The Swan Book

A Lake of White Water





A lake of white water, not a mirage, lay far ahead. This was where she saw the swans. Black wings swirled down from the clear blue skies to skid across the water. The girl thought it was her dreams catching up with her, coming back in the daytime. She needed to run to see if these were her swans but knew not to, to watch from a distance the swans gliding on the white water, while I glide swanlike…I glide and glide. From the sides of her eyes she saw the hurdles. Warren Finch would see she had not forgotten the swamp. She never knew how the genies would react.

Questions surfacing in her mind about leaving ran from the girl, and disappeared into the vista of the white sea. She felt homesick, a terrible yearning to go home. She ran towards the swamp that wasn’t there. The swans saw her coming over the salt, and before she had a chance to come anywhere in reach, they snapped loose her spirit from theirs, and took to the air. She watched until they were out of sight, flying further ahead, in a south-easterly direction.


Warren watched her run. Sure! Sure! I’ll be there. He spoke loudly into his mobile phone. I am ready. Let’s do it. His words caught her, ran along the surface of her arms as she ran, and as though a net he threw had unfurled over her, she realised in this moment, that she was attached to him. She would never escape, even if she ran forever from a world that had fallen apart.


Doom tried to console the girl about the swans flying away. They were not your swans. They are free birds. They belong somewhere else. She felt residues of bad luck lurking inside of his voice. It was his bad luck that the swans had sensed, why they had flown. Around their feet, a little breeze picked up grains of salt with dead grass and carried these along, signalling the owls to start their retreat, back towards the east coast for the summer. Most would not reach their destination, Doom said sadly. So much work done for nothing. Why breed? He knew that they would all be gone that night.

Hare stew.

Meal fit for kings. And a queen. Eat before the lizards steal it.

The Milky Way lit the landscape, and Snip took the girl away from the campfire to give her a lesson about the night sky. I think you will like it. There is something pretty special up there tonight. She had learned a lot about the alignment of the planets from him. The genies often pointed to the path in the west where Venus would fall earlier each night, until in the winter nights it was Mars that was the first to fall. Remember! Winter rains will fall on this land, and in the middle of the night, a cloud of mist will descend to touch the earth.

Remember to come back here, Snip said, as they stood on a hill, staring at the sky.

The thought of returning seemed unlikely. She could not imagine how it would be possible.

These are the methods of positioning yourself for finding South, he said, explaining that they were in the galaxy of the Milky Way that rose like smoke from the horizon until its river of stars ran directly above them. Their light rebounded off the salt and it was this phenomenon that seemed to make the stars shine more brightly. He showed her how to position where she was by drawing a line through the Southern Cross and joining it to a line drawn to the halfway point from The Pointers. This will form a V for you, and from there, if you draw a line down to the horizon, you will know where to find South. Or another way, he explained, was by forming the same triangle by drawing an imaginary line down from the brightest star in the sky, Canopus, and across from the star Achernar which sits low in the southern sky.

However, this is not what I really want to show you, he said, taking her hand, and pointing her fingers along with his into the northern world of the sky, he drew along the stars the outline of a swan in full flight.

Do you see it?

She nodded, seeing the swan’s long head arching down towards earth.

That is the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. The star of its tail is a supergiant named Deneb. Look for it up along the Milky Way. If you can find it in the sky, you will be able to follow it North, until the weather becomes warm again.

She continued looking at the swan’s changing position, wondering how she would remember to find it again.

Don’t always look in the same place. He will move across the sky. Remember you will only see Cygnus at the onset of winter. Just like your swans I imagine.


In the darkness with a dying fire, they waited for the final moment when the earth opened the spinifex grassland abodes and the hands of the spiritual ancestors released the owls like pollen into the skies. The swooping waves of owls flew over their heads, the young travelling eastwards with their parents in a colony of thousands.

Men may do the same one day if they fear too much. Imagine it. Imagine a dust cloud travelling right through this country. Snip’s voice was almost a whisper, and in that moment, the clouds heralding the cool change appeared from the east, travelling in a westerly direction.


While the girl and Warren slept, the genies were searching for a few stray owlets in the spinifex. Doom said there had to be one or two that had not fledged. He promised one for Oblivia to keep as a pet. In the morning I will have one for you, he said. She thought of this owl while sleeping in a low-lying valley filled with white flowering lilies that shone in the starlight breaking through the clouds.

But the valley became a box when clouds settled on the hills, and very quickly it was filled with an overpowering perfume pouring into the air from thousands of flowers. Sometime during the night her lungs ached for fresh air, and this was when she heard Warren moving away. Very silently, he was slipping away into the night, but she thought it was already morning and they would be going back to join the others.

Shh! he said, and left. Her tongue failed to form words to ask him where he was going, and she watched him walking further away into the night. He did not return, and she was unable to prevent herself from falling back to sleep as the heavy putrefied air swallowed her into a nightmarish dream. Those boys from long ago emerged from the ground. It had happened suddenly with the ground swelling and growing around her until she was covered in total darkness, but she knew them instantly, knew what they were doing – she had not killed them in her memory. She remembered their closeness to each other, in touch, smell, and breathing. Of being joined together with them as firmly as a ball of animals rolling over wet ground. She saw through them as they were falling in, over, above, coming through her in sepia-coloured waves of brown, grey and red. They rolled in desert wind over the surface of the land, and down the green and yellowing spinifex smothering the hillocks that rose and fell into valleys of lily-coloured skin, and over the distances of salt marshes.

The landscape had closed over with mist, and the perfume of the lilies under the mist was suffocating even the flowers. Her arms and hands pushed at the fumes but she was unable to reach fresh air higher up, and succumbing to the intoxication, she crawled away towards her memory of the tree. She reaches the tree in this state, and falls back into the safe darkness to hide. From the shadows of her dream she sees the swans lifting off again from white water, pushed upwards by vaporised hands reaching out of the lake. They have been rejected, pushed away by the country from her outstretched arms.


She was coiled inside the tree in a dream, and when she woke, she could see the valley surrounded by hillocks decked by clouds.

Better get ready. We will be leaving soon. Warren spoke slowly but firmly, as if to a child, and the way he watched her, she thought he had been in her dream. She felt violated by the way he continued to stare at her with his eyes moving over her. Perhaps he had watched. It seemed that he knew what had happened. Perhaps it had not been a dream. You better eat something first, he said, handing her a piece of damper.

She ate the brown bread that was made from seeds and bulbs. It had a sour bitter taste under the salt that had been added to the dough before it went into the ashes. Take your time, he said, after noticing how she was struggling to swallow each piece. She washed the lumps down quickly with cold tea. She watched him doing the same. They left empty-handed. Whatever had been brought in with them, the pannikins, swags, simple things like the tin billy, were left behind.


Soft light filled the lily plains with William Blake hues in the first light, which was like looking at the living museum of another time surviving in the arid landscape. Warren told her that some people saw these flowers as a fragment of life from another era, when there might have been a different language that once described the wetlands and rainforest in the heart of the country, before it disappeared. This living fossil was all that was left of those times, he explained. She knew it was a ghost place. Closer to the eye, groups of pale green, firm fluid-filled stemmed flowering plants luxuriating in their freshness opened their petals. Each stem had stormed through to the surface from a large swollen bulb that grew at least a metre deep in the red soil. This garden of lilies rose to the surface he explained, only if water lay long enough to soak through this dip in the landscape after heavy rain. The flowers open. She thinks the petals are like the wings of old Aunty’s white swans. He asks her if she is all right. She nods. She can look after herself.


Warren Finch and the girl walked through hills, the ones that were called the great bodies of the spirit men moving through the land. What about the others? she tried but failed to ask Warren as she kept looking back to where the genies had been camping.

They have other things to do. We will see them later, he replied simply and to the point, no differently than how he normally spoke to her. He looked as though he had aged, grown old on this trip. She kept thinking something was not right, that something had happened to them, and she kept looking back with growing concern as the distance grew greater. But only the old voices of Aunty talking to the Harbour Master could be heard coming from behind her, through the sound of the ground breathing, casually talking behind Warren Finch’s back. The Harbour Master said he was pretty sure the genies never existed. He had never recognised them as real people. They had come out of a brass lantern from the Middle East as far as he was concerned. The old woman crowed on about the men on the boats she had seen murdering each other out of rivalry and jealousy over women. Oh! Yes! I saw it all. All the time you know. Did you cause this? The old woman was talking loudly, starting to accuse Warren of every travesty, until she got around to what she really wanted to say, you killed those nice boys, and the girl looked away from Warren who was telling her to keep moving, because she was thinking that he had murdered the genies too. The Harbour Master became silent because the old dead woman’s ghost was putting things in the girl’s mind about Warren Finch. Girls were always thrown overboard – I told you about that. Girls were left to die in the bush. You know the public payphone really only rang sometimes…Unwept girls, all killed by their husbands.

The Harbour Master turned controversial, snubbing Bella Donna’s ghost, which was raving on like a mad woman about how the Aboriginal killer husband Warren Finch would end up killing Oblivia too, because he was already proving his true colours by killing the genies. The Harbour Master swung away from the old woman’s spirit every time she came close to him, calling her, Liar. What you think all Aboriginal men are violent or something? He poked his bony face in Oblivia’s while walking backwards in front of her as she walked ahead of Warren Finch. In the end, the Harbour Master spurted out everything in his head through hissy spit: You know something? Warren Finch only saw Doom, Mail and Hart, dead on the ground. He didn’t kill them. He makes a fist with his hand and with the index finger pointing from it like a pistol, he waves his arm around in the air, while calling over his shoulder to the old woman raving behind him to shut the f*ck up about Warren Finch and warning her to stay away from them, and walking backwards quicker to stay in front of Oblivia’s face he releases more spit-hissed words, and on he goes: They were killed instantly – BANG! BANG! BANG! No mucking around. Just smack, smack, one shot each was enough. Knocked their lights straight out (clicks fingers) – knocks them flat in their sleep. Oblivia was really frightened now. She stared ahead and walked even faster as though she thought the only way to stop hearing the Harbour Master was to walk through his frightening face, and all the while she was looking around for old Aunty and old Aunty was calling from somewhere behind, wait for me, and all the while trying to convince herself to ignore the healing man’s powers, for that’s right, no man would take over her mind. But the old Harbour Master was relentless and was using his bony fingers to jab her in the chest, and on and on he went in his tirade about the deaths he witnessed – while telling the old woman to git out of their country, that nobody else saw what happened, not even that idiot-features Warren bloody Finch. You want to know who did it? Not that gutless wonder Warren – he didn’t do it – look at him? There’s no way in the world that a slack-assed cunt like him could kill face-to-face. He gets other people to do his dirty work. You want to know what I saw? A mob of assassins who killed them! All of them came running, hooded, and disguised in Army fatigues through the scrub but I saw them.

Oblivia looks side-on across the haze-covered spinifex as though she fully expected to see soldiers from the swamp following them, but all she sees through the wiyarr is Bella Donna’s ghost straining to drag things out of the ground and calling for them to wait for her, and Oblivia thinks she must be digging up the genies, or she found some dead girls, and this makes her heart pound even harder and she walks faster and hears the old woman’s voice reciting – So mastered by the brute blood of the air…Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? – and she tries to walk through the Harbour Master who looks where she looks, and he walks backwards quicker, but ignores what the old woman was doing and he continues talking right into Oblivia’s face as though he is taunting her to use that half-dead tongue of hers to shout at him to get out of her way. There must have been dozens of those blokes running amuck with their revolvers with silencers and whatnot, and sneaking through the spinifex with infra-red search-lights strapped onto their heads. Like combat soldiers. Yes, just like soldiers in some war zone, although who knows if they were soldiers or not – I just don’t know for sure what they were, or if they were from the whiteman’s hell. Could’ve been from the swamp. They could have been anyone, just like you or me, or more like me than you because you would be too gutless to kill anyone, just like you are too gutless to speak. Alright then! They didn’t know ‘someone’ was looking at them through the darkness with my own infra-red night-vision binoculars eyes.


Oblivia thinks he is tricking her and tries not to look at his eyes and continues to look around for Army men, although she cannot hear the old woman any more who she figures must be still trying to dig up bodies, but the Harbour Master goes on about how good his infra-red vision eyes were. I saw the whole thing coming, just like silly Warren knew it was coming, only difference is a person like me can dream wherever I want to go, whereas Warren Finch, he’s a dog! Well! Look at him. He has to call someone on that mobile of his to tell him what’s going on and he hides somewhere else. The Harbour Master paused to pay his respects to the genies, I really and truly hope you good boys haunt the living daylights out of some of those buggers. Come back and haunt Warren Finch too if you like. Yea! That would be good. And he continues berating Oblivia, That’s the reason why your-suppose-to-be-husband Warren bloody Finch was acting strange last night. I saw him sneaking around in the night too. He knew there were people wanting to assassinate him. He heard their vehicles. You better lay low, I am telling you girl, if you are going to keep hanging around with that idiot. He will get you killed before too long. You can bet on that. That’s why you will never see those good fellas again. Really decent blokes too they were. Oblivia was listening now and walking normally, so the Harbour Master slowed down, but continued talking, and whenever he spoke about Warren, pouted his lips in his direction. The coward Warren disposes of the bodies quick smart. Buried his staff members in the bush. Hardly dug a hole deep enough for any of them. You would think he’d do something better for his mates. Shallow graves. Real shallow. Better get a rifle too if I were you. You are just another staff member. Remember that. The Harbour Master blamed Bella Donna’s ghost for killing the genies. He really had it in for her. You know how she needs to kill off any strong black people. It gives her strength, he claimed. Yulurri! Murderer! Yulurri! She led the assassins right up to them like a bloody big road train heading through the bush with an arrowhead marking the spot just in the front of where those three boys were sleeping. Didn’t know what struck them, it was strange seeing it happen – real quick like that. You don’t want to think about her any more if she is going to cause trouble like this. Get rid of her from your mind. You don’t need her now. The Harbour Master looks back, and although the old woman’s ghost was nowhere in sight, he tells her to git away from them. Get away from Australia. Yulurri! We don’t want you overseas ghosts here.


At the end of the day of walking and the Harbour Master’s tirade to Oblivia, they reached a sandy river overgrown with the vines of paddy melons laden with fresh yellow balls of fruit. A flock of white corellas stared with black beady eyes as Warren Finch and the girl passed by, then continued gnawing with sharp pointy beaks on the paddy melons held in their claws. Families of bush ducks flew from out of the reeds on the side of a dry riverbed, where there were still ponds of water from the flood after the rains of months ago.


Across the river the next morning, Oblivia was alarmed to see that there was a small rural township of less then a dozen unkempt houses painted in every combination of bright primary colours, flash blue, red, green, and yellow. All was quiet, and it seemed as though these houses had been willed to appear like a playful whim in amongst the spinifex, and if you turned your back, would disappear. Oblivia saw that they were close to the roughly cut airstrip that ran through the thickets of saltbush where, the evening before, Warren had taken an interest in walking along its length and kicking the dirt runway with his feet. She noticed that he did not use his mobile phone now, and this made her feel even more vulnerable, unsure of what was going to happen to her, and of the possibility they would be seen by strangers in this town without his genies to guard them.

She could not help staring at the houses.

Just people, Warren snapped, as though he knew she was wondering about who lived there.

What kind of people? People. People, who are more interested in talking to their white daddy and granddaddy graves about selling cattle, horses, or people for that matter; they work at the petrol and diesel service station over there. Mostly used by cattle trucks. He spoke impatiently as though speaking to a child. She knew that he did not want to speak to her. Did not want to answer questions. The town was silent. It looked deserted.

In the distant mirage beyond the houses, Oblivia saw the green and white service station. The sight of the green roof became a thought to reach, not of running away, but taking back her life. He knew her thought as she looked off in the distance, and said: It won’t pay to go over there. You will find that this is a pretty rough joint. We will wait here. The plane won’t be long. His mobile phone rang once, twice, and three times before he answered it. Yep! Right! He seemed relieved to be leaving. She could hear him talking about the plane’s arrival time and then the droning off in the distance. She listened to the sky too – for the heartbeat of swans flying, and for a few moments of panic, caused by the thought of being forcibly pushed onto the plane by Warren, she was again standing on the shores of the empty salt lake. Only the warmth of the swans remained where they had rested on the ground covered with low-growing tussock grass and saltbush.

Within moments of the blue aeroplane landing they were gone. Only the deafening howl of the engine could be heard as it flew above the saltbush landscape, over the salt lakes, and into another world. There was nothing but clouds, and the frightened girl thought how the clouds would look around the mountaintop of the old woman’s homeland, and thought she should have asked the old woman a question about clouds, because she did not know: Who spoke of great seas of clouds where wind was eddying under the crevices?





The Christmas House





After clouds, always mist, and another ghost story to tell.

Ah! Beautiful, isn’t it. This is where we will be living from now on. Well! For you this will be your home for a little while at least. Look! Right down there, can you see it? Just there! That place! It will be your home from now on. Warren Finch sighed, his face marvellously at ease as he looked longingly through the small window of the plane. Below, the city she saw was a sea of stars twinkling from the base of mountains, and sprawling across flatlands to the ocean. The plane flew through dozens of searchlights splashing back and forth through the skies, and on to Warren’s relaxed face while he was humming that old song, Sea of Heartbreak, sea of dungkumini, malu of heartbreak…the lights in the harbour, don’t shine for me, and the relief was in his voice: Yes! It is good to be home.

There was no way Oblivia ever expected that she of all people would see the riches of paradise from a plane. How come? She thought about the Heaven people taken from the cities by the Army and dumped in the swamp. They prayed all the time for the chance to see their paradise again, How did I lose you, where did I fail? The lights he called home spun meaninglessly in her head. She searched for the distant light of the burial chamber he had pointed out, to show her where she would be living and from the sea of lights below, all she extracted was a single glow. She looked away to censure the old woman creeping from the clouds and into her head, forbidding her from asking the question about women and girls who have disappeared: Can you see any left dead on the side of a road in that light?

Ah! Don’t worry, you are dead already, the Harbour Master answered on the girl’s behalf. He was also somewhere on board the plane – said he was the bloody pilot. That’s right, he laughed, better remember to put the wheels down. Who was to know if she was dead or alive? The plane bounced on the winds of one pilot short, in its descent to land.


Warren kept talking: You are going to love it here. You’ll see. It will take a little bit of time but it will be better for us if you give it a chance. He spoke philosophically, so it is equally important that you make an effort to do this for me and for yourself. You will find that life will be better if you see things like this.


They stepped from the aircraft and into a world shrouded in fog and darkness. Warren Finch was immediately surrounded by a group of security people, and within moments, they were leaving in a shining black, chauffeur-driven limousine with a small Australian flag fluttering in the breeze. Several security cars, that had been discreetly parked, would also accompany them for the rest of their journey.

The limousine careered through a foggy maze of concrete industrial buildings, high-rise offices, factories and houses. In this closer glimpse of paradise, the girl could see that much of the city had cracked; the city was breaking up, as though the land beneath had collapsed under its weight. This had happened a long time ago and now, the natural landscape was quietly returning and reclaiming its original habitat. In its strange kind of way, the city was creating a garden. Through the cracks in the footpaths small trees had sprouted, and ferns and grasses became obstacles through which people were struggling to steer a clear path as they walked. She saw more mature trees with the orange fungi Pycnoporus coccineus growing from branches and tree-trunks, while ferns and grasses that swayed from mossy walls and roof tops caught her attention with each gust of wind. There were places on the roads not hit by heavy traffic where long grasses grew.

She saw no camp dogs hanging about these streets. No birds. There were only crowds of people moving quickly past one another with blank faces, and many others living in footpath ghettos, like people were in the swamp. They were begging for food. She heard frogs croaking in the drains where the rainwater poured in such profusion it was hard not to imagine an underground river flowing beneath the city.

Warren continued a running commentary like a tour guide. He spoke about why people were running, what they were doing, whether they went into restaurants, grocers, supermarkets, fish shops, meat shops, women’s clothing shops of every description, shoes, pets, computers, furnishing, delicatessens, banks, office buildings that stood side by side reaching for the skies, down and up through narrow streets and onwards, while countless lights shone from the homes of families, single people, couples, and apartments where parties were held, and couples made homes, made love, grew children, cooked food or brought home takeaways, and new furniture, and spent all night discussing life or conspiring, or deceiving, or divorcing, or engaging in adultery, throwing out rubbish, playing computer games about war. He talked more or less about all of this while the girl was thinking about something else. She was trying to determine the natural sound of the wind through the distortion of sounds passing through the laneways between buildings.


The Christmas house of prehistoric green was lit up like the solar system. It stood in a garden of worse-for-wear Norwegian fairytale forest firs covered in glowing balls of coloured lights that swung madly on the wind-tossed branches. Owls were calling out to one another from the deep foliage like calls from the genies they had left on the salt lake. The girl looked at Warren but he was too occupied with the spectacle of Christmas lights, and what lay ahead. The journey they had taken was now clearly wiped clean from his mind. The first thing she noticed as they stepped from the car was the fragrance of the trees clutching the mist, and the house groaning in despair each time it was buffeted by winds coming in from the sea.

The Harbour Master and the old woman exiled amongst the clouds were both awestruck with the glamour of it all. Could this be the home that Warren had been pointing to from the plane? It’s bloody marvellous the Harbour Master claimed, but the old woman scoffed at its cheap imitations, and described how pretensions made her feel nauseous by pretending to vomit on the bonnet of the shiny car.

The driveway was lined on either side by a parade of adult-size glowing snowmen. The people greeting them enthusiastically at the large door shone in the way that people usually greeted Warren Finch. He said they were his anonymous friends. This was a safe house, which immediately had the Harbour Master asking what he needed a safe house for. But before the girl could think of an answer, she became too wrapped up in being ashamed, and looked away. All she had seen looming at the doorway were giant-sized people with red hair blowing like fire in each gust of wind. They were not introduced. The man, the woman, and two children, one boy and one girl, became an avalanche of fiery white ghosts flying out of the house, and descended on Warren with non-stop pattering.

Don’t tell me this is your E–thyl? Is this really her? The big woman squealed.

This was a safe house because it was typical, Warren had forewarned Oblivia. Typical of what? Australia! Paradise? Even she could believe it was a place that nobody of right mind would want to come to and she had been nowhere. Old Aunty squealed like the big woman. The Harbour Master pushed his way in front of them and yelled to the girl to keep away from the bunch of red-necks. This had the old woman and the Harbour Master arguing about how you could identify a red-neck. She insisted that they were only missionaries. I know what a missionary looks like, he claimed combatively: How would you know anything? You think every white person is a missionary. The girl wanted to disappear from hearing her name falling off everyone’s lips. Yes! It was true then? They had been talking about her for days, practising that name, because they did not want to offend Warren’s lady. Why, she will be the first Indigenous lady of the country soon.

E-thyl was a very pretty name the lady claimed, and said she insisted on knowing how she had been given such a name. You sure you got it right? You sure it is not Ethel? That’s a girl’s name. I don’t know where you get a name like E-thyl. Was it Aboriginal?

The girl was covered in goose bumps every time she heard the name. She hated the name. Wondered where it had come from too and would have preferred to be called nothing, like normal. The girl wore filthy clothes – the ones that she had on when they left the swamp. Warren laughed at everything the red-haired people said. He had not stopped laughing since he had arrived. Should she laugh too?

She felt thinner and darker than normal people while standing next to this strange family that she thought were the typical Australian family, because Warren said so. And beside their snowy whiteness, she felt an out of place darkness, much darker than Warren even whose golden skin glowed in the soft yellow lights of the house. The more she saw, the more in awe she was of how white Australians lived. Unconsciously, she edged herself up against the wall to keep out of the way of the endless movement of these big people scrambling and gushing with every footstep in welcoming Warren back into their home.

Hold on now! I have only been gone a few weeks, he joked and laughed loudly, and even the girl was surprised to see him competing to be more extraordinary in a plain, simple laugh. The din of laughter echoing throughout the house was deafening for someone who never laughed. She thought Why laugh? How do you laugh? To say continuously, Ha! Ha!

Oh! Boy! Our Warren, the woman and her husband beamed in satisfaction, and together they raced through the dark echoing wood-panelled house to see the Christmas decorations in the backyard, while calling back for the girl to follow.


Come on. You got to have a look, Eee-ah? Come on. It’s better than last year even. Now Warren was speaking like these people, even forgetting how to pronounce her name. What’s wrong with you? Get going. You think that they are contagious or something? Might turn you white? A voice that sounded like the Harbour Master echoed in her head.

The large garden was a forest of full-grown pine trees decorated with coloured lights. It stretched all the way to the edge of a rocky cliff where waves crashed, but the red-haired lady said it was a good thing they had planted the trees to muffle the sound of the ocean, because you get sick of it roaring day and night. It was enough to give you a headache. Underneath the dripping canopies of the trees a single seagull was lost somewhere in the needles, singing its airs to the seagulls gliding far away, over the sea.

The family ran breathless along curving paths, brushed against the wet foliage of the trees, and deep in the forest were greeted with Christmas carols sung by a glowing metre-high smiling robot snowman with a red carrot nose, and black top hat. It’s an extravaganza – a miracle, Warren exclaimed, saying that he had never seen anything like it in his life. It was first prize mind you, in the whole of the city, the children and their mother said proudly.

Warren looked on warmly, his face flushed and glowing as the soft lights touched his skin. He said it reminded him of how great Christmas was in this house. And there, in a corner of the yard, sat many more second-hand Christmas trees of all shapes, sizes and condition in pots. The girl learnt that these were orphan trees. They had been dumped by people in the city, and were waiting to be planted one day – once space could be imagined for them. Yea! We drove around and collected them all – couldn’t bear to see them die senselessly, the wife claimed. It does not pay to take your eyes off them though, the husband added with a wink, otherwise their numbers would increase. Then they ran from the mist in a jostling stampede back to the house just in time to experience a crinkling smell of smoke, as the electricity short-circuited the wet lights. It was different in the old country, where you had to run around with a torch in the middle of the day to see where you were going. The woman’s voice filled the house.


Christmas! Christmas in the city was different now. The girl had to listen very hard, to keep up with the quick-speaking red-haired people racing through everything stockpiled in their heads for this moment, as if every precious second counted while Warren Finch was in their home. She watched words tumbling out of four mouths that never stopped moving – open and closed, up and down. Their voices shouted to be heard above each other to complain about power surges in the city, and the malfunctioning Christmas lights that were never like this before. They remembered a time when you could leave the lights burning all night without anyone batting an eyelid. Bring back the good old days when we could even cover the whole yard, trees and all, with the snowflake machine. The only good thing apparently, was that it had been another bumper season for the growth of the Christmas trees. The red-haired man was jubilant about this. Conifers loved the rain, and the perpetual mist, and did not seem to mind if the sun never shone.

Which is a good job with the way it has been raining all the time, the red-haired man said with a sigh.

That’s right love, the wife replied with another happy peal of laughter.

All the trees must have grown approximately three metres, just since spring.

Whatever happened to the good, old, hot Australian Christmas, hey, Warren? It will be snowing next thing.

Warren said it was all to do with global warming and climate change, but his moving-mouth friends were more concerned with the failure of the electricity in the yard. Still there was great relief that they had been able to show him the lights, since the woman said, she could not remember when Warren had missed seeing the lights of Christmas in their house: Not since he had been sent by his elders to the city as a young man to complete some of his education.


The refrigerator was worshipped. Glorified like the supreme spirit of the city. The huge blue fridge dominating the kitchen was like a house within the house – bigger than a humpy. Coloured lights lit up the interior when you opened the door. Warren was told that it was a new fridge. That it had come from overseas. It had been the biggest in the shop, the biggest you could buy, and with Warren there for Christmas, they were pleased that they had gone ahead and bought it. Whenever they spoke now, it was about some item extracted from the fridge for consumption. Food had to be talked about while it was eaten like people do in Paris the lady said.

Warren Finch was in his element. He relished the conversation about food and talk of regional differences in dairy products, recipes and dishes he had tasted at various restaurants in countless countries he had visited since the last Christmas. Oblivia had only seen him eating with the genies, where he did not seem concerned about what he ate. He put anything in his mouth. She watched as they talked endlessly of things of no importance to anyone but themselves, and now about the brands of butter you could buy in places called the ‘new’ supermarkets, which was not like the old days, they claimed, when they had no butter at all during the long drought. They said it was almost as bad as the place where the girl had come from – God! Blessed girl.

Isn’t that right E–thyl? The girl’s failure to answer their questions stiffened the room. She did not know what these conversations were about. Warren, who had never stopped smiling, just shook his head in a familial gesture that the family understood, without wasting words, don’t bother, don’t fuss, not worth the trouble.

Well! Eee-thyl will have to know which butter to buy if she is going to be living in the big city now.

Why? The red-haired husband asked in mock astonishment. E–thyl might not even like butter.

Of course she likes butter. You like butter, don’t you Eee-thyl? The girl nodded, but she had never tasted butter.

A woman can be good for other things – not just being knowledgeable of which butter to buy.

Warren laughed. Mentally, the girl noted the joke, thinking it might be useful to know how to make him laugh one day.

In this introduction of what gave peace and pleasure to Warren Finch, the girl had found hell. She wanted to scream. She hated everything about these people. Her mind left the room to look for the genies’ camp among the owls and rats, and somehow, in a slim crevice of non-stop talk bouncing off the wood panelling, she heard an owl outside calling from a Christmas tree. She wanted to leave. Go outside. Disappear. Crawl away from this dead wood house that Warren had claimed would be her home. Her mind walked through its wooden cocoon where geography was lost, and where momentarily, she saw the ghosts of trees with branches swinging in the wind, that swung out and would hit her.

Noticing her silence, the woman said, Ethyl, you just make yourself at home, love. This is your home now too, you know. The girl’s fingers ran along the wood panels which she visualised as tree trunks in some dense forest in her head. Why could he not have been like other men? asked Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions. She was standing in the back of the room trying to pull the girl from the tree roots and telling her to start acting polite and grateful, and stop that chatting to herself like an idiot. Harbour Master stood in the doorway. He just yelled at the girl that they were a pack of racists. Couldn’t he just have been like the men who killed their wives in the bush? Not go around bringing them to places like this. You would be better off dead. Skeletons left propped up against a tree somewhere. Sun bleaching bones with pieces of skin hardened to leather, and pieces of rag from their dresses fluttering in the wind. A bird picking about on her bones! Things like that!



The girl escaped. She left the table where the continuous sound of voices grated like gravel thrown across the floor of her brain. In the corridor of that vast house she felt lost, although relieved in being alone, and tried to remember the route of the journey with Warren. No plan of escape came easily to mind, so she explored the Christmas house.

The voices faded as she followed a corridor lovingly decorated with festoons of pine branches that were tied with red ribbons in big bows, and large silver bells tinkling automatically from an inbuilt sonar detection device. Otherwise, it was a quiet house with empty rooms where only the sound of clocks could be heard ticking from walls, mantelpieces and cupboards. She was guided by an orange, grey, black and white marbled cat that ran ahead and led her into its favourite room. On entering the room, she discovered it had been permanently divided into more rooms, and these smaller rooms had been partitioned within, into strange, little alcoves on the Christmas theme that replicated in miniature scale nostalgic wintertime memories of foreign countries.

She felt as though the meowing cat was sweeping her along, urging her not to linger too long – don’t get sucked into other people’s worlds. And don’t knock anything over and spoil the dream. They passed each elaborate world of dreams, where miniature winter people went about their business walking, stopping to talk to others, living lives among reindeers, tending baby deer, riding colourful sleighs, and looking at a cheerful Santa with elves, and grinning snowmen. There were carol singers that looked into rooms full of brightly wrapped presents, decorated Christmas trees, dinner tables laden with feasts, bowls of delicious apples and pears, and behind them, a countryside full of red robins singing in barebranch trees, and miniaturised forests of pine trees laden with fake snow.

The girl examined each of the created worlds closely with a dark, morbid fascination, consciously searching for failure, proof of fault, in the perfect images of nostalgia. She heard herself saying: Did not exist. Did not exist, and drowned the old woman’s delight in recognising all the places she had known once upon a time, and the Harbour Master mumbling in her other ear about all the racists running around and ruining the country. The cat protested. Meow! Meow! Insisting it knew the consequences of falling in love with constructed fairylands, so mind you don’t break anything because the red-haired people really love their memories. But the girl had already become lost in the theatre of the remembered foreign lands. She did not want to be reminded of footsteps on gravel when Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions was already walking among Christmas valleys, and pulling the girl back to a day long ago when up in the mountains they searched the vista for a house in a village that no longer existed.

They travelled to fields in the miniaturised scenery where saintly-looking people talked to birds, and small children lived in the care of swans while their fathers and mothers were away at war. These were lands where swans had been fed by a spring under a great ash tree where its three roots of fate kept spreading throughout the world to create the past, present and the future.

There, in another theatre, the old woman pointed to swan gods singing to swallows, where the neck of the longlived swan is curving and winding; and to the swan that swims on the river separating the living from the dead. She wanted to find a swan lifting off from a quiet lake and leading a people to their doom in the sea. Where had such a cruel swan come from? Was it living out Aristotle’s death song of swans, and sung because it believed it was going to heaven, as Socrates assented, as it flew to sea to die? Heaven! The girl could hear an angel in the heavens above humming the swan waltz. Her swans might already be on their way back from heaven.

A globe contained disgruntled fishermen sitting around on the snow ice fishing in another winter, with lakes and seas frozen over, and birds in plight as snow fell. On icy waters, old Aunty showed the girl her cursed people who had been turned into swans. They dipped into freezing shallows to feed on the aquatic plants below. Some, the old woman said looking into the globe, were spirits condemned to live in the sea for centuries, while others would fly in a lonely sky forever. They were cursed like the children of Lir she said. They died because they were too old and decrepit when they had changed back to their human form, after living nine hundred years through an evil spell that had cast them as swans. Their fate twisted between Erin and Alba on the sea of Moyle.

The girl had spent hours searching for deception in these countless miniature scenes of Christmas, perhaps because she hoped that some tiny voice would reach up to her ear, but the more she leant into the little scenes, only their happy faces returned her gaze. And the more she searched, the more she found old Aunty’s stories of swans really existed in other people’s memories too. She even found the sailors aboard the East India ship in the year of 1698, and watched as they watched a black swan off Hollandia Nova. Sailors ran on the beach as they chased swans over great sheets of shallow water. Then, on a wooden ship on a Christmas sea, she discovered two black swans in a cage heading to Djakarta in 1746. And black swans in the Europe of 1791, at Knowsley, in England, where they were bred in the Earl of Derby’s menagerie, and also in France – in the Empress Josephine’s ponds at Malmaison – and the waters of Paris at Villeneuve L’étang. She saw small graves of black swans with people standing around the little brown plots of earth, including Sir Winston Churchill, mourning his war gift from Australia before World War II.

After exploring all of these little scenes that had been created by months of labour, she had found no eucalyptus tree trunk with strange writing in the dust, no swamp lined with people guarded by the Army. She could not understand why this history did not exist in this world of creation. It was incomplete. Wrong. This was the flaw that she had searched for and found. There was no miniature black girl such as herself in any of these depictions of humanity, no swamp world of people quarrelling over food, not even Warren Finch among the black shepherds, or a black Wise King.

What became of the time when a young Bella Donna of the western world ran through the snow with her family and countless others as exiles? Where were they in the scenery of Christmas? Where were the escaping boat people who had placed their fate in a swan that led all the rickety boats that failed the decades adrift on the mercy of seas in that world of unwanted people? Where were the deserted boat people cities that had existed on the oceans of the world? She moved on with the knowledge that there was no link between her and Warren Finch’s world.