The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

swans floating on their fat bellies, their red beaks preening themselves right next to their old benefactor’s bright floral-patterned dress billowing in the water. Silently, the girl was a shadow that listened to the stories and secrets whispered into swan ears, and whatever she remembered, it was mostly poetry for swans.
    Swamp people said the swans were frightening them. Theyaccused the swans of looking right into their souls and stealing the traditional culture. Bella Donna said she did not know why a swan would want to look into somebody’s empty soul. Just an insult a minute. She had already looked inside their souls herself and said that she had found nothing there. Just thin bits of weak weeds lying on the bottom of your guts trying to stay alive. Perhaps swamp people had empty souls, but they did have pride. They jumped around a lot and told her , Enough’s enough now, don’t you go talking like that. Anyway, she retaliated: What could there possibly be for a swan to see except these little bits of weeds lying on a tin plate in a tiny pile at the bottom of your soul?
    Guess there was no answer for that.
    But red-ringed, black-eye swans dipping their beaks like fortune-tellers swilling and swirling old tea dregs around while swimming by the girl could create beautiful thoughts, staring straight into her eyes. The girl in turn thought she might read their fortunes in the language nature had written in the blackish-grey-tipped curled tail feathers scalloped across their backs. It was how swans read each other when choosing a mate. She was determined to solve the mystery of why they had left the most beautiful lakes in the country – a vision created in her head by the old woman’s stories of other places. Her existence revolved around learning the route they took, how they had crossed the interior country, the old woman’s geography of featureless sand dunes stretching to kingdom come, just to reach a North country polluted swamp. It was the love stories, the old woman chuckled to herself. She was amused at the girl’s addiction to bolt holes. In the muddy waters the old woman went on feeding squads of cygnets volumes of a tangled, twisted love story about the Gods only knew what, which they soaked up like pieces of wet bread.
    All children wanted were answers to universal questions about how people should live, and strangely, the girl thought she would find these answers by tossing herself in the old woman’s madness of singing to swans. Just as she believed there was a secret route back to the tree – she believed there had to be a secret route that had brought the swans up to the top of the country. The mysteries were running away from her. Her mind too tied up in a jungle of tracks to run. Another way. Hidden passages. Places to hide. Always running. She had to become Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions who knew how to call swans, and time became desperate. But Oblivia remained out of kilter with the old lady’s shadow, never quite fitting the cast of the sun, while the old woman sung her stories slowly, moving more and more slowly those days.
    This story that began across the ocean, in a far-away land of a country which had already lost its name. In this place people were often telling common stories about themselves as they looked out at the awfulness of their land. The stories were never about history, or science, or technology. They talked about a useless landscape that grew nothing and which most of them could not see anyhow because of their blindness. These people spent ages comparing better times before who can tell what happened, except saying: We were already late when the God of the world said Git.
    Ice-covered lakes dried up where the swans once lived. Beautiful creatures of snow-white feathers with yellow beaks had flown half-dead, half-way around the globe to reach extraordinary destinations in faraway lands.
    Here, dead clumps of grasses by the sea billowed