Free The Swan Book by Alexis Wright Page A

that the music of epic stories normally sounded like this.
    This is the world itself, disassembling its thoughts.
    It was just the new ceremony of swamp dreaming, the girl thought, for what she called, Nowhere Special. She thought it suited the wind-swept surroundings of the dead swamp, where children played with sovereign minds, just by standing out in the wind to fill their cups with dust given to them by their ancestors.
    Dust covered the roads and nobody knew where they were anymore, and the old woman claimed that even the bitumen highways were disappearing. Soon, no one would have any idea about how to reach this part of the world.
    If you leave here, you know what is going to happen don’t you? People are going to stop and stare at you the very instant they see the colour of your skin, and they will say: She is one of those wild Aboriginals from up North, a terrorist; they will say you are one of those faces kept in the Federal Government’s Book of Suspects .
    Bella Donna said that even though she had never seen this book for herself, she had heard that it had the Australian Government’s embossed crest on the cover, and was kept at the Post Office where anyone could study it. What was a post office? The girl had listened.
    This was the place where they kept faces plucked from the World Wide Web by Army intelligence looking at computers all day long, searching for brown- and black-coloured criminals, un-assimilables, illegal immigrants, terrorists – all the undesirables; those kind of people.
    Never ever leave the swamp, she said, adding that her own skin did not matter, but the girl was the colour of a terrorist, and terrorism was against the law.
    Bella Donna’s home was camouflaged in the middle of the flotilla of junk littering what she called the vision splendid. The hull jutted out of the swamp like a war monument saluting in grey-coloured steel. This joyless, rusting hull with a long war record of stalking oceans looked like a traitor imprisoned away from the sea, but it was not alone in this polluting junkyard choked up with so-called ‘lost’ Army property. Its neighbours were the remains of all the muwada – cargo boats, trawlers, tugboats, fighter boats and rickety old fishing boats. These phantom vessels were either falling apart at the seams from decades of bobbing themselves into oblivion, or had become dilapidating wrecks.
    While the hull was slowly sinking its huge belly in the yellow mud, the old foreign woman chopped carrots in the galley. She sang her premonitions as she chopped. The hull was burying itself at its own funeral. It was a kind of simple theory, as far as theories went. All kinds of conspiracies poured out of her old lips to the sound of the knife clipping the wood, chopping vegetables for another stew . Was this going to be the unrecorded record of the world’s longest suicide attempt? The longest pause! You could feel the slide, slipping and dipping further into the mud, by a few millimetres a day.
    The bounty the old white aunty business brought from overseas was about reading the signs of the unsaid and speaking about whatwas not obvious. Well! Why not listen? The resident Queen of the manufacturing and boat-building industry did reigning well. She knew what you needed to feel in your bones about nautical living, boat steel and planks of wood. Even her bones could feel how the hull was reorienting itself towards the fanfare of East Coast cities. She asked any passing spirit bystander she noticed hanging around her kitchen, How else was the hull going to capture the glory from which it had been robbed?
    Sounds were destroying the memory of the girl who only wanted to be living in her tree again. She felt as though she was locked inside a suitcase that the old woman dragged along and pussy-footed about on noisy gravel. It was the walk of life , old Aunty claimed. How it felt to be living inside the steel of a battling war hero robbed of the