Read Online The Swan Book by Alexis Wright - Free Book Online Page A

that decision for them.
    Now the swamp people’s voices were talking in the girl’s dreams, telling her: Your tree did not exist. Screamed: TELL HER. No strong tree like that ever existed here. The girl panicked, would wake up in fright from not remembering anymore about how she came to be asleep in the tree. She started to believe what other people believed: She was telling lies.
    The light quickly travels across water, twice over buildings, through the football oval, and along streets, then swirling around, the Army men on the boundaries go through the exit gates, before turning around, locking the gates, and the lights march off again.
    The girl watched the other children. They play a game of pretending they are from another life – from the space age, living on Mars or some other planet, and run to be saved by the passing light.
    When the old woman was not watching, Oblivia studied the running rays of light reflected on the surface of the swamp, unsettling a black swan that lifted, tail splashing, into garnishes of serendipity. There were bones rattling like loose change when the torchlight hit flocks of white cockatoos, causing them to screech from the rooftops where they sat roosting – Sweet Lord . A light ran again across the water saying, say again: What’s going on ?
    Humpies! Hundreds sprung up all along the banks of the swamp like nobody’s business now. Well! The dominant voices around the country and western bloc of the country’s politics had not balkedfor a second about Aborigines when saying, ‘ Why not?’ This was what happens when you put the Army in charge of the swamp, long after it had become one of those Australian Government growth communities for corralling Aboriginal peoples into compounds. These were past times for kicking Aboriginal people around the head with more and more interventionist policies that were charmingly called, Closing the Gap. But, so what? The very sight of the place was vilified up and down the country for being like dogs in the pound begging for food.
    Well! So what if it was just another moment in a repetitious black and white history repeated one more time for Aboriginal people from wherever about the place, after having their lives classified and reassigned yet again? Anybody’s politics was a winner these days, so long as they were not blackfellas caring about their culture. So it was nothing for Australians to get excited about when Aboriginal people started being divided into lots and graded on whether anything could be done for them. Upper scale – if they could actually be educated. Lower scale – just needed some dying pillow place to die. Many Indigenous populations began to be separated regardless of family or regional ties. In growth centres like the swamp, thousands of Aboriginal people became common freight as they were consigned by the busload, then more conveniently, by the truckload. The swamp now renamed Swan Lake was nothing special. It was the same as dozens of fenced and locked Aboriginal detention centres.
    Only starving skin-and-bone people with hollow-eye children who refused to speak came off those trucks and Army buses. Their clothes were stiffened with dried sweat and dirt from the journey. These strangers looked here and there initially, as though trying to avoid the heavy spirit of bad luck swooping down to sit on their backs. They got spite eyes from the local people. A little dull blue butterfly flew through one of the buses to have a look around andsat down on a young boy’s head. He would commit suicide this poor little juka . Everyone knew. More boys and girls would die like this.
    The swamp people, the big time protesters, rocked to their foundations from three centuries of dealing with injustices already, will probably feel the same way in two centuries more – who’s speculating on the likely projection of this tragedy? Now they were yelling and screaming, Weren’t we supposed to