wainamoinen of the Kalevala were walking their land, swans came gliding from the marshes…came in myriads to listen…

The same old oracle was everywhere, even in the dust of rats. This time, Bella Donna was quietly singing the poetry of Ludwig Rellstab’s In der Ferne – In the distance – of fleeing one’s home broken-hearted, hearted, from Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang D.957. Hovering! Somewhere up in the sky! Asking the breezes to send greetings to a time when women stitched those white and golden swans in treasured embroidery that became heirlooms, before they fled along broad rivers towards the sea where white soot-stained swans were nesting in the burnt marshes.

Warren Finch did not stay asleep for long. The genies were too full of enthusiasm, divined more song and talked of seeing so fine a starry night. Hey! Girl, look at that, they called Oblivia frequently, constantly checking to see where she was as she stood in the darkness. They kicked rats away, and their laughter swirled about with the wind. Hey! Girl, did you see that? The car produced bounty – food, cooking utensils and bedding, more than anyone could have imagined would fit in its boot. A campfire was lit. Meals were cooked. Aromas filled the air. Wine and water appeared as though they had been divined from the windy earth itself. You will feel pretty good while you are on this country, Boss, they reassured him. He was on their land. It fills you up with life. All the energy you need. You’ll see. The men exchange knowing looks. There is no need to speak. They all belong to the same game. They know what Warren Finch has to work out before they go back to the city.


Let’s go, jila nungka, Finch said flatly to Oblivia, after he had eaten every piece of meat on his plate. She had not eaten, or as Warren guessed, refused to eat. He could see hatred in her eyes, and felt how tense she was, but he took her by the hand, pulled her to her feet from the ground where she had been sitting near the fire, and led her back to the car. In this moment of pulling her away from herself, she knew he would overpower her life. Even the sensation of his hand touching her had sent her back into the tree in her mind.

Once Warren had left with the girl, the genies chatted lightly about city women, international woman who called him up night and day. Now therein lay the mystery: She was not in the same league. They had seen enough of her on this journey to know that he must be regretting his mistake. She was just a kid. Well! She certainly looked and behaved like one. What did he think was going to happen once they got back home? Anyone could have told him not to go around picking up ‘damaged goods’ girls from dysfunctional Army-controlled communities like the swamp. Main thing being that bloody place was her homeland. The man’s got enough troubles. What was he thinking? The girl was overcome with shyness and here they were, a thousand kilometres away, and she would not even look at them, let alone speak. What he went and done now is a wrong thing. They knew how lightly he treated women, but thought he understood which women had any chance of standing up to him. Well! That was too late now. He had laid the idea of ‘worldliness’ at the feet of a recluse. Who knew what was the matter with him? He’s gone too far. They did not have to say what each of them already knew, that they could not fix this problem. It would not be like having a ‘small smart chat’ to one of the city women he was tired of, who he wanted to go and get lost.

I am so tired, Warren told her, after he had driven a short distance from the camp the genies had made for themselves, and threw his swag on the dirt.

Come here and let’s get some sleep, he said, pulling the trembling girl towards him, onto the swag, and into the blanket of dust swirling over them. The surrounding bush smelt of the rats that were rushing through the grass whining for food, which made her believe they would attack once she fell asleep. She felt nauseated by the closeness of this other person, but surveying the surrounding darkness, she saw that there was nowhere to escape in the dryness of the strange country that frightened her. Forced to lie together in the cold, locked for warmth like sheltering animals against a windbreak he had erected with the canvas of the swag against the car, his arms wrapped around her made her feel that she was in the grip of a snake. She listened closely to the dry grass and shadows of scrub being rustled by the wind, singing stories and laws that she would never know, and knowing this single thing about being its stranger was like having the weight of the world on her shoulders. This was the kind of weight she carried to stop her from sleeping in this country. Whenever she drifted off to sleep, she would instantly be re-awakened; just by the simple fact of knowing she should not be there, and knowing that rats crept all over the ground searching for food. She felt the country’s power. Knew it could kill her.

Every sound convinced her that his bodyguards, the genies, were in the bush waiting for her to run. She does not trust any of them. But how could they be lurking around, when from further away, she could hear them singing the country through the night, their voices resounding in the wind gusts, and echoing through the landscape, as though there were many others singing with them. Her instincts keep telling her to run, she cannot stand being near him, feels like death to her, but fearing he would kill her, she remains frozen, barely able to move. Whenever she moved slightly, even to breathe deeply, his grip tightened. But he slept easily: the songs travel with him, and he carries the spirits of homelands inside him. It makes him strong: the hands of the ancestors are in his own, acting in unison.

She lay very still in the hope that he would stay sleeping even though she did not want to be left awake to listen to the sounds of the country. She hears the sharp cry from a rat and imagines that a snake is killing it, and this convinces her that she is sleeping on miya-jamba, snake ground. She imagines snakes are everywhere and hates the place, and is hot from panicking to be off the ground. The thought of rats and snakes infested through every centimetre of this piece of country makes her growing hatred for Warren Finch grate that little bit harder, and she is desperate to move, but just when she wishes to kill him and reaches around to find a rock to slam into his head, forgetting to fear she might touch a rat or a snake instead because she can’t see a thing in the darkness, or that he will wake up and see what she is doing and kill her instead, something happens. She forgets to act – either to run off, or to kill him. She has changed her mind? No, that was not it. Her mind changes itself. It is at war with action. Fights decisions. She forgets to act when memories quickly regain control of her brain, and instead of fighting, she escapes with a flood of thoughts running back along the song-lines to the swamp, and the language inside her goes bolting down the tree with all the swans in the swamp following her.


He knew her terror. It was the fear of a child that even the rats sensed and were scattering in frenzy. What was he to do with her world? This was when he realised that he would never be able to reach her. Hadn’t he given her a fair go? He had built a dream as complex and ingrained as her own, but where he knew that his would keep pushing him out in the world, she would always dig a hole to hide in. She was still the girl in the tree. Untouchable. Rolled up in a tight ball like a frightened echidna. Yes, it was easy to decide not to touch her. Perhaps he never would. What did it matter? Nobody would accuse him of being a paedophile or a rapist. Number one rule of his forefathers. What could he do? He drifted off into half-sleep like he always did, while thinking about a mountain of crises in any country that sprung to his mind, and through the wee hours of the night, he would spin by the world’s troubles, resolving crises one by one, intervening step by step in other people’s fortunes or misfortunes, in his dreams.

When the wind dropped, all she could hear was his breathing resounding through the sounds of owl fights, and screaming rats. Above them, she thought she saw spider webs being spun on fine threads that ran down from the power lines and across to the low-growing mulga trees. These enormous webs were being woven thicker and thicker and spiders were flying through the air in search of places to anchor their threads, as though setting a trap to encase them during the night. She lay flat beside him as he slept, and drifted into sleep with the thought of touching the walls inside her tree, and dreamed of a struggling swan enclosed by Warren’s icy body while Old Bella Donna sang from afar – A swan with a slither of bone in its beak.

The dawn landscape was grey and solemn as it revealed a silent vista of mostly grass and sparsely scattered scrub, until the baying of cattle echoed in a chain reaction that sallied back and forth from the distant horizons. When the sun rose, the cattle had already broken through spider webs and gathered around the two sleeping figures. She was in a cathedral of Law where marriages were always honoured but she would not honour hers. The morning air felt cold. So were her thoughts, vowing that nothing would spring from the dirt of this ground.

You will learn that you and I are going to stand for each other as the only ones we can trust, so never forget that I am your best friend, and only friend, Warren said, preparing to leave, and added – always serious – You remember that, and that will be the main thing I will want from you as a wife.


She looked at the landscape – a vista of sameness in every direction – and knew that this was why women went missing on journeys with their husbands. They were lost forever. This country would devour anyone walking in it that did not know it. Only local people would know how to move through it. A voice she recognised was surfacing: Look around here. She thought this wedding country was the home of stories about women thrown overboard, cast out, abandoned, those bodies lost in wiyarr spinifex waves.

Isn’t it a great country, Warren said, already flowing into the day ahead, and pushing aside the troubling dreams that had come to him during the night, where he had met himself as a dead man, disoriented, weak, and his ghostly face full of disbelief, while being supported by the genies through the streets of the city, and he had watched as they walked on, to a grave he would be buried in.

Swans mate for life: that was what she thought. And if a swan loved its mate, then what would make one kill its mate as she had seen once in a sudden and vicious attack, alongside the hull? It was a silent death. There was no such thing as the dying swan call. It died without sound. She had no sound either, and knew what it was like to be without sound. This country would never hear her voice, or the language she spoke.


The genies’ camp was a mess. Their smart clothes were abandoned over the ground, their pots, pans, and swags spread in a chaotic palette. Encircling it all, dead rats in their hundreds lined the periphery. Swarms of blue Lycaenidae butterflies, unusually massing in one spot, flew above the heads of Drs Hart, Mail and Doom who were now dressed in their oldest bush clothes, that might have been buried for years under clumps of spinifex. The three men were busy with the fire, creating breakfast, and totally oblivious to the blot they had created on the landscape. Welcome home, smiled Mail. Oblivia looked around at their camp. It looked as though they had not moved from their position around the fireplace from the previous night. They were listening intently to a distant magpie, just jarrburruru absorbed in its song.

Hear it? A Thessalian maiden no doubt, Doom said. A slight smile of appreciation spread across his face as he spoke to Warren Finch.

Warren nodded casually. He began poking the fire with a stick to send up the flames. His mind was set on the black billycan steaming with the aroma of tea and with pushing away the shock of seeing his dead face in a dream, which was still clear in his mind. Oblivia noticed Dr Doom’s face softening, the hardness of the day before had disappeared. He looked like a boy staring into the distance, locked into studying the structure of the magpie’s tune. After a while he stood up, and faced the direction of the songster. He whistled the song perfectly. The bird replied. A song war continued until the bird flew from twig to twig across the ground to investigate, and seeing how it had been tricked, flew off.


Would you like to have some owl’s eggs? Snip Hart asked her. He had been squatting beside the fire, stirring a large fry pan amidst the smoke, but had come over and spoken quietly while handing her a plate of food. She looked away in disgust. She was not eating owl eggs. Eat it, Warren demanded in a voice that made her wince at the ferocity of it. Her eyes rested on the wanderings of a rat daintily sniffing over each corpse of its dead friends. It touched the tips of grey bloodied fur with its nose as though it was searching for a faint breath of life or a ticking heart, before moving on.

The girl could not understand what the genies thought the reason was for spending most of the night killing rats. They told Warren that these were plague rats, were attracted to the light of the fire. There was blood on thick sticks of wood resting on the ground beside the fireplace, right next to the king-sized frying pan filled with bright yellow scrambled eggs. She tried to guess how many owls’ eggs had been taken from their nests and looked at the landscape of spinifex kinkarra and grasslands, where nothing much grew higher than a metre off the ground. The girl tried to locate where owls would nest in those plains where there were no significant trees, except mulga. She remembers owls nesting in the ghost ships on the swamp and she gets up and feels that she is starting to walk off towards home, which feels very close in her mind, but Warren makes her sit on the ground. The plate of food is placed in her lap. He repeats this exercise a number of times before she realises that she is not going anywhere.

Well! So many rats, so many owls, and all night, ‘The tremulous sob of the complaining owl…’ Bones remarked excitedly, his face covered with grey dust. In an authoritative voice, he explained that they were sitting in the best place in the world right now to see owls. Man! We are right in the middle of a plague of rats that are multiplying in droves. Never seen anything like it before. He explained that the rats had migrated in strands of millions flowing inland through the desert. In their wake, large flocks of native grassy owls had followed them, and the Tyto capensis grass owls, he explained, were also quadrupling in numbers each time they bred. The food supply was so good – different, unusual, changed weather patterns are causing it. Well! It was like sitting in the middle of a feast, said Doom, speaking knowledgeably about the extraordinary phenomena – a million to one chance they were lucky to witness. He had been visiting places like this for years, waiting for this to happen.

Yep, Snip added, Don’t forget the owls were attacking the moths attracted to the fire as well and I think…

Yes, of course, Doom interjected with science talk, But I don’t think the fire was a consideration in the mind of swarming rats being chased by owls.

My friend! Who knows the workings of a rat’s mind, Snip replied.

I thought that was our expertise: to know a rat when we see one, Doom laughed, but Mail took a more serious analogy about predation in a natural feast or famine occurrence.

Vigilance! My friend. It was only sheer vigilance – the nature of our ancestors, that had saved us from a storm of vermin.

Snip said he agreed because he felt Mail really possessed the mind of a genius, and laughed. In a way, he said, I really equate that brain of yours Mail with a high tech microscope. Someone, who could without hesitation, and with the least bit of prompting, easily cast his mind back through time in a matter of moments, to situate himself inside the brain of the first man and recreate his prophecy.

And the reason? Ancestry. It all boils down to the connective tissue of heredity. A miracle that is not restricted to time. The brain is a marvellous organ.

You are one of a kind, brother, Mail laughed.

This whole thing was one of a kind.

One continuously ponders the puzzle of life, Warren said with a deep sigh.

Of course, genius is always hard to ignore, Snip said, with a wink.

Exactly. The reason why Tyto capensis and Tyto alba were nesting like flies around the spinifex.

The souls of women, Warren reminded them, and looked at the girl who was still staring at her plate, unwilling to eat strange food.

You had better eat. It will be another long day.


The return to the highway commenced with a greeting from a blue-eye crow. It was crying next to its squashed-in-half mate left in the middle of the road. Warren stopped the car. The bird tried to defend itself as Warren sought to befriend it. Quietly, he moved closer, holding out his arm, then the bird did a very strange thing. It leaped onto his outstretched hand and onto his shoulder, while crying aah-aah-aah, and began chuckling its secrets into his ear. He asked questions, calling it a wise bird, for wise it was with age from the colour of its eyes, and then, he consoled it for its loss. The bird responded well to his voice, for it did another strange thing to demonstrate its ability to communicate its feelings to human beings. It began to mimic lines from that famous old ABBA song – Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world – which its ancestors perhaps learnt from listening to a truckies’ roadhouse jukebox where they had spent decades pilfering scraps, and which the bird now sung repeatedly in so many Aahs. He sang, and the genies sang, and the bird was almost beside itself.


The girl wanted to keep this lonely bird. Warren saw her moment of vulnerability and in that instant, she received his first lesson about what he meant by friendship. He sent the raven back off to where it belonged, into the northerly wind.


The day was spent examining owls’ nests. Their vehicle had been left beside the road covered with Army-issued camouflage netting. Warren and the genies took great care to ensure that the vehicle would remain undetected, and had walked back along their wheel tracks off the main dirt road to buff up the grass.

They travelled on foot, walking into the vastness of low vegetation plains surrounded by smooth, tussocky hills. The work was hard. Dust rose with each step, filled the air with each breath of wind, and fell to settle in their hair, over their skin and in their clothes. They looked as though they had crawled in it, but they had blended into the country, and were indistinguishable from it.

The task of locating the nests of the grass owl was not easy. The nests were concealed at the end of tunnels constructed through the thick kinkarra spinifex grasslands. The genies walked in circles between each nest. Warren trailed behind. Oblivia always felt that he was watching her, just in case she tried to escape. She was seething with anger. She hated being watched, of knowing he was staring into her back, getting into her mind. She thought of ways of killing him once she had the chance. His phone rang. He was always busy on what the girl learnt was a mobile phone, capable of making calls from where they were, in one of the remotest places on the planet. Each time it rang and abruptly broke the silence of the bush, he would fall further back, while he talked into it. Sure! Not now. Speak to you later. Warren Finch, important or not, was determined to have this time on Country. He silently indicated five days tops with a show of his open palm to the genies when they looked back at him speaking on the mobile. They smiled. Agreed. He continued talking. Somebody else. You will have to cope. You can cope for a few days can’t you? A lot of hard talking had to be done to keep the world busy while he was away. How to finally topple that old goat Ryder once and for all? Take the reigns as the new President? March right up to what the country needed. It was time. He was saying how he wanted time to think, to prepare, to be ready for what was coming. How was he going being married and all? He repeats the question each time it’s asked. Fine! Right!

Keep hitting if it makes you happy, he said, whenever Oblivia decided to run back to take another slog at his face.

The genies always tried to mask the conversations Warren was having by talking about owls to the disinterested or disconnected girl – they could not decide which – by naming and describing the two-hundred odd species in the world. It became an endless conversation between the three men about the twenty or so types that included different barn owls, fishing owls, burrowing owls, wood owls, little owls like the one Picasso had as his sad pet. They discussed the Latin family names like Tyto, Megascaps, Bubo, Otus, but only Ninox and Tyto represented the nine different owls found in Australia. She learnt that barn owls could be used by farmers to control plagues of rodents as these owls were now doing out in the desert country. I am in rodent country, she thought while she turned and spat towards Warren. The three genies talked a great deal about why the owls had come from the east. What this meant. The ecology of the country had changed. Was this the Law doing something to the country? Then something changed. Words trampling her into the ground could also pick her up. She looked surprised to be told that each family of owls consumed several thousand mice and rats in a breeding season. Yep! Bones Doom commented, as though speaking for the girl’s silences. She glared at him. She did not want to know these things. These fellas will keep on breeding out here until they have consumed all the rodents, and then their own numbers will decrease, because most owls will not live more than a couple of years.

Such a large bird, very unlike the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo which might live for eighty or ninety years, explained the gentle Bones.


There was no owl’s nest passed before it received a thorough examination. The men never tired of their interest in how an owl had constructed its nest. With each clutch of eggs discovered, the find was welcomed by the genies as though a miracle had taken place, and chorusing, Doom, how do you do it man, you are a f*cking genius. How many is that now? 12,001? 12,002?

The eggs were examined for number and weight, and each egg created serious discussion to judge its particular shape and age, held up like a diamond against the sun to examine the embryo forming inside, and then finally, enthusiastic thought was given to how each egg felt as though it was the first marvellous thing they had ever held in the hand. Oblivia thought all the nests were the same. Whenever she was the first to see a nest she did not volunteer the information. What did it matter? She could not be bothered that each nest consisted of six or eight eggs with a displeased sitting owl. Who cared? She wanted to go home. The urge to bolt through the spinifex overpowered her. Only the swamp loomed large in her mind. A vision now contaminated with the ghostly sight of Warren walking like a dead man. A vision that would not leave his mind either.

The information about the owls’ nests, including the level of anxiety to the disturbed owl, was recorded on pocket-sized computers. Doom was constantly reminded how painfully slow and tedious he was in his search to locate each nest in a fixed area, before the group could move on. It’s for science. Nobody knows anything about why these birds come to this place, or why the rats are driven here. The girl was desperate to go. Warren catches up with her each time she walks away. She knows that she slows them down even further. The work becomes slower. Always Doom gives the same answer, while sometimes glancing conspiratorially at Warren, the man on top of the nation who has up to this point, always been in a hurry. Warren nods: Sure! Who hasn’t got time for science?

We were doing this all last night, Edgar Mail told the girl in a voice that was like an echo from distant spinifex groves, but there were other words burning inside of her: Stupid girls get into trouble. It was Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions’ voice. Stupid girls deserve to get what is coming to them. The Harbour Master was dancing across the plain, stopping every now and again to stare quizzically at the owl hunters whom he repeatedly called, stupid people. He and the old woman were both shouting over the distance to reach one another, reminiscing about the bad luck of the girls with weather-beaten bones that lay scattered in places exactly like this. The Harbour Master called it kinkarra nayi. The desert. Spinifex. Wiyarr! Wiyarr! Everywhere. What next?

They said their bones were like white chalk. Odd, how these bones were scattered around the ground throughout the spinifex. The girl’s stomach nods, rolls, and nods again. She saw prowling dingos with white bones in their mouths wherever the sun’s glare struck the horizon. The dead lady’s voice reminded her that all men wanted was sex, so how do you like that? It happened on the refugee boats. It can happen in the mulga too. The girl remembered there was an owl, a julujulu that once lived in the darkened hole in the roots of the tree. She had felt its soft feathers with her fingers. Now she was reminded of its softness.

Edgar Mail continued talking, You should remember that anyone can be a habitual colonist perpetually in search of difference to demystify myths, always trying to create new myths to claim as their own. The girl could hear the old woman and the Harbour Master chuckling somewhere in the air above them, telling her to forget about what that man was saying. What would he know about the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas back in 1697 when a white man first saw your mythical black swan swimming about over there in Western Australia, who had always thought black swans were evil and never really existed? Did he stand back and not touch, believing he would be doomed on a shipwreck for taking a black swan?


You know, most of these eggs will hatch but when the food runs out in the summer, the rats will perish, and so too will most of the owls, Edgar Mail said lamely, while looking at Snip, who looked at Doom. The girl began to think about how she was going to disappear into ghost country, just like the girls who never returned. She looked out over the ocean of grey-green grasses and thought of how Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had spent years looking across oceans to stop herself from dying at sea. The Harbour Master reminded the girl that it was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed.

The genies kept talking about Oblivia’s name.

Immya Wake. You are kidding me. Nobody has a name like that.

No. No way man.

You tell them, Warren laughed, looking at her. The girl felt as though she had been stripped in broad daylight. She looked away while trying to decide where to run, but there was no place to run. The plains country was already a coffin for brides.

That’s not a good joke comrade, Snip snapped.

Yes! You are right, Warren replied. Swan girl, I know your name is Ethyl. Will always be Ethyl. I don’t know who gave you that other name. But from now on it’s going to be Ethyl, short they tell me for Ethylene Oblivion. A beautiful name really, Ethyl.

The genies wanted to know where that name originated.

The girl stalked off, spitting all over the ground as she went.

Warren Finch liked her spirit. She was a good hater. He smiled as though he was pleased with his new possession. The girl did not go far before she realised that she wanted to live, and this dead face Warren Finch was bloody well it, so when Snip commanded, Stop. Stay dead still until I come to you, she froze on the spot. All she hears is Warren’s voice, talking again on the mobile phone.


Snip Hart charmed snakes. Snakes are my thing, he laughed as he appeared without a sound beside her: Not yours I can see. He urged her to pick up the snake coiled on the ground directly beneath them. She remained glued to the spot, full of hate for the man’s continual speaking, leaning back and forth, taunting the snake to lunge.

Come on. I am right here, he urged. The girl felt the serpent eyes staring right into her mind. She felt the sensation of its glare and the immediacy of her fear travelling back through its nervous system, pushing its strength down though the muscles of its body, and from there her fear sat like a spring in readiness, as the snake prepared to strike. Snip waited. Shh! he whispered. Perspiration ran from her forehead onto the snake’s shiny head and over the black beads of its eyes. The snake lunged. Her blood raced to the spot where it would bite before Snip Hart swung the snake up off the ground and into the air by the tail. It hung from the top of his up-stretched arm, struggling for freedom.

He smiled: See how simple it is? He gave her a pat on the shoulder as he walked past to show the others. Snip was an expert on desert snakes. It was his country. The girl thought that the snake had not seen him because he was invisible to it. He was already inside the snake. It had only concentrated on striking her. Snakes were also numerous, Edgar Mail explained to Oblivia as they walked, because all the unusual climatic changes which were creating plagues of insects and rodents, also increased the numbers of species that fed on them.

You just have to be quick, Snip claimed, as if snake-catching was an ordinary skill that people needed to know to be able to walk in a country like Australia. Oblivia continued watching him as he walked ahead while trying to discover whether he really was invisible to snakes. In the sun, she was soon hypnotised by thoughts of hands that moved from running down the body of a snake and examining owl eggs, to hands she pushed away at night.

Snip Hart was fast. He plunged his arm straight down a hole in the ground, or a spinifex tunnel, and grabbed a snake. He announced the measurements and weight in breaking news, while noisily tapping the results into his computer with one hand, and with the other holding the snake. Afterwards, when he finished with each snake, and before releasing the writhing creature, he stared into its eyes to speak lovingly to it in simple words describing its numerous points of beauty, its measurements, and stroking it, he successfully seduced the creature into limp submission in his hand. In its hypnotic trance, he said, it only dreamed of loving this land. How many sexual encounters he wondered, had this snake experienced. Ten? Edgar Mail guessed, fingering the length of stubble on his face while studying the size of the creature. Twenty, by its size, reasoned Snip. Then he laid the creature on the ground, where it stayed motionless, and walked away.

There is a lot to learn about owls, Mail claimed dreamily in camp at night. He was singing his curiosity to the country and asking the ancestors for their reasoning, as he built his thesis on the plague of rats. Not the type of thing you could learn in one day in a place where samples of the biosphere in a vast stretch of the country were being carried through some of these creatures we were examining. How do you explain their special stories of origins and creation, return and renewal, which are as new as they are old?

No! Don’t tell them anything. Wait until I get back. Warren on the other hand, had spent most of his day ignoring the world of rats, owls and snakes, and was still answering and making calls on his mobile phone’s secure link. He spoke to people across the world in their own languages. He chatted to all of the policy-makers he was interested in, and lastly, told his men that there were people trying to find their location, and continued to speak calmly, while fetching Oblivia back from another attempt to walk off in a halfawake dream, or having to duck from her sudden outbursts of arms swinging to either punch or scratch him, or avoiding another round of aeroplane spitting. Ah! Janybijbi nyulu julaki jabula! Naah!

Well! People will be looking for you, Edgar Mail said, already knowing. It was always understood that Warren Finch’s life was lived in danger. He was simply a wanted man. Everyone wanted a part of him. To put it mildly he was a saviour, and we know what happens to saviours. Threats were continuously being made on his life. This time, the threats were so serious, he was advised to think about his future security by old untrustworthy, O.K. Corral Horse Ryder, if he wanted to stay alive. Yet Warren and his men believed that this was simply how he had to live. In their world, it was hard to know what was sound advice, or what contained a threat, or what was just someone crapping on in their mind. It could not have been any different, and Warren relished each challenge, where he would constantly be dealing with trouble, and out-smarting anyone in the world who wanted to take a shot at him. It was these threats to his life that became the reason, the modus operandi for Warren’s elusiveness, where nobody really knew or understood where he was. He led people into believing what he wanted them to believe. So routinely exercised was this art of illusion in fact, in a puff of the genies’ smoky haze, Warren Finch could will himself to be anywhere in the world, instantly in flight to another country, instantly appearing in another part of the continent, or regularly popping up on the television all over the place, while all the time, it was assumed that he was still living normally, like other people. His artfulness in disappearing and reappearing was so strange, that as the swamp people had believed he was somewhere else, he could still make you feel that you had never seen him – that he was never there at all. This was why they were out on the genies’ country. A bushland so vast in its sameness, that only the traditional owner could read the subtle stories of its contours. This was where they always took Warren to work out strategies to fend off the latest round of would be assassins.


Let them wait. I am having a break. Want a bit of time to think things through.

Warren kept a lot of the information he had received to himself. Business. Policy. His security. The seriousness of new threats to his life. It concerned him after all. He would deal with the waiting game for others to strike first. Keep punching – just like he had told the girl.

Stay as long as you want, Edgar agreed. You are in charge. But you better keep it in mind that the longer you are away, the more difficult it is going to be to take control when you get back.

Nothing to worry about, Warren said. There is nothing they can do without me. I am not even back in the country as far as anyone knows.

I am just saying there are things happening in the country right now, Mail warned. Might do better with your presence, that’s all.

I know that, Warren said in a tone of voice that made it clear that he did not want to be reminded of having other responsibilities: What we are doing here. Finding out what is going on in the country. This is more important right now.

The genies smiled and continued relaxing on the ground next to the fire well into the night, drinking tea, their eyes upwards, searching the star world. Nothing Warren said was of any consequence to them. His fingers rang up and down the girl’s hand while she froze for what felt like a dead man touching her, and he thought of his own death march to the grave. The onset of owls screeching aroused quiet academic discussion which grew into an argument about a single pitch once heard, the purest of sounds, and whether this was an owl signalling its territory, or something else altogether – a voice from the spirit country.


Edgar Mail took the violin out of its case. He tuned it slowly as his fingers worked on the yellow wood instrument shining from the light of the fire. It softly responded to his touch while he listened, until suddenly, he began playing the melancholy tune of owls calling through the stillness of night. The music created ripples in the rhythm of the owl calls as he replied to their sound with his own composition. Near and far, the owls replied. The music was theirs. Edgar was almost in a trance as he walked around the camp with his violin and drifted away into the darkness of the surrounding spinifex with rats parting in haste to create a path, and his music calling and responding to the instructions of the owls.

He was playing like the old powerful chants of bringing up the country. Law music. The music was unearthly, but belonged to this land in the same way as the chanting of ancient songs and the sound of clap sticks beating through the night. The music now contained joyfulness, sometimes dropping suddenly into a barely audible lullaby, then out of this calm, it would suddenly grow again in pitch and rhythm until another and another crescendo was reached. Finally and abruptly, Edgar stopped playing, too exhausted to continue. He would have to remember the music. He said what they had listened to was the beginning of the first movement of music to grass owls in D flat major.


The nights in this windy landscape were spent with the law spirits who were travelling the country to scrutinise the marriage of plagues – keeping the balance where insects, rodents, snakes and owls were breeding. Warren Finch wanted the ancestral world to create the balance in his marriage. He whispered into her ear that this was the way he wanted the land to see them. Oblivia moved away as though he was already a ghost. She saw the infestations of the day were still exactly the same at night. She was back in the tree in her mind. Safe there. Worse than ever: scribbling that silent language in the air. In truth, Warren was becoming convinced that for whatever reason he had taken the girl in the first place, it was not going to work. Even the act of consummating it seemed a waste of time. When he looked at her all he saw was a child. You can’t have sex – make love with a kid. She was scared stiff of the sight of him. Terrified when he touched her. His face, to her, was contorted with death. That was how she dreamed at night beside him. He saw clearly that it was beyond his power to change her, but by morning he would see the day afresh as a challenge to be met to make his marriage work, just like he tried to make everything else work, whatever the challenge, because to him, that was what life was all about.

He kept reminding her that they would become friends. In the end you will trust me. That he should succeed in gaining her trust was important to him. The first goal he wanted to achieve. She was his last real link to a world he had severed, the attachment he had planned to keep. Sometimes she thought he was right. She would trust him.

During the day whatever else he thought, he kept his distance, walking behind, always speaking to someone on the mobile phone. He knew that she had overheard some of these conversations. He said that these were just people he loved. People that he trusted. He depended on them for their safety. Yours too now, he added.

Warren Finch did not sleep at night. In fact, the death dream returned the moment he dozed off on this country. He lay awake with their future – his future – weighing heavily on his mind. He had decisions to make, and he wondered whether it was worth taking the risk of continuing his political life. His death seemed to be the only future from it, and he kept revisiting the scene of being led to his grave.

Could he bring her into that world? He tossed the question over and over, although he knew that it was not a safe decision to take her any further. She would need a lot of looking after that was for sure. He tried to push aside any imagining of what his life would be like with her. Couldn’t form a vision of it. Somehow, thinking about the future did not seem to make any sense as the night wore on. He was more familiar with having a rough ride in politics and doing it alone. Never thought about his own personal future before. Just the country’s future. It was his speciality. The only dream he felt that he could make real. This was the best way he knew of dealing with his enemies. As though making enemies was his life. He looked at Oblivia pretending to be asleep. Wondered how much longer he could stay, but confirmed in his own mind, that until he knew where the new threats were coming from, he would keep stalling his return. There were government security people on to it. They kept updating him. Getting closer, he had been told. He only trusted his own bodyguards: Hart, Doom, and Mail. They had been close for years. If they thought his life was in so much danger, so be it. They had agreed: We will take as long as it takes to deal with it.

Tomorrow they would be out of this death country, and it couldn’t be quick enough. But what to do about her? It almost did not matter to him which way the wind blew. He was always ready to fall. Yet he knew she would not be able to take the blows, although she had given him a few, and continued to lie awake until dawn, knowing he would have to do something about it. She would struggle. For the first time in his life he had to admit that he really felt jinxed.


The vehicle was left far behind covered with spinifex, where it melted into the landscape on the edge of the salt lake country through which they were travelling. The whole country could burn behind them if disaster struck, but the genies were not interested. They were born and raised on the land and they knew how to walk in it.

Don’t look back, Edgar Mail said, surprising the girl as he whispered into her ear. We wouldn’t want to see you being turned into a pillar of salt.


In the days that followed, they continued travelling further across the white sea. The defining landmarks of this salt lake country were small crags that jutted out here and there in the salt. These were the possession of spirit guardians travelling on a journey far away to important story places. The salt crust broke underneath them with each footstep. There was even more solitude in this place than in the spinifex country they had just left behind. They felt the presence of the enormous white glistening body that contained the quietness of a resting serpent spirit fellow who was listening deeply to hear even an insect perching on its skin, come there to recite its song. The landing of butterflies. The feet of a lizard pounding on crystals of salt.


There were battalions of stink beetles crawling over each other and the salt. Plague grasshoppers jumped away at the coming of strangers. Moth storms swept across the lake. Crimson and orange chats whistled from the heath of spinifex, pittosporums, mulga and eremophila scrubs growing along the sides of the lake. The girl saw green twisting clouds of budgerigars crossing their paths at various times throughout the day. Up high, harriers and kites cried out as they glided in the thermals. To look back was to see fine salt crystals dusting over their tracks as little storms of salty filaments gurgled about in the desert air.

That was during the day. The salt glowed at night, and the body of the lake moved differently when the ancestral winds lowered themselves from the skies and whistled eerily across its surface. The night spoke in dreams which took the wandering thinker far below the surface, to be jostled in a spirit sea populated with the salt-encrusted bodies of millions of grasshoppers, shoals of tiny fish bones, brine shrimps, larval fish like splinters of glass, colourless moths, seeds and stalks; grotesque bloated grunters, bony herrings, frogs, tadpoles and water birds that had perished in the increasingly saline waters, and been entombed when the water evaporated.

The girl dreamt of swans, chaotically misshapen creatures frozen in death that were forcing their spirits through films of salt to reach her during the night. Had they come searching for truth, but found encasement? She awoke from dreams where her fingers were red raw from trying to peel away the salt to straighten the pinion feathers of the swans and let them fly.


They passed through old times, coming through hillock after hillock covered in spinifex, of Country that had a serious Law story for every place, and of everything belonging to that place like family. The genies kept calling the names of these places which were thousands of years old, and which joined the Law stories of naming, titles of belonging, maps of exclusiveness that ran like this, throughout the continent. Oblivia kept quiet. Listened to the names. Tried not to think in case the spirits heard her and dragged her into their realm. She would not die on this country.

While the genies were drifting even further back into ancient times with their name calling, Warren Finch was making the equivalent leap into the future, and impatient to get a move on and back to his job of bloody well running the country, he told the genies to speed it up. They were getting out of here. Before the bloody country got f*cked up good and proper by Horse. That cunt of a man. Can’t turn your back on him for a second. The genies looked concerned, but not overly bothered, having seen it all before, on other occasions when they had to get him out of a jam. Tops! They might make him last another few days out in the bush. Yep! The boss! Too right! Power crawled like a pack of cut snakes through his body. He was an addict to it. Addiction? They knew he wouldn’t last long. Couldn’t. They had seen the man explode if he was not in control. They knew that what was left for him was time. But, like the man said, he had work to do, and everyone knew how toey Warren could be if he didn’t get a fix from being in charge, and feel the power surging through his blood. He would chase it down anywhere. Do anything to assert power. Why couldn’t he just chase that girl around a bit more? Crazy thing had his measure already. Warren always thought it was a waste of time to hold up the entire country just for the sake of a few people getting in his way. Well! Bring it on. He knew it. They knew it. Impatience was a fact of life. Yep! Everything will be fine. I will be fine. The girl will be fine. He convinced himself of it. She would grow up. Why wouldn’t she? What else could she do? He was bored of marriage already.

Doom, Mail and Hart understood the deal: they could only hold him up for as long as they could possibly get away with it. Already he had imbued every molecule of air with the stench of Horse Ryder. Rah! Rah! Rah! Can’t keep still for a minute. Can’t stop talking about Horse Ryder. But, even they thought he would maintain some interest in the girl he had taken. His keepsake. This little challenge he had set himself – a promise wife. They knew the threats on his life were real this time. Why can’t he take it seriously instead of worrying about what Horse is doing? The girl saw an endless journey ahead in an unchanging landscape that they would continue walking forever. Just like ghosts! Perhaps they had already crossed over into that world. Would she escape? Do ghosts escape?

A day passed of counting the fluffy fledglings transforming into orange wash and white feathers that were hidden in the grasslands by the shores of saltpans while waiting to fly. The country was consuming the girl’s memory. She could not carry the past and had to let some of it go. A few of her old messages to her swans had returned from places that no longer existed – address unknown. The Harbour Master had come along and saw the burden she was carrying, and for a while, he walked beside her while trying to persuade her to give up some of her treasured nightmares. He sat around in the salt sorting out which thoughts should stay, which should go, telling her off for sending away anything he thought was really valuable. He was the kingmaker of policy too. You always need a few of those bad thoughts to chuck around. He kept telling her how he could not stand the sight of Warren Finch. Look at him. Stalking along. Planning and scheming some other stupid thing – probably how he is going to kill you off since he is sorry he bothered with someone like you in the first place? And the genies? Mate! I know a ghost from the Middle East when I see one.

Maybe you are from the Middle East yourself, the girl growled and walked away from the Harbour Master who was piling up her thoughts into salt columns of what was to be kept, and what cut loose.


This is not all we do, Doom said, feeling that he ought to prepare the girl for their departure – once the owls left the desert after the rats perished in these hottest months.

There was a shop he owned, he said, in the city where she would live. She did not understand what he meant. Cities are where people die. That was what old Aunty always said about cities. Illness places. You will be arrested for being a terrorist. She wondered about what he said, and thought: But I like it here now. He looked at her sadly. You could ask Warren about the city. Could she ask him what would happen to her? Why would she do that? Speak! To terrorists from the city? The salt lands now became unreliable, temporary in her mind. I specialise in many things. Birds. People. Books. I am not always there. Travel with the boss a lot. Love to spend time at the shop though, Doom said.

He explained that he, Edgar and Snip were all involved in specialist trade and had the most beautiful shop in the city. It was the place where you could feel the country: This place. I made a place in the city to hold my heart. Like this place. He said that they sold birds, old butterflies from all over the world, exhibited rare eggs and feathers, bird books, snake books, musical instruments, traditional maps of routes and footpaths, maps for following foxes and bees, old instruments for finding dreams, stars, or fossils. This was the place to seek professional advice on cultural law, societies, myths and almost anything anyone needed to know of the human condition from Edgar, Snip or him – the filler of ears, the purveyors of information.

She was to learn that Snip loved nothing more than selling his customers gadgets to find stars, and that Edgar Mail specialised in selling old sheet music he had collected from elderly men and women in the inner laneways of ancient cities. He also recorded and spent tireless hours publishing the music from these works. His own music was printed on the old printing press in this shop. They believed in their enterprise. Our customers are people seeking knowledge about the world. Mostly from the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Australians? Not too many. We are specialists you know. You will probably want to visit us from time to time.


Oblivia tried to anchor these new pictures of the genies in her mind, but she had no idea of how to hold the details of what she had never seen. Their words died as soon as they were spoken and buried in her mind. She squinted in the sun, had to blink to see what lay ahead in the endless story of yellow lofty crags in salt lakes, owls, rats, snakes, when she saw a speck in the horizon of blue skies. Yellow! White! Blue! Black!