The Swan Book Read Free Page A

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.
    Oblivia remembered thinking that dust had a way of displacing destiny the first time she saw a swan. A red ghost was rolling in the sky when a lone, grey-black swan suddenly appeared at lunchtime over the riparian rook of this northern world. General swamp people sitting around as slack as you please, were shovelling freshly sautéed fish fillets into their mouths when they heard the strange song of the swan. The whole place went silent. Nobody said a word. Everyone stopped eating. Half-raised forks froze mid-stream above the dinner plates. The dinner went cold while everyone stared at the first swan ever seen on this country. Only their thoughts wild with noise were asking why this strange bird stilted the heat of theday with song where there was no song for swans. The locals asked the storming almighty red dust spirit relation, What’s that bro?
    In all of this vast quietness where the summer sun was warming the dust spirit’s mind, the swan looked like a paragon of anxious premonitions, rather than the arrival of a miracle for saving the world. Seeing the huge bird flying through the common dusty day like this, disturbed whatever peace of mind the stick-like Oblivia possessed. Everyone watched a swan’s feather float down from the