The Swan Book (16 page)

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

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

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

Twenty Years of Swans

I
t was more than twenty years since the day Warren Finch had nearly killed himself for a swan, when he arrived in the Army-run detention camp of the swamp in a flash car – a triumphant long-anticipated homecoming to his traditional homelands, with enough petrol for driving up and down the dusty streets for nothing.

Around he drove with his friends, down every street, the back roads and by-roads, sizing up everybody who was a
Black
thank you – checking out the despair, mentally
adding up the figures and checking it twice
, and deciding like he was White – that it was
all
hopeless, nothing would help, and driving on.

He was sure going to miss the pride of the place. The swamp had become truly wondrous in the eyes of the benefactors. These locals, along with the other detained people from God knows where, all jelly-soft now from years of inter-generational interventionist Australian policies of domination, were true beholders of wonder and fervour-ridden with the beauty of home. They had no say about anything important in their lives. This had been an Army-controlled Aboriginal detention camp for decades. Whereas Warren Finch's Aboriginal Government Nation that was just down the road, had
grown prosperous with flukes of luck here and there called mining, and saying yes, yes, yes to anything on offer – a bit of assimilation, a bit of integration, a bit of giving up your own sovereignty, a bit of closing the gap – and was always paraded as Australia's international showcase of human rights. The swamp people had seen life triumph. Hadn't they witnessed the growth of an enormous flock of swans on their country? The swans had thought it was okay to live there. Well! This, and the loveliness of their children and country, traditional or adopted, gushed like a permanent flowing river through their hearts. Hearts must have it sometimes, for after a lot of bureaucratic argy-bargy with Canberra for around two hundred years – but who's counting the cost of crime? – the community had been successful in giving the swamp the far perkier name of
Swan Lake
. It was the only thing they had ever achieved in a fight with Canberra. Their name received official status from Australia and that was a beautiful thing in the eyes of the locals.

But nope! Not Warren. He saw nothing for the sake of sentimentality. He drove right around the watery expanse for a bit of sightseeing, an excuse for intensifying and exercising his cynicism while describing what he was looking at to people he was
mobiling
back down
South
. Finally, he snapped the mobile phone shut in disgust and parked his dust-covered white government Commodore thing in the shade of the Memorial. The twin, giant, concrete-grey, crossed boomerangs. He stepped out of the car, into the full force of a north country summer's day, and glanced at the block at the base of the boomerangs – the sign inscribing a dedication to all those who had fallen in the long Indigenous war against colonisation with the State of Australia –
And continue to fall.

Who knows if Warren Finch paid much attention to the Memorial, but he would have agreed on one thing at least, that it was a pretty ingenious idea to erect this traditional icon, so symbolically embedded with psychological power. Nothing was
going to beat clapping boomerangs calling the stories and songs – not even Warren Finch standing around the base tapping his song into the concrete, just to check that the whole darn thing was not crumbling from shonky trainee workmanship, and likely to collapse on his car.

He would not have known the local stories about what they thought was pride. The boomerangs belonged to the old people. They had devised an image of themselves as super mythical beings – giants of the afterlife clapping these boomerangs all day long. These were their longed-for days. They said they would be better off dead.
More powerful.
They would telepathically stream their stories forever through any time of the day they said:
We will haunt Australia good and proper, just like the spirits of the Anzacs living in war monuments all around the country, and just like the ghosts of wars living in all of that rust dumped in the swamp away from white people because they thought they were too powerful.

Warren Finch was not some
random
person, someone who had come to look at Aboriginal people for the day as part of their job so that they could make up stories about what they had seen, and even though he did not have much respect for the sacred monument, he was convinced that those two grey swellings of cultural pride illuminated at least one fact –
that nothing easily slid into oblivion.
He gazed beyond the monument and zeroed in on the polluting junk that lay around in the swampy lake.

The vista seemed to excite him, and he started muttering on about some of his important theories of colonial occupation, but whatever personal conversations he was having with himself, those who overheard him said they could not understand what he was talking about, and dreamingly claimed,
No! Nah, nah. Whatever!
Of course the junk in the swamp was not a glorious sight, and well may this be true, but this man's time was in no way infinite.
Warren was very conscious about how much the world beckoned for its few important people. He strode about life in his natural state of beckoning overload –
one, two, three, that's all the time I've got for you
. These days he spared only a minute or two on most things that crossed his path, and this was what he did while spending sixty seconds flat intellectualising the swamp full of war fossils.
Tis this sight alone,
he chanted in a flat, bored voice, almost as though he was still speaking on the mobile,
that justifies many thoughts I can't get out of my head about dumped people.

It's a mighty slow crawl from ancient lineage. That's why you can't fast-track extinction,
he claimed, murmuring to his fellow travellers, although to them – recognising the fact of their being Black, and his being Black – it was hard to understand why he was talking like that about himself. They did not want to become extinct through assimilation, if that was what he meant, while assuming it was. But, just what else would a man see? Someone like Warren Finch who was touched by all of the cultures of the world was now seeing the poorer side of his own traditional estate for the first time.

In the swamp there was a long-held belief and everyone knew what it was. The whole place believed that one day prayers would be answered, and it would happen like this: there would be an archangel sent down from heaven to help them – a true gift from God. Not like all the previous rubbish stuff. Then so it was. It was heard through the grapevine that the gift had been delivered. This would have to be the boy genius that everyone had heard about from those other people of their vast homelands – the ones who were much better off than they were themselves. The ones they were not talking to. Those rich sell-out Aboriginal people with mining royalties and a treaty.

So when the archangel Warren Finch arrived, sure they were supposed to know because it was supposed to be a miraculous occasion. A gift from God was supposed to be incredulous. Perhaps
there would be more stars in the sky. Or, perhaps, beams of sunlight shining from him would dazzle all over the swamp. They had always imagined what this occasion would be like, and most had even prophesied how the archangel would hover over the lake indefinitely so that everybody could get a chance to see him up there doing his business by spreading his protective wings over them, and all would be well after that. Not like all those other so-called miracles for assimilation that had been endured and considered God-given failures. However, Warren Finch deceived everybody. He really looked no different in appearance to anybody else living in the swamp.

For a few moments, the archangel glanced over the lake, and he thought naming the ugly swamp Swan Lake was a really stupid thing to do. He started to interpret the name in traditional languages, and then in the many foreign languages in which he had fluency. He said the name was common enough, but what's in a name? It was not going to save people from heading towards their own train-wreck.

What was more, he thought the name was only a deceitful attempt to stretch the largesse of anyone's imagination. He would not be tempted to pity the place. Instead, he took pleasure in picturing the atlas of the world and dotting all of the places he knew that were named Swan Lake. So he had to ask himself:
What was one less Swan Lake on the face of the world?
He considered the possibility of having a quiet word with the world-leading astronomy centre of which he was the patron, to see if they could rename a hole of some obscure outer-space nebulae
Swan Lake
. Yep! Why not? Once he was down the road which would not be long now, he would make a point of doing exactly that on his way back to Heaven.

This was the era of unflinching infallibility,
claimed Warren, the postmodernist, deconstructionist champion, affirming from the bottom of his heart that any view of a glitch in the modern
world could be reshaped and resolved. He laughed, saying that he felt like a foreigner standing on these shores that represented nothing more than the swamp of old government welfare policies. He looked like he knew exactly what to do. Someone who believed as most people believed of him, that he owned the key to the place where political visions for the entire world were being fashioned
. And where was that?
This was his question to himself, his concern, as he turned back for a second glance at the swamp, and his answer was also to himself:
Brains! In the brains of the men on top.

The late afternoon shadow of the monument ran like a dark road across the entire lake, and Warren Finch's eyes were led along it straight to the old Army hull in the centre of the water, the largest vessel amongst all of the wrecks. He had only parked in the broadest part of the shadow next to the monument because across the road he could stroll over to what he called –
their ‘so-called' Aboriginal Government building
.

As he looked at the hull, he thought about how ideas of
flightlessness
occupying his recent dreams were mostly about his childhood, and for a moment he once again felt the gravitating seductiveness of the swan woman's shadow. He was flying with her towards the realisation of the journey his dreams had always evaded. Then he looked straight past the vision, and all he saw was the sun reflecting the shadow of the flotilla's rust and wreckage on the watery expanse, before a whisper of wind dissolved into a nothingness the muted hues of rippling gold.

The girl thought old Aunty and the Harbour Master had returned and were outside, their spirits walking over the swamp. Whispering on the water. It made her blood run cold. She wanted it to be old Aunty and the Harbour Master talking about raising the evening mist together, and already mist was blanketing the water, covering
it like a shield. The voices continued a whispering conversation, where old Aunty was saying that lingering reservations kept occurring in people's lives, and were always holding them back from what they should be doing. Harbour Master was more specific. More grounded. He said someone was tapping the concrete boomerangs up in the park and arguing with the old people. The Harbour Master said that person thought that he was living in a big ship populated by castaways – a bunch of scavengers, he claimed.
A big captain shouting orders from the decks of the destroyer that gave people berth – if they liked the way he was single-handedly shipping and trading the world.
The Harbour Master said he just watched and was keeping his own particular mouth shut.

Up in the middle of the memorial park of Swan Lake, several swans had scattered from puddle to puddle under a sprinkler watering what remained of a lawn. A plague of grasshoppers,
jibaja
, bloated from eating everything green, chirruped, jumped up and down, and rose away in a wave when the swans scattered. But dozens of the town's thousands of pet brolgas with the quickest eyes around the place suddenly remembered something from the past. This was their old friend Warren from their former colony near his own community. These ageing brolgas also regularly sat under the park's creaking set of sprinklers, while enjoying the spurting jets of water, falling into deep sleep as water rolled off their grey feathered bodies. The brolgas went haywire and immediately leapt up from the mud to run over and greet their old friend from days gone by.

The old brolgas had led the flocks from the abandoned rookeries after the brolga boy had deserted his country. These brolgas had become
half urbans
from living at Swan Lake. They were flourishing in the rookeries that they had built all around the swamp. Nests stacked on the rooftops of houses. Look out in bits of backyard and you would see a grey throng sitting there in
a day-dream of devising methods to steal food from the township that they too thought was wondrous.

Earlier in the day when Warren Finch was driving around, the old brolgas had been taking a majestic stroll up and down the streets to knock over the rubbish bins, and to squabble in D minor about all the useless rubbish they saw lying on the ground. Everything was going along fine until the flash car beeped the horn at them wherever they were spotted. They had retreated back to the lawn in the park, to continue examining the exposed roots of the lawn struggling to replace each green shaft of leaf repeatedly plucked clean and eaten by insects, until finally, they sank into their deep peaceful sleep.