The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

Nobody lives there anymore. It just does not exist. You really mean that old place no longer exists, it can’t be true but I guess it must have disappeared by sea rising, or wars. Had to happen. Talk like that. Lead-poison brains kind of talk. Conversations that meant nothing to overwhelmed swamp people who had always been told to forget the past by anyone thinking that they were born conquerors. They already knew what it was like to lose Country. Still, it did not pay to fret about the world when you were imprisoned. They were already the overcrowded kind of people living in the world’s most unknown detention camp right in Australia that still liked to call itself a first world country. The traditional owners of the land locked up forever. Key thrown away. They were sick to death of those two going on about what it was like having – Been there! And, Been there too. And , You should have been there before the whole place turned to nothing.
    I wonder why you never see a white swan landing on the swamp? The old woman was always asking the famous Harbour Master this question, ignoring many large flocks of black swans that now already lived on the swamp, and he in turn was always singing and talking about the Rolling Stones songs that his genius of a pet monkey once sang. Yes, for sure, he missed the monkey he called Rigoletto. Sorry he had abandoned it after the monkey kept making a nuisance of itself by predicting colossal wars that started to frighten the life out of everyone. Sorry he thought the monkey was mad. How does this swan look in your dreams? He seemed to have been waiting for the swan to arrive too. No! She had never seen it in her dreams. These two had travelled to so many places in the world, surely, one of them had seen it somewhere, from viewing the land in a boat of banishment.They looked for her lost white swan down in the chasms of gullies and valleys wrinkling the world, tramped through mill ponds, listened to the Mute Swans ringing the food bell in a Somerset moat, gone along the flaggy shore of County Clare and searched among the Liffey Swans dipping for weed. It was like a giant séance for gathering the thoughts of at least half a million swans from Europe to Central Asia.
    Bella Donna talked of having walked the stoney shores among the Iceland Whooper Swans of Lake Myvatn to Reykjavik, of having skated along-side swans taking off on a frozen lake surrounded by icicle trees in Sweden, of having lived among migrating swans rushing to fly from snow on the mountains in Russia. She spoke to the oo-hakucho wintering in Japan’s Akkesi-Ko, descendents of the great Kugui flocks that came from the olden times of the Nihonshoki in the eighth century and now sleeping on ice in the mist of Lake Kussharo. She had slid across the ice on Estonia’s Matsalu Bay among sleeping Bewick Swans, still like statues, escaping wolves on their long migration. In her imagination, she had flown among the thousands of black-beaked Whistling Swans lifting into the Alaskan skies and in flight to the Samish Flats of the State of Washington, and far off, she had heard the bugling of the royal swans owned for centuries by monarchs, gliding along the Thames. Did she look around China for her swan? She had sat silently in a small boat under a Chinese moon where the Shao Hao people’s winter angels live among kelp swishing in the sea of Yandun Jiao Bay. Long were the distances travelled, and all lonely! And all of them slow from too much hope in the heart, expectation, and the yearning to return.
    The two old people’s stories fly on through storming specks of ice, where the air had frozen into crystals that danced around the swan as it struggled to fly over the peaks of Himalayan mountains. They searched every abandoned, broken-down and flattened nestin the Eastern Kingdom on the Mongolian Nurs, and then hiked, wet and wretched across grassy plains, while a migratory procession of white Whooper Swans flew