their cries all day long. But it was different for birds. The seagulls and hawks flew around the swamp, absorbed in their own business of surviving in a peaceful and orderly manner. The birds disregarded the monologue of northern hemisphere outsidedness humming like the engine of a boat, trying to move their relevance to their native country further away in the fog.
When the girl whispered, the old woman interpreted â guessed what she wanted to know â and spoke for her, why canât I see that swan with the bone if you can see it ? Something dropped into the water. Plop! Was this a fact that had slipped from her hypothetical love stories? The girl thought that she could hear ghost music. A string of musical notes gob-smacked in bubbles broke through the surface of the swamp. Even the old woman noticed the music, but she continued on her merry way with her story, regardless: I have become an expert on music made from old bones, and I say it could be from swan bones, or bones of drowned people, or of drought-stricken cattle, imitating the scores of Mozartâs fingers racing across the ivory.
The greatest love story this country has ever known began somewhere around here, the old lady said while sniffling back at the bubbling water, speaking only to herself, or to somewhere way past the girl, that could have been the Harbour Master listening from the top of his hill.
A large flock of black swans whispering to each other in their rusted car-body bedrooms all over the swamp whistle, glide and bump over the waves driven along by the sudden arrival of gusty winds, while the old woman sings more: I got to roll you over, roll over, rolling bones.
Far into the night, the swamp music continued telling the old womanâs love story through the girlâs dreams where, inthe underwater shadows, she looked like a cygnet transformed into two people entwining and unwinding back and forth in the bubbling swamp, in waves scattered by a relic dropped from the beak of the black swan imagined by the old woman.
Black swans kept arriving from nowhere, more and more of them, from the first one that had arrived unexpectedly and spoiled the swamp peopleâs dinner.
After black swans came to the swamp something else happened⦠A soft yellow beam of light fell over the polluted swamp at night. It was the torchlight of armed men flying in the skies like Marvin Gayeâs ghost looking about the place, to see what was going on. Yes! Well! You tell me what was going on? The Army men sent by the Government in Canberra to save babies from their parents said that they were guarding the sleep of little children now.
The swamp bristled.
This was the history of the swamp ever since the wave of conservative thinking began spreading like wildfire across the twenty-first century, when among the mix of political theories and arguments about how to preserve and care for the worldâs environment and people, the Army was being used in this country to intervene and control the will, mind and soul of the Aboriginal people. The military intervention was seen as such an overwhelming success in controlling the Aboriginal world it blinded awareness of the practical failures to make anyoneâs life better in the swamp. This âclosed earâ dictatorial practice was extended over the decades to suit all shades of grey-coloured politics far-away in Canberra, and by tweaking it ever so little this way and that, the intervention of the Army never ended for the swamp people, and for other Aboriginal people like themselves who were sent to detention camps like the swamp tolive in until the end of their lives. The internment excluded the swamp people from the United Nationsâ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the control proliferated until there was full traction over what these people believed and permeance over their ability to win back their souls and even to define what it meant to be human, without somebody else making
When the girl whispered, the old woman interpreted â guessed what she wanted to know â and spoke for her, why canât I see that swan with the bone if you can see it ? Something dropped into the water. Plop! Was this a fact that had slipped from her hypothetical love stories? The girl thought that she could hear ghost music. A string of musical notes gob-smacked in bubbles broke through the surface of the swamp. Even the old woman noticed the music, but she continued on her merry way with her story, regardless: I have become an expert on music made from old bones, and I say it could be from swan bones, or bones of drowned people, or of drought-stricken cattle, imitating the scores of Mozartâs fingers racing across the ivory.
The greatest love story this country has ever known began somewhere around here, the old lady said while sniffling back at the bubbling water, speaking only to herself, or to somewhere way past the girl, that could have been the Harbour Master listening from the top of his hill.
A large flock of black swans whispering to each other in their rusted car-body bedrooms all over the swamp whistle, glide and bump over the waves driven along by the sudden arrival of gusty winds, while the old woman sings more: I got to roll you over, roll over, rolling bones.
Far into the night, the swamp music continued telling the old womanâs love story through the girlâs dreams where, inthe underwater shadows, she looked like a cygnet transformed into two people entwining and unwinding back and forth in the bubbling swamp, in waves scattered by a relic dropped from the beak of the black swan imagined by the old woman.
Black swans kept arriving from nowhere, more and more of them, from the first one that had arrived unexpectedly and spoiled the swamp peopleâs dinner.
After black swans came to the swamp something else happened⦠A soft yellow beam of light fell over the polluted swamp at night. It was the torchlight of armed men flying in the skies like Marvin Gayeâs ghost looking about the place, to see what was going on. Yes! Well! You tell me what was going on? The Army men sent by the Government in Canberra to save babies from their parents said that they were guarding the sleep of little children now.
The swamp bristled.
This was the history of the swamp ever since the wave of conservative thinking began spreading like wildfire across the twenty-first century, when among the mix of political theories and arguments about how to preserve and care for the worldâs environment and people, the Army was being used in this country to intervene and control the will, mind and soul of the Aboriginal people. The military intervention was seen as such an overwhelming success in controlling the Aboriginal world it blinded awareness of the practical failures to make anyoneâs life better in the swamp. This âclosed earâ dictatorial practice was extended over the decades to suit all shades of grey-coloured politics far-away in Canberra, and by tweaking it ever so little this way and that, the intervention of the Army never ended for the swamp people, and for other Aboriginal people like themselves who were sent to detention camps like the swamp tolive in until the end of their lives. The internment excluded the swamp people from the United Nationsâ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the control proliferated until there was full traction over what these people believed and permeance over their ability to win back their souls and even to define what it meant to be human, without somebody else making
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