The Swan Book (15 page)

The Brolga Nation was chosen by an international fact-finding delegation to be their showpiece of what a future humane world was all about. A UN sign was erected at the entrance to the Brolga Nation. It read,
Peace and goodwill to all peoples
. This modern Brolga Nation was just the kind of place that International Justice could promote to bring an end to the wars of homelessness across the world. This high law said it was the showpiece, the example for the future, the hope for kindness to reign over the world for the next marvellous century.

So, these elders, now traditional leaders of the modern world, who already knew that they were high class, were hailed for sitting on their land since the beginning of time, and for having fought very quietly for three centuries the war of oppression. They joined the ranks of other peaceful men in the world like the Mahatma Ghandi, or the Dalai Lama. They were properly cashed up for Rights of Culture, Land, Government, Language, Law, Song, Dance, Story – everything. It was under these circumstances, necessary to explain, that they had hand-picked their brightest child – a gift from God even though he was a half-caste – and had gone so far as to have bequeathed him to their vision of the new world.

This was how he became the chosen one, singled out from all the others in this Australian warzone of torn people, and was hailed
in vows under the Brolga Country moon as the truest gift from ancestral heroes, and having a bit each way, not just from God, but any other gods on the planet too.

The education Warren received at his Aboriginal Government's authorised school was a mixed marriage of traditional and scientific knowledge. In a curriculum that the elders had personally composed with all of the reverence of their traditional law, they watched over his education like hawks. In fact, they were like hawks with all progeny, teaching the young to survive in tough new environments.
We are swapping band-aid education for brand new education, sealing the cracks – all the holes in the broken-down fences of Australian education policy for Indigenous peoples.
Yes, they continued the
better education, we know what is best
rhetoric in their on-going war with the
sceptic observer
whom they continually accused
was pass em this and not pass em that – always out to destroy Aboriginal people like a record still stuck in the same grove.
Anyway. Whatever. Agree or not. This was the hammer, even in officially recognised Aboriginal Government, pulping confidence. The hammer that knocked away the small gains through any slip of vigilance. The faulty hammer that created weak ladders to heaven.

So there it was. Warren had been taught, from the day he entered his people's Aboriginal Government School of Brolga Nation as their
sweetest
boy of six years of age, that he would fulfil a vision primed for their own survival, that above all else, he would connect Brolga values with the future of the world.

This was how Warren Finch had been able to live on his traditional land as a practising pupil out on his Country. The official words about this education were described as being:
culturally holistic in all its philosophical, political and environmentally sustainable economic approaches for a school's curriculum which honoured traditional law and the art of sustainability for culture and land.
A lot of thought
and hard work had been put into a boy like Warren Finch to create
New Light
. But everybody in his world already thought he would inherit the world after he learnt how to make laws by studying the dance and life cycle of the brolga.

There was another time Warren Finch remembers from when he was still a boy learning how to be a man. He had stopped somewhere along the fisherman's track above the high reddishgrey earth bank of the river, and was listening to the silence of the middle of the day. He reflected on the pleasure of his thoughts about what the future held, where one day in another place and time, he would recall this time. And he wondered what he would feel then, as he danced to a fiddler's tune with the dragonflies above the river affectionately known as the Pearl – a traditional breeding place for local river turtles. He found it difficult to see through the large flat leaves and flowers along the way, but he was sure the river was not dry like it had been in the winter, when the lily bulbs lay dormant, hidden in the cool ground with the turtles, deep below the surface.

In the middle-of-the-day sun that showered the land with bright light, he walked further up the river in search of the black angel he had already seen flying low just metres above his head, the previous night, having been awakened from his dreams by droning wings far off, that he could not see. He had called out:
Who are you, flying there?
The thing he had seen flying close above his eyes looked like a very large woman. A twinkling bell-like voice had also awoken him from his sleep. Warren Finch lived in a world of bells, where birds like
willy wagtail
and magpies sang like bells even throughout the night, and beetles and geckos cried bell-like, and grazing cattle wore bells that rang in their night foraging over stubbly grasses. His elders often reminisced about the days when their people did everything to the sound of a bell on the Mission,
rung by a white manager who ordered them about.
Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong! Bell! Or: Ding-a-ling. Or, did it sound like: Dang! Dang?
They inherited bell clanging, whatever the variance in sound. It was stitched in the brain.

A black angel cloud flying in a starry night and playing harp music should be easy enough to find. But the moonlight shining sporadically through cloud cover only returned fragments of his dream by just revealing slithers of a woman's naked body that looked enormous in the sky. She had come to him like a promise, from moving slow along the river that flowed as slowly as his blood. He felt her presence bonding with his own, slowly flowing like the river did, in his blood.

Again and again he tried to recapture the woman's shadow passing over his thighs under the light of the moon. She aroused a desire he had never known before, and with sudden urgency, he tried to force the images of the woman to return, but her fly-about hair, breasts, arms, legs slipped quicksilver through him, and in an instant, the memory of her had faded away into nothing. He was as before, always alone, and although he tried with great difficulty to recall this dream of dreams, others more mundane reminded him of the practical side of his life, where his responsibilities lay.

His frustrating efforts to bring her back revealed nothing, except confusion whenever the dream suddenly surrendered a small memory, bringing him a small victory of being millimetres apart from the dark skin of the woman's body above him, before it again became a cloud passing quickly across the landscape, travelling away through terrains he had never known. He was never sure when these images would reappear, or whether he even delighted in the idea of travelling further to find a glimpse of what had already died.

Brolga and Swan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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