The Swan Book (18 page)

Quiet! Listen!
He was signalling with his little left-hand finger, indicating:
Watch the brolgas dancing.
His gesture made the local
crowd feel as though he was no different than anyone else. They were just ordinary people together.

The brolgas danced chapters of the story they had produced out of their life at Swan Lake. It was an unusually frenzied repertoire, perhaps connected to the frustration they felt at losing their leisurely evening walk from house to house to snatch the bits of fish they had to gobble instead in the excitement of meeting Warren.

He gave a little speech, although it was pointless trying to listen to him, when all eyes were on the transfixing sight of excited brolgas leaping madly, as though hallucinating to the smell of fried fish hanging in the air. Warren had to speak louder, until finally, he was speaking loudly enough that his voice was carried across the swamp and into the hull, where,
Oh! Dear,
Ethyl(ene) (Oblivia) Oblivion or whatever her name was, was still cooking fish in a frying pan hot with crackling oil. She was not listening to anyone, but she was the only person who heard every word he said.

Warren claimed to be one of those people who used the voice given to him by the spiritual ancestors of the land for its only useful purpose, to uplift Aboriginal thought to its rightful place of efficaciousness, to be fit in mind and body, and residing in thought and action alongside the land. A high-pitched cockatoo squawked:
Gone were the days where the Aboriginal people's culture was being strangled in the sewer of the white man's government.

Nobody listened. Poor buggers in poor people's clothes were not the ideal crowd for the voice from Heaven. Perhaps the brolgas' dance was more mesmerising, or swamp people preferred to muddle through life in silence after eating fish. Perhaps it was the point of view.

Anyone else would have been a dead dog though, if anyone else had spoken like Warren, saying that he thought they were:
Unable to change. Unable to experience the depths of self-analysis. Hell was hell. No point sinking any lower than that
. This was a talking surgeon cutting
with precision, but then, quickly stitching all of the infections back into the wounds, covered with a couple of band-aids:
You need to expand yourself beyond personal selfishness. Bite the bullet if you want to make a life for yourselves. Don't get stuck on your whacko solutions if you don't want to live in whacko land
.

Well! Bravo.
Great lame duck applause!
Arrr!
After an uncomfortable pause, then came the automatic practised cheerful roaring that could be heard a kilometre away, like that usually roared all afternoon at local football matches.

Now, the brolgas' long performance, locally interpreted for Warren as being about the law of freedom and life, was finished, and the birds walked off, leaving the razzamatazz of political mindlessness to the dancing tongue of Warren Finch.

The fish-eating people literally bent over backwards into a dancing, circling mob ingratiating themselves all over Warren Finch, to take it in turns to sing his praises, and in chorus thundering:
Oh! We just want to congratulate you because what you said just now made our hearts feel really good.
They embraced him as though he walked the same dirt roads as they did.

They sung more bird music.
This was really good that you have come here finally, so far out of the way, to speak to the littlest people of Australia. Oh! You are really the true way.

In her hull home, Oblivia Ethylene was thinking about a group of butterflies with pretty wings that had flown around her in the moonlight once, when she had seen a wild boy from the ruby saltbush plains in the glow of a night lantern. He was singing nursery-rhyme speeches to the stars in a parliament house constructed of dry winds and decorated by dust storms.

The Yellow Chat's Story

W
haay? Whaay? Why? And early may?
A lone, brightly coloured yellow chat whistled from the top of the Crossed Boomerang Memorial, its longing song about ancestral ties went wafting down into the ears of the poverty people standing around below, who looked as though the sky was about to fall on top of them.

In the crowd, little Aboriginal flags held up in the breeze danced to a nervous low whistling of
Stand By Me,
while the shockstricken, distant relatives of Warren Finch were busy amongst themselves, obsessing about all of their shared origins no matter how distant or close they were to
good boy
, who was once the child prodigy of their large sprawling Indigenous nation.
Shouldn't you tell him how you are related?
You could hear the warbling chat feeling sick with shame that nobody really knew the answer to that question, that they all shared the same genes –
Shouldn't he know how…Shouldn't he?
Although in reality, Warren Finch was honestly acting as though he was nothing more than a complete stranger.

He yawned and stretched with his arms wide open. He was weary of listening to his own preachings and speeches, and what was more, totally oblivious of the yellow chat's song – a rant, a rave,
pointless to him. Homeland? What did it mean any more? After the experience of being cooped up in his Government car for endless hours of travelling across plain after treeless plain, he had reached – whatever the term meant, and what others called –
his people
. The world was in fact his home, homeland, place of abode, and where his people lived. There were no childhood memories in his mind. His nostalgia had been the pull of movement, but movement had drained life from him, and he was ashen-faced, like the grey feathers of the brolgas standing outside of the crowd replicating his every gesture, stretching their wings too.

Still his relatives were excited with the belief of finally quelling his restlessness, and where they were breathing the same exalted air as he exhaled, they could not help realising too, that the taste of his breath was so much sweeter than theirs. Fine! They had lost their fish dinner. Didn't matter. This closeness to the
gift
was exciting. His relatives felt complete to be so close to his flesh and blood, and could breathe at last for having a precious belonging returned to the ordinariness of Country. But there was one cold hard fact, for in reality he did not resemble any of them at all.

Slowly, the crowd started to feel let down. They began to feel normal again. A natural suspicion snuck back into the picture of life, the larger landscape, what was painted in the framework of life. They began to think that he looked more like one of those outsiders – the complete strangers. Those Aboriginal people from other places the Army had trucked in and who were now tucked up in their lives through marriage, family, living under the one roof.

Even the
outsiders
resembled his people more in the flesh and blood than Warren Finch, where on this night of wasted fish, each enlightened revelation like this was just another kick in the head. With these thoughts in mind, poison from their hearts swept to their brains, which asked further questions:
How could he look like a gift from God at all?
He now looked like the devil. Just a half-caste!
It was insulting that Warren Finch thought they were his relatives. Nobody was related to him. They had never seen this man singing to the birds in this country.
His skin is not permeated with the dust of our plains. Where is his language? Where is the salt of our swamps on this man?
Now he was a total stranger. Nobody knew him at all. A familiar question popped out about heritage:
Where was his family among any of them?
It was a bit déjà vu, reminiscent of those old Native Title stories that ended up as laws to include or exclude families.

A bit of analysis would reveal that the genesis of Warren Finch lay with the elders who authored his childhood. Hadn't they perceived the era of colonialism continuing longer than their lives? They created movement in him that was like the travelling ancestral spirits. Now in his early thirties, it was true that he had little attachment for people, least of all his barely surviving, flagwaving relatives who noticed the difference. They could see that Warren Finch's feelings were nothing more than weightless dust, particles of responsibility from their own Brolga plains he had scattered across the globe.

Warren Finch's life could be simplified in an instant, by sitting in the seat of an aeroplane soaring through the thermals over his own homelands, flying him off to those cities and towns located thousands of kilometres away from them. There was no point sulking about it. If he did not have it to be local, then he did not have any affinity to his own humanity, and he only thought of a moving world, which he epitomised by
imagine what you will?

Perhaps, you could imagine that he swam in the ponds of an ultimate paradise, where continuous cool sea breezes kept on working to distil any traces left of the North from the face of the rough boy who had once lived among the brolgas.

Perhaps you might find him at home in a foreign place that could carve regal, fine-bone men – those who grow older with carefully smoothed grey-black hair from a brown forehead.

How could any of the swamp people explain this comfortable face they saw on television that held a universal magic capable of mirroring the faces of countless millions of ordinary people, who like themselves, had been duped by their own sense of community into recognising some uncanny likeness and affinity between themselves and Warren Finch?

Warren had not travelled alone. The vehicle was packed with his entourage of three tall and well-dressed, sinewy-bodied men. His friends looked like Indigenous football stars – the ones seen advertising high-end fashion gear on city billboards. In those brown stubbled faces, each wore the fine chiselled lines of what was commonly termed by
neo-colonists
who study race, as nice inter-racial breeding.

These men were Warren Finch's minders, or security men for the Night Lantern – his global name. They viewed everything casually, through sun-reflecting sunglasses, like justice men, free and tolerant, comfortable wearing handguns strapped to their chests, and being wired for constant communications with the central security headquarters back in Heaven. The general perspective in Warren's world was that these were good men – the best you could get, barely in their thirties, but tougher than most. For their trip to the north end of the country, they had exchanged their expensive southern city suits for slick Italian casual clothes.

After the speech-making, they hastened Warren away from old crying relatives, talking to him about oblique kinship ties, and all those grey birds. The locals called the haste,
Manhattan finesse
. Enough time had been wasted, especially the over-performing brolgas homage that they agreed had taken longer than
Swan Lake
performed back to back by every ballet company of the world, and quoted Auden
, Lion, fish and swan/ Act, and are gone/ Upon Time's
toppling wave
. The entourage moved towards the office of the Aboriginal Government of Swan Lake.

The general swamp people stood back and gawked with pride. They rejoiced to see these smoothed, supple-muscled, dark-skinned men of action, their own people in fact, moving around as though they owned the place, although on the other hand, they took the trouble to reassure each other that only white people behaved like this. Even the atmosphere had turned excitable. Heavy clouds bearing an electrical storm were now overhead, but the swamp crowd hardly noticed that, and you could tell they were dying to call out to the poster guys that they were exactly what a black brother should look like.

Warren disappeared into the office, leaving most of the spectators to stroll home in the storm to eat cold fish.

In the humidity of the hot, airless building, before all the members were present, Warren Finch opened the meeting of the Swan Lake Aboriginal Nation Government. He announced matter-of-factly:
I am looking for my wife.

His
mangkarri
! His wife! Listen.
Manku
! He's speaking, making his
jangkurr
speech about something.
Jangkurr-kanyi nyulu ngambalangi
. Let him talk to us. Don't start a fire.
Balyangka ninji jadimbi-kanyi jangu
. Be silent.
Kudarrijbi
.

He might start getting cheeky like lightning making the ground explode,
dumijbi jamba, malba-malbaa kijibajii,
like dynamite-
waya
, maybe.
Kudarrijbi
now.
Kuujbu nyulu kiji-anyi.
He's looking for a fight. Because of his wife.
Mangkarri-wunyi
. We'll see if he talks straight.
Diindi jangkurr nyulu ngambalanya.

In this building where
truth
was the motto, the Canberraimposed controller of the Swan Lake Aboriginal Government turned Army-controlled asylum was a real
weisenheimer,
the name by which the
mandaki
white man was commonly known around
the swamp.
Miyarrka-nangka mandaki.
Whiteman can't understand. He was supposed to implement white ways of loving children as being better than theirs. These people of the Aboriginal Government looked him over, and thought as they normally did,
We turned our back on him.
They had turned their backs on a lot of people. They had issues with showing tolerance for any outside government policy people especially. No! Of course they were not tolerant people. Tolerance was not their forte. They either liked something, or didn't like it. Simple! It was one or the other, and nothing in-between. No maybes crippled up in the heart. Or this or that prolonging nothing thought in the head. You don't survive on grey areas. This was what having sovereign thinking meant in the time immemorial law of the land. That was how their people had survived the aeons. The controller chose not to hear what Warren Finch had said about looking for his wife. The assumption was that he never burdened anyone about his personal life, so why should he have his Friday evening disturbed by listening to someone else talk about what ought to be –
their own business
.