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Book Review: The
Swan Book
Nick G.
Imagine the AAMI black swans TV ad took place in Bob
Dylan’s Desolation Row. Imagine that the swans were not on the
attack, but were the spiritual brothers and sisters of a mute Aboriginal girl
living half a century into the future under an even more punishing and
widespread Intervention regime.
Indigenous author Alexis Wright, whose previous
insight into Aboriginal Australia was set in a mythical Queensland community
appropriately named Desperance, has delivered another powerful statement about
the State’s denial of black self-determination in The Swan Book.
The protagonist is Oblivia Ethylene, who pursues,
but is unable to articulate, a “quest to regain sovereignty over my own
brain”. She lives on a contaminated lake
controlled by the Army and filled with the detritus of war machinery and naval
craft. Her homeland has become a secret
locality for Defence Force scheduled training manoeuvres and bombing runs.
Into this incarcerated community, and others like
it, are shipped all Aboriginal persons deemed unable or unwilling to adapt to
life in capitalist Australia. These
“growth centres” of “truck people” are the outcome of the National Aboriginal
Relocation Policy which is set up to deal with
the old people who, having done “nothing to change things by themselves
for the future… had given up the right of sovereignty over their lives”.
Not all Aboriginal people are trucked to such
camps. There are those who are exempt
from the coercive policies imposed upon their compatriots by virtue of
“presenting themselves as being well and truly yes people who were against
arguing the toss about Aboriginal rights”.
They were “anti about whatever there was to be anti about if white people
say so” and were thus granted an Aboriginal Nation Government. From their ranks emerges young Warren Finch,
and where have we heard before of a “Warren” in Aboriginal Australian political
life?
Wright says of Finch: “He had become the only public
Aboriginal voice of the era. The only one Australians would listen to, and
reported in the newspapers, or had given their airways to whenever he spoke
publicly. It certainly seemed as though
there was national deafness to hearing what other Aboriginal people had to say
of themselves.” And so she disposes of
the black Judenrats promoted by the
Murdoch media!
Finch claims Oblivia as his promise-wife and orders
the Army to bomb her community out of existence so she has nothing to which to
return.
Like Desolation
Row, Wright’s novel has its cast of strange characters.
There is Oblivia’s protector, Bella Donna of the Champions, who arrives in the swamp community
as a refugee from the climate change wars of the global north, an old white
lady with a swan-bone flute. She and
others like her were the “new gypsies of the world…millions of white
people…drifting among the other countless stateless millions of sea gypsies
looking for somewhere to live.”
Bella Donna spends much of her time arguing with the
Harbourmaster, an “Aboriginal man with an Asian heritage…a healer for the
country…he just flies where he wants to” although we are not talking aeroplanes
here.
He and his monkey Rigoletto appear and disappear at
will, as one would expect of a healer of great power; however, he is in reality
a delusional character who “only had a big mouth and that was not going to move
the sand mountain” that kept building up like a pile of unsolved social
problems at the mouth of the lake’s entrance to the sea.
Wright’s acknowledgements include a nod in the
direction of the late Tom Trevorrow, a Ngarrindjeri Elder from the Coorong which, like the Lake, had its entrance
to the sea silted up as a result of climate change.
These two powerful
themes, failure to respect Indigenous self-determination and failure to respond
to climate change, make The Swan Book
a powerful weapon for dissecting the problems of contemporary Australian
reality.
