The Swan Book (2 page)

And so I travel, fired up with the fuel of inquiry about what it means to have a homeland, to travel further into strange and
unknown lands covered with holy dust and orchards of precious small, sun-ripened fruit that are sometimes half-destroyed by war, and at other times, slapped hard in the face by famine. But still, even when I bring gifts to their door, the local people, although hungry and tired, find the courage to reject a person from their paradise no matter how far they have travelled, simply for not belonging.

I tell the virus that I have felt more at home with the cool air flowing on my face from a wild Whistling Swan's easy wings sweeping over snow-capped mountains in its grand migration across continents, than in those vast ghostly terrains of indescribable beauty that have given me no joy. I must continue on, to reach that one last place in a tinder-dry nimbus where I once felt a sense of belonging.

The virus thinks I want what it wants – to hide in a dark corner of its lolly pink bed, where it dreams, in my diseased mind.

Dust Cycle

And I hear the clang of their leader crying.

To a lagging mate in the rearward flying…

W
hen the world changed,
people were different. Towns closed, cities were boarded up, communities abandoned, their governments collapsed. They seemed to have no qualms that were obvious to you or me about walking away from what they called a useless pile of rubbish, and never looking back.

Mother Nature? Hah! Who knows how many hearts she could rip out? She never got tired of it. Who knows where on Earth you would find your heart again? People on the road called her the Mother Catastrophe of flood, fire, drought and blizzard. These were the four seasons which she threw around the world whenever she liked.

In every neck of the woods people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction.

They talked about surviving a continuous dust storm under the old rain shadow, or they talked about living out the best part of their lives with floods lapping around their bellies; or they talked about tsunamis and dealing with nuclear fallout on their shores and fields forever. Elsewhere on the planet, people didn't talk much at all while crawling through blizzards to save themselves from being buried alive in snow. You could bet your life on it – they hardly talked while all around the world governments fell as
quickly as they rose in one extinction event after another. You be the judge. Believe it or not.

Ignis Fatuus = Foolish Fire. That's you Oblivion! You're just like that old Rip Van Winkle fella of the fairytale time. They were always calling out to him: ‘Wake up coma man.' That man who slept like a log, more than an old dog, and kept on sleeping for so many years that when he woke up and went home, his house was gone – just scrub there, and nobody knew who he was anymore. He was empty – like a mystery man. Nobody remembered him. He could have been anyone. They kept poking him in his bony ribs wanting to know, ‘Who do you reckon you are?', what his name was, and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that? So bloody good job. Serves him right. You should always know where to find your home.

‘It was here! It was here!' That was what the Rip Van Winkle man kept saying. He was just like you for making up stories like that, Oblivion. Nobody liked him either.

Some say that there was an accident before the drought. A little girl was lost. She had fallen into the deep underground bowel of a giant eucalyptus tree. In a silent world, the girl slept for a very long time among the tree's huge woven roots. Everyone had forgotten that she even existed – although, apparently, that did not take long.

Locked in the world of sleep, only the little girl's fingers were constantly moving, in slow swirls like music. She was writing stanzas in ancient symbols wherever she could touch – on the palms of her hands, and all over the tree root's dust-covered surfaces. Whatever she was writing, dredged from the soup of primordial memory in these ancient lands, it was either the oldest language coming to birth again instinctively, or through some strange coincidence, the
fingers of the unconscious child forming words that resembled the twittering of bird song speaking about the daylight: but the little girl could not understand the old ghost language of warbling and chortling remembered by the ancient river gum.

Her fingers traced the movements of the ghost language to write about the dead trees scattered through the swamp, where
dikili
ghost gums old as the hills once grew next to a deepwater lake fed by an old spring-spirit relative, until they had all slowly died. This happened during the massive sand storms that cursed the place after the arrival of the strangers from the sea. Their voices were heard arching across the heavy waves in the middle of the night. All their shouting ended up on ribbons of salt mist that went idling from the sea along an ancient breezeway – travelling with sand flies and tumbling bats through kilometres of inlet, along a serpentine track, dumped where it could dig into the resting place of the old story that lived inside the ancestral people of the lake.

The beetles blanketing the lake shook the night in a millisecond that shattered its surface, like precious old Venetian glass crashing onto a pavement. The roar of those harsh-sounding voices from the sea startled the ghosts which rose from beneath the lake's water – from hearing those men calling out –
half past midnight, half past two,
echoing from inside several brackets of reeds.

Sleepy children from the little dwellings around the lake heard voices speaking from large leafy fields of waterlilies. They felt words chasing after them, surrounding their feet like rope trying to pull them back as they ran away. Anyone daring to look back into the lake's echoes heard voices like dogs barking out of the mouths of fish skimming across the surface as they chased after the hordes of mosquitoes –
around four o'clock.

Those echoes of voices which originated far out at sea were coming from the Armed Forces men involved in a large-scale
sweep-up of the ocean's salty junk, floating about, bobbing and buoyant across the horizon.

The men from the Army were taunting these haunts of ghosts and outlaws to surrender themselves by dawn because they shouted:
Grab your liberation! Freedom! Called ghosts, you what?
It was a tragic demand to abandoned steel, planks of timber, brass lanterns and fittings, whose ghost sailors were unable to respond to military voices. But surprisingly, the empty wreckage obeyed. Vessel after vessel crawling out from behind the waves gleamed with the light of the stars dancing with the moonlight.

A parade of tugs towing the collected ruins churned across the breakers and headed towards land, and while the voices giving orders rose and fell, the flotilla began motoring through the deepwater channel towards the vast lake where the caretakers lived – the Aboriginal people who were responsible for this land. Whatever the men from the Army had been saying to each other on that night of bringing the junk to the lake was quickly forgotten, since around here, the words of strangers meant nothing.

Up to that point in time, the people of the lake had felt secluded in their isolation, even invisible to the outside world. They were more interested in singing in praise to the ancient spirits for the seasons lived alongside eels, fresh-water mussels, turtles and other aquatic life. Now they were truly startled by voices that resembled angry animals fighting over a few scraps of food.

It was freakish, yet they were frightened for no reason except instinct, from having their invisibility exposed by a simple little thing – lit up in the night as though it was the middle of the day by the beams from the Army's high-powered search lights swivelling on the tug boats – eyeballing along the shoreline for witnesses.

Their instinct for invisibility caused the entire population to slink away from its homes and slip into the bush, but in this inglorious fleeing for safety, something more sensational was
noticed by one of these so-called nouveau-journalists of the event.

Somebody had eye-witnessed the lake bubbling from tug boats mix-mastering the water with their propellers, whisking it like a spritzer and putrefying all the dead ancient things rising to the surface, spraying it around like the smell of eternity. No wonder the local people, the traditional owners and all that, were too frightened to go back to the lake anymore. They had heard stories – bad stories about what happened to anyone who went back there.

Oblivia's fingers kept on writing the swirl language over the dust that fell on what the tree had witnessed in its lifetime, and the history of the stories that continued to be told by the locals about the years of fighting like a bunch of battle-axes – for umpteen friggen decades, without success, to get back what was theirs in the first place, and of years later again before these old families quit their tourism of other peoples' lands by saying they had had enough of wandering around homelessly for years worse than a pack of overseas gypsies, and returned to their rightful place of belonging, their ancestral domain.

Then, to top it off, they had no sooner set foot on the place, when they were told that Australians now recognised the law of Native Title after two plus centuries of illegal occupation, but unfortunately, on the day that they had left their land, their Native Title had been lost irredeemably and disappeared from the face of the planet.

The first thing they saw on their arrival at the lake that no longer belonged to them was the audacity of the floating junk. Even the tugboats had been left there to rot unfettered and untethered. Undeterred, the traditional owners ignored the view, and acted as though the lake was still the same tranquil place that it had always been from time
immemorial,
before the day that their people had been frightened away.

They took up their lives with the eyesore view of rust amongst
the lilies, and very soon, everyone felt as though they had never left. But, it was strange what a view can do to how people think. The rotting junk clung to its secrets and in turn, the local people who did not really know what they were staring at or why the junk was staring back at them, also became secretive.

They wished and dreamed for this emotional eyesore to be removed and gone from their lands forever. It was foreign history sinking there that could not be allowed to rot into the sacredness of the ground. Their conscience flatly refused to have junk buried among the ancestral spirits.

These were really stubborn people sticking to the earth of the ancestors, even though they knew well enough that the contaminated lake caused bellyaches, having to eye each cup of tainted water they drank from the lake, but drinking it anyway.

There was not much choice about pure and pristine anymore. It was no good thinking about contaminated water leading to deformity in their culture for an eternity.

These people were hardened to the legendary stuff of fortune and ill fortune. They saw many children being born without any evidence of contamination. All children in living memory of the lake people's history, and regardless of the Army intervening in their parenthood, were deeply loved by their families, until this girl came along who was so different to any child ever born in their world, it made everyone think about why Oblivia had been born at all after this dumb girl was dragged out of the eucalyptus tree by old Bella Donna after years – a decade of being missing – and who disowned her people by acting as though she had by-passed human history, by being directly descended from their ancestral tree. Time would tell if this was true or false. Who was anyone to judge anything?

The junk on the lake was used as regular target practice for bombs falling from the warplanes that appeared unpredictably,
flying low across the water from time to time throughout the year. Surprised at first, the local owners soon realised that their homeland was really a secret locality for Defence Force scheduled training manoeuvres. What a blast was that? Things getting blown up, up and down, in the isolated northern part of the nation.

Only heaven knows, there were millions of people throughout the world who either offered pigs as sacrifices to their Gods, or flowers, or the first grain of the new season's crop. There were even others who offered their own people to the Gods. Now the day had come when modern man had become the new face of God, and simply sacrificed the whole Earth. The swamp locals were not experiencing any terrific friendship with this new God. It was hell to pay to be living the warfare of modernity like dogs fighting over the lineage of progress against their own quiet whorls of time. Well! That just about summed up the lake people, sitting for all times in one place.

These were anti-halcyon times for the lake people, where the same old festering drains and degraded lands were struck hard and fast by a string of bad luck, which all in all, amounts to the same thing happening with the surprise of being struck once, or twice, or a hundred more times as though it were a chosen place.

Sand storms continued pouring over the lake and turned it into a swamp. The sand flew about in this freak weather until it banked up into a mountain with a pointy peak reaching into the sky. The mountain blocked the channel leading from the sea to the swamp.

Then an elder, a healer for the country arrived to examine the devastation, which he called,
a total ugly bitch of an annihilation
. He turned up like a bogeyman. A
kadawala. Dadarrba-barri nyulu jalwa-kudulu
. He claimed that he was feeling pain in his heavy heart. Turns up from nowhere like an aeroplane.
Bala-kanyi nyulu
.
He just flies where he wants to. This old
wululuku
was an Aboriginal man with an Asian heritage, the kind of person all sorts of people liked to call a half caste, yellow fella, or
mixed blood urban
Aboriginal. Half caste. Thinking! Thinking! Mixture. Mixed up. Not straight this or that. Extract! Lost purity. Not purely trustworthy. Exactly! No matter! He liked to call people a lot of names too, but he called himself the Harbour Master. He favoured calling himself by his own
worldly acquired
bona fides: a bony man with sun-darkened brown skin and sunglasses, a slack shaver with stubbly growth on his face – someone who resembled Mick Jagger. Someone with special healing powers who travelled anywhere he was needed, just by thinking himself into a sick person's mind. His was
wanami
, like fuel, and
wakubaji
– goes like anything. He started to live like a
persona non grata
sitting up there like a motionless exile on the sand mountain's summit. Japanese type. Something
sage-guru-expert
turnout. He became simple, like a snail-eating dune hermit. Somebody short on detail about what else he was going to feed himself with, and no tap water either to boot. Still, only kings live above everyone else, watching everybody else like this. So, maybe, he was a bit of a king too.