The Swan Book (44 page)

The old swan leader kept throwing back his head over his wing, and his long neck flowed like a snake resting over his black plumed body. His eye canvassing the landscape like a stranger trying to find the quickest way out of the place. The huge bird was never the same after losing his flock. It found being alone unbearable. It never stopped looking for the other swans. It was the kind of creature that belonged in old Banjo Paterson's poem about black swans, perpetually straining for the sound of wings beating, of
lagging mates in the rearward flying.
The old swan's red beak clicked twice, then as time passed, as it does but not for nothing, it clicked three times, or perhaps, twice again. The swan had some strange equation going on in its head. This continuous clicking of his beak exaggerated even greater numbers of swans he anticipated would return in his ghostly rendition of what life once was.

Oblivia sensed that he was waiting for the equivalent of one thousand years of swans, an immense flock, one that was capable of overcoming all adversity, but she told him straight in the eye to give up.
They have all gone now and finished up, and none are coming back
. Talk like this grieved the swan. It swooned and dropped its neck to the ground. To see the swan like this made the girl feel sick of the virus thing talking in her head, and telling her that she and the swan were joined as companions, of being both caught up in a
mal de mer
from the yellow waves of dust spreading over the land. The old swan would have to fight to win back control, to settle the dust, and return the rain. He was old now, but the girl tells him:
If I could fly high up in the atmosphere like you instead of swilling around in dust storms, I'd make it rain.

But how in the hell would I know?
Its belligerence was unbelievable.

It was not interested in saving the world. Defying everything. How would she keep telling the swan another million times that the lake was gone, having to hold its beating heart closer to prevent its wings from spreading in a swim through the dust, treading it like water, and whispering the truth:
Deader than a doornail! Drier than Mars! Don't you see that it is all bulldust out there?

Her mind was only a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction.

They say that the gift from God kept getting out of his grave after Warren Finch was finally buried in his country, beside the river of that time long ago when he first saw a swan. The story goes,
He wanted to give his promised wife some gift. Oh! Yes! He still had power of eating the brains of politicians. That was why there were no smart politicians in the country any more. It was really true.

It was just fate that brought him back. On the face of it, his body could have been anywhere else on the planet by now, if the semitrailer's axle hadn't broken down on a bad day in the North, and the mad driver hadn't called it a day by dragging the heavy sassafras coffin out into the boiling heat that one last time, and telling Warren Finch,
I am going to bury you here you bastard, and be done with it, then I am going home.

This might be the same story about some important person carrying a swan centuries ago, and it might be the same story in centuries to come when someone will carry a swan back to this ground where its story once lived. Well! Talk about acts of love. A place where white whirlwinds full of bits of dry grass and leaves blew in ashes from a tinder dry giant eucalypt, where a swan once flew in clouds of smoke from fire spreading through the bush land, with a small slither of bone in its beak.

It has been said by the few heart-broken-homes people,
mungkuji
left for that
kala
country, who come back from time to time to visit the swamp after Warren Finch had the place destroyed, and they had seen the girl wife, First Lady of whatnot, Oblivion Ethyl(ene), that she always stayed like a
wulumbarra
, teenage girl. Well! She walks around the old dry swamp pretty regularly they say, and having seen her where there is a light moving over the marshes in the middle of the night, like a will-o'-the-wisp, they thought that they had heard her screaming,
kayi, kayi kala-wurru nganyi, your country is calling out for you,
which they described was just like listening to a sigh of a moth extending out over the landscape, or a whisper from the scrub ancestor catching a little stick falling from a dead tree, although nothing that could truly be heard – just a sensation of straining to hear something, which understandably, was how anyone should whisper on this spirit-broken place, from seeing their old homes scattered to kingdom come, of being where the Army owned everything, every centimetre of their traditional land, every line of buried song, stories, feelings, the sound of their voices, and every word spoken loudly on this place now.

There is a really big story of that ghost place: a really deadly love story about a girl who has a virus lover living in some lolly pink prairie house in her brain – that made the world seem too large and jittery for her, and it stuffed up her relationships with her own people, and made her unsociable, but they say that she loved swans all the same. Poor old swanee. You can see swans sometimes, but not around this place. It is a bit too hot and dry here.
Jungku ngamba, burrangkunu-barri. We're sitting down in the heat now.
It's really just sand-mountain country. Like desert! Maybe
Bujimala
, the Rainbow Serpent, will start bringing in those cyclones and funnelling sand mountains into the place. Swans might come back. Who knows what madness will be calling them in the end?

A Note on Sources

Quotations embedded in the text of
The Swan Book
are from the following sources: Robert Adamson, ‘After William Blake' (p v); A.B. Paterson, ‘Black Swans' (p 6); Bari Karoly, ‘Winter Diary', in
Leopard V: An Island of Sound
, London, Harvill, 2004, (p 25); W.B. Yeats, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole' (pp 28-29); Richard Wagner,
Lohengrin
, Act 1 (p 28); John Shaw Neilson, ‘The Poor, Poor Country' (p 53); Seamus Heaney, ‘Postscript', in
The Spirit Level
, London, Faber, 1996 (p 77); James McAuley, ‘Canticle' in
Collected Poems 1936–1970
, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1971 (p 111); ‘Song (March 1936)', in
Tell Me the Truth About Love: Fifteen Poems by W.H. Auden
, London, Faber, 1994 (p 135); Paterson, ‘Black Swans' (p 157); David Hollands,
Owls, Frogmouths and Nightjars of Australia,
Melbourne, Bloomings Books, 2008 (p 165);
The Kalevala
, trans John Martin Crawford, Cincinnati, The Robert Blake Company, 1910 (p 168); William Wordsworth ‘An Evening Walk' (p 175); E.B. White,
The Trumpet of the Swan
, New York, Harper Collins, 1970 (p 195); W.B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan' (p 202); Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself, 33'
Leaves of Grass
, Book III (p 218); Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Dying Swan' (p 239); Douglas Stewart, from
Images from the Monaro: For David Campbell
, in
Letters Lifted into Poetry – Selected correspondence between David Campbell and Douglas Stewart 1946–1979
, ed Jonathan Persse, Canberra, National Library
of Australia, 2006, p 226, (p 239); Shivananda Goswami, Baul song, in Mimlu Sen,
The Honey Gatherers
, London, Rider Books, 2010 (p 239); Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Now, When you Awaken, Remember', in
The Butterfly's Burden
, trans Fady Joudah, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 2007 (p 240); Heaney, ‘Postscript' (p 240); Leonard Cohen, ‘The Traitor' from
Recent Songs
, Columbia, 1979 (p 240); W.B. Yeats, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' (p 264); Hank Williams, ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain', song by Fred Rose, recorded 1951 (p 284); Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Swan, to Victor Hugo', trans Roy Campbell, in
Poems of Baudelaire
, New York, Pantheon, 1952 (p 290); Ch'i-chi, ‘Stopping at night at Hsiang-Yin', trans Burton Watson, in
The Clouds Should Know Me By Now – Buddhist poet monks of China
, ed. Red Pine and Mike O'Connor, Boston, Wisdom Publications, 1990 (p 302); James McAuley, ‘Nocturnal', in
Collected Poems 1936–1970
, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1971 (p 326).

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude and respect to my countryman Kevin Cairns, Chairman, and the Board of the Waanyi Nation Aboriginal Corporation, for your kind permission to use the Waanyi Language Dictionary.

Thank you to Aboriginal traditional landowners and elders of the Coorong, Ellen and Tom Trevollow, for your generosity, friendship, and guidance.

My gratitude to Professor Raoul Mulder, Department of Zoology, University of Melbourne, for research material on the behavior and ecology of black swans; Ray Chatto, Parks, Wildlife and Conservation, Northern Territory, for invaluable information about brolgas in Northern Australia; Bernard Blood, Curator of Lake Wendoree in Ballarat, for your wonderful story of swans returning to the lake after the drought.

I have watched swans in many places, and learnt the best place to see swans on the Liffy in Dublin from a truly amused interviewer at RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta. I learnt from Seamus Heaney's poem ‘Postscript', displayed at Dublin airport, that if I wanted to see swans, I should look on the Flaggy Shore in County Clare. Many friends, colleagues, and family members very kindly and thoughtfully told stories, sent information, and swan presents, including music inspired
by swans, or poetry, photos, pictures, objects, books, and life size statues of swans. Thank you Hal Wolton, Sudha Ray, Forrest Holder, Jeff Hulcombe, Ann Davis, Murrandoo Yanner, Evelyn Juers, Andreas Campomar, Benoit and Christine Gruter, Steve Morwell, Kevin Rowley, Pip McManas, my sister Robyn and brother-in-law Bill, sister-in-law Larissa, brother- and sister-in-law George and Barbara Sawenko, Francis Bray, Kim Scott, Terry Whitebeach, Stewart Blackhall, Robert Adamson, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Steve Morwell and Karina Menkhorst. Thank you to Nicholas Jose for showing me the nesting swans along the Torrens River, and Bruce Sims who went on visits with me to the Melbourne Zoo.

My daughter Tate travelled with me on a special trip to the Coorong, and also came on many walks along the Torrens River to see nesting swans and find the man who nurses a wild swan on his lap. My daughter Lily enthusiastically found images of swans that she sent to my computer in the middle of the night, and we had several special trips to the Melbourne Zoo where we visited a lone Mute Swan befriended by goldfish. Thank you to my step-son Andre for telling me the story about the swan that lost its way on a busy highway in Melbourne.

I am indebted to many people who offered encouragement and support, including my former colleagues at RMIT, and especially Antoni Jach. Thank you most sincerely to Evelyn Juers
and Alice Grundy for reading the final manuscript and offering invaluable feedback; and to Darren Gilbert for permission to use his wonderful image of the swan on the cover of this book.

I am very grateful for the support of Professor Wayne McKenna, the University of Western Sydney, and Professor Anthony Uhlmann and all of my colleagues in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the university.

Ivor Indyk, my publisher, editor and critic knows the work that went into this book. Thank you.

Thank you to my husband Toly for our trips to Lake Wendoree, and for many thoughtful references you found from the beginning of a journey that continued through many parts of the world.

Of course, all of those swans, and also our kelpies Jessie then Ruby, and our cats Pushkin then Luna, for the company.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

‘An indigenous Australian literary vernacular of consummate skill that is not afraid to relax into poetic reverie but can, and does, snap taut at a moment's notice.'

MICHELE GROSSMAN
,
Australian

‘Wright's narrative voice is remarkable, shifting like a cyclone from full velocity to poetic calm. It's got the feel of the voices you hear up north: the rapidfire delivery, the long digressions, the meandering storyline and, above all, the wicked humour.'

SALLY BLAKENEY
,
Bulletin

‘Wright breaks all the rules of grammar and syntax to sweep us along on a great torrent of language that thrills and amazes with its inventiveness and humour and with the sheer power of its storytelling. It's brutal and confronting and it's sad and funny at the same time.'

LIAM DAVISON
,
Sydney Morning Herald

‘This is not myth as Western culture understands it: not an imagined dimension, but a literal if incorporeal one that bisects and animates the physical world; it makes for marvellous theatre.'

ELIZABETH LOWRY
,
London Review of Books