The Swan Book Read Online Free PDF Page A

words, but prefers the tempo of the local dialect, to interpret like a local, and with her tongue tapping around behind closed lips, echoes soundlessly the homilies of her home life: Toughen up. Get out there. Make a difference. Don’t be like the rest of the people around here. And have a good day.
    The old lady’s speech was considered quite charming but inspired nothing in the local Indigenous people’s summation, where it was generally thought to be, Very good English for sure, and would go far for the language betterment of Australia, but not here . Naturally! Out on the swamp where life was lived on the breeze, her tongue was considered to be too soft, like a cat’s purr. It could not adapt to the common old rough way in the normal state of affairs, cross-cultural-naturally , where all English language was spoken for political use only. Whatever was decent about English speech in the way she spoke it, was better for chatting a long way away, in its homeland. Maybe, while taking a leisurely walk with ladies and gentlemen through the environs of a finely constructed English garden, with those whose day delighted in the sight of every fresh rose, or were surprised by a squirrel scampering across the path with a plump autumn acorn in its teeth.
    Swamp people were not ignorant of white people who, after all, had not turned up yesterday. Having lived it all, they claimed to have at least ten, or possibly more generations of knowledge, packed up tight in their mentality about white people doing good for them. Seasonal crop farmers, harvesters of potatoes, cabbages, fields of beans, yellow pears, wheat for whisky, wine grapes, dairycattle or pigs, truffles and olives, death feuds, imprisonment, domination, the differences between rich and poor, slaves, war and terror – whatever celebrated their faraway ancestral districts. Still! Why worry about the old woman’s voice going – Blah! Blah! Or jumping – Ting! Thang! Thing! Ting! Thang! What! – it was only the needle of her compass spinning back to the north from any radius of her wanderings of the Earth. Opera! It was only opera. This was how the local population living packed up and down in the great distance around the swamp described her kind of talk.
    The old woman spoke loudly to the girl while feeding flocks of black swans gathering around the hull. She was fed up. She had always gotten on well with people everywhere in her life before being rudely treated by a child. Not just from this swamp. Yes, she said, I have used my opportunities for influencing people across the world. You must use the voice. The girl thought that she should be silent if words were just a geographical device to be transplanted anywhere on earth. Then if that was possible: Was it possible for her voice to be heard by imaginary people too?
    Wanymarri white woman was from one of those nationalities on Earth lost to climate change wars. The new gypsies of the world, but swamp people said that as far as they were concerned, even though she was a white lady, they were luckier than her. They had a home. Yes, that was true enough. Black people like themselves had somewhere, whereas everywhere else, probably millions of white people were drifting among the other countless stateless millions of sea gypsies looking for somewhere to live.
    Bella Donna of the Champions claimed that she was the descendent of a listener of Hoffmeister’s Quartet in F. This music was cherished throughout the whole world she boasted: But not here. That was true enough! The swamp people had never heard of such music. She said on the other hand, whilst living happily enough amongthe Aborigines of Australia now, she was from many other countries equally and felt not really here and not really there . When you had travelled so far and wide in a lifetime as she had, of course you would be heard anywhere on Earth if you had left your tongue everywhere. She had often told the girl that all of