Whaay? Whaay? Why? And early may? A lone, brightly coloured yellow chat whistled from the top of the Crossed Boomerang Memorial, its longing song about ancestral ties went wafting down into the ears of the poverty people standing around below, who looked as though the sky was about to fall on top of them.
In the crowd, little Aboriginal flags held up in the breeze danced to a nervous low whistling of Stand By Me, while the shockstricken, distant relatives of Warren Finch were busy amongst themselves, obsessing about all of their shared origins no matter how distant or close they were to good boy, who was once the child prodigy of their large sprawling Indigenous nation. Shouldn’t you tell him how you are related? You could hear the warbling chat feeling sick with shame that nobody really knew the answer to that question, that they all shared the same genes – Shouldn’t he know how…Shouldn’t he? Although in reality, Warren Finch was honestly acting as though he was nothing more than a complete stranger.
He yawned and stretched with his arms wide open. He was weary of listening to his own preachings and speeches, and what was more, totally oblivious of the yellow chat’s song – a rant, a rave, pointless to him. Homeland? What did it mean any more? After the experience of being cooped up in his Government car for endless hours of travelling across plain after treeless plain, he had reached – whatever the term meant, and what others called – his people. The world was in fact his home, homeland, place of abode, and where his people lived. There were no childhood memories in his mind. His nostalgia had been the pull of movement, but movement had drained life from him, and he was ashen-faced, like the grey feathers of the brolgas standing outside of the crowd replicating his every gesture, stretching their wings too.
Still his relatives were excited with the belief of finally quelling his restlessness, and where they were breathing the same exalted air as he exhaled, they could not help realising too, that the taste of his breath was so much sweeter than theirs. Fine! They had lost their fish dinner. Didn’t matter. This closeness to the gift was exciting. His relatives felt complete to be so close to his flesh and blood, and could breathe at last for having a precious belonging returned to the ordinariness of Country. But there was one cold hard fact, for in reality he did not resemble any of them at all.
Slowly, the crowd started to feel let down. They began to feel normal again. A natural suspicion snuck back into the picture of life, the larger landscape, what was painted in the framework of life. They began to think that he looked more like one of those outsiders – the complete strangers. Those Aboriginal people from other places the Army had trucked in and who were now tucked up in their lives through marriage, family, living under the one roof.
Even the outsiders resembled his people more in the flesh and blood than Warren Finch, where on this night of wasted fish, each enlightened revelation like this was just another kick in the head. With these thoughts in mind, poison from their hearts swept to their brains, which asked further questions: How could he look like a gift from God at all? He now looked like the devil. Just a half-caste! It was insulting that Warren Finch thought they were his relatives. Nobody was related to him. They had never seen this man singing to the birds in this country. His skin is not permeated with the dust of our plains. Where is his language? Where is the salt of our swamps on this man? Now he was a total stranger. Nobody knew him at all. A familiar question popped out about heritage: Where was his family among any of them? It was a bit déjà vu, reminiscent of those old Native Title stories that ended up as laws to include or exclude families.
A bit of analysis would reveal that the genesis of Warren Finch lay with the elders who authored his childhood. Hadn’t they perceived the era of colonialism continuing longer than their lives? They created movement in him that was like the travelling ancestral spirits. Now in his early thirties, it was true that he had little attachment for people, least of all his barely surviving, flagwaving relatives who noticed the difference. They could see that Warren Finch’s feelings were nothing more than weightless dust, particles of responsibility from their own Brolga plains he had scattered across the globe.
Warren Finch’s life could be simplified in an instant, by sitting in the seat of an aeroplane soaring through the thermals over his own homelands, flying him off to those cities and towns located thousands of kilometres away from them. There was no point sulking about it. If he did not have it to be local, then he did not have any affinity to his own humanity, and he only thought of a moving world, which he epitomised by imagine what you will?
Perhaps, you could imagine that he swam in the ponds of an ultimate paradise, where continuous cool sea breezes kept on working to distil any traces left of the North from the face of the rough boy who had once lived among the brolgas.
Perhaps you might find him at home in a foreign place that could carve regal, fine-bone men – those who grow older with carefully smoothed grey-black hair from a brown forehead.
How could any of the swamp people explain this comfortable face they saw on television that held a universal magic capable of mirroring the faces of countless millions of ordinary people, who like themselves, had been duped by their own sense of community into recognising some uncanny likeness and affinity between themselves and Warren Finch?
Warren had not travelled alone. The vehicle was packed with his entourage of three tall and well-dressed, sinewy-bodied men. His friends looked like Indigenous football stars – the ones seen advertising high-end fashion gear on city billboards. In those brown stubbled faces, each wore the fine chiselled lines of what was commonly termed by neo-colonists who study race, as nice inter-racial breeding.
These men were Warren Finch’s minders, or security men for the Night Lantern – his global name. They viewed everything casually, through sun-reflecting sunglasses, like justice men, free and tolerant, comfortable wearing handguns strapped to their chests, and being wired for constant communications with the central security headquarters back in Heaven. The general perspective in Warren’s world was that these were good men – the best you could get, barely in their thirties, but tougher than most. For their trip to the north end of the country, they had exchanged their expensive southern city suits for slick Italian casual clothes.
After the speech-making, they hastened Warren away from old crying relatives, talking to him about oblique kinship ties, and all those grey birds. The locals called the haste, Manhattan finesse. Enough time had been wasted, especially the over-performing brolgas homage that they agreed had taken longer than Swan Lake performed back to back by every ballet company of the world, and quoted Auden, Lion, fish and swan/ Act, and are gone/ Upon Time’s toppling wave. The entourage moved towards the office of the Aboriginal Government of Swan Lake.
The general swamp people stood back and gawked with pride. They rejoiced to see these smoothed, supple-muscled, dark-skinned men of action, their own people in fact, moving around as though they owned the place, although on the other hand, they took the trouble to reassure each other that only white people behaved like this. Even the atmosphere had turned excitable. Heavy clouds bearing an electrical storm were now overhead, but the swamp crowd hardly noticed that, and you could tell they were dying to call out to the poster guys that they were exactly what a black brother should look like.
Warren disappeared into the office, leaving most of the spectators to stroll home in the storm to eat cold fish.
In the humidity of the hot, airless building, before all the members were present, Warren Finch opened the meeting of the Swan Lake Aboriginal Nation Government. He announced matter-of-factly: I am looking for my wife.
His mangkarri! His wife! Listen. Manku! He’s speaking, making his jangkurr speech about something. Jangkurr-kanyi nyulu ngambalangi. Let him talk to us. Don’t start a fire. Balyangka ninji jadimbi-kanyi jangu. Be silent. Kudarrijbi.
He might start getting cheeky like lightning making the ground explode, dumijbi jamba, malba-malbaa kijibajii, like dynamite-waya, maybe. Kudarrijbi now. Kuujbu nyulu kiji-anyi. He’s looking for a fight. Because of his wife. Mangkarri-wunyi. We’ll see if he talks straight. Diindi jangkurr nyulu ngambalanya.
In this building where truth was the motto, the Canberraimposed controller of the Swan Lake Aboriginal Government turned Army-controlled asylum was a real weisenheimer, the name by which the mandaki white man was commonly known around the swamp. Miyarrka-nangka mandaki. Whiteman can’t understand. He was supposed to implement white ways of loving children as being better than theirs. These people of the Aboriginal Government looked him over, and thought as they normally did, We turned our back on him. They had turned their backs on a lot of people. They had issues with showing tolerance for any outside government policy people especially. No! Of course they were not tolerant people. Tolerance was not their forte. They either liked something, or didn’t like it. Simple! It was one or the other, and nothing in-between. No maybes crippled up in the heart. Or this or that prolonging nothing thought in the head. You don’t survive on grey areas. This was what having sovereign thinking meant in the time immemorial law of the land. That was how their people had survived the aeons. The controller chose not to hear what Warren Finch had said about looking for his wife. The assumption was that he never burdened anyone about his personal life, so why should he have his Friday evening disturbed by listening to someone else talk about what ought to be – their own business.
Mr Weisenheimer looked around the room at his people – the worst basket case he ever had to work with in a long, distinguished career in Aboriginal affairs. All he could see were the innocent faces of the Aboriginal Government representatives who were his charges, still arriving late and sitting down at the table whenever they were ready. They were doing what he had already assumed they would do – just sitting there and staring at the table and not saying a word. He knew this because he was an experienced career man of Aboriginal Affairs. He had seen this happen heaps of times.
Weisenheimer knew Aboriginal people better than they knew themselves, but that was okay. That was how he earned his bread and butter. He was a learned man about Aboriginal people. An academic. He had a national reputation that set the benchmark for Aboriginals to achieve results in Indigenous policy, which he had influenced in its development for numerous years with the Government in Canberra.
These people though? He believed that the people he looked at around the room were had it. Did not have what the policy required of them. Did not share the dream of Australianness. This was the reason why they had to be in servitude. It was the only hope if he was to shape the next generation on his human farm. And quite frankly, he thought it was hard work, almost impossible to save the children. He expected that they would continue to have nothing to say, and it would take several generations – more than his lifetime of assimilating them – even if it all started tomorrow, to eventually one day see a good, decent Australian citizen from any of these people.
While the entire meeting remained silent, Weisenheimer was expert enough to instantly fetch to the surface something from somewhere deep within himself – the whim-wham thing called the goodness in his heart. He prattled on about his programs – about how well everything was progressing (now that he was in charge). In doing so, he chose to adore Warren for being Aboriginal, by instantly ignoring the statement of marital intention that was no business of his, but all the same it confirmed in his mind that all Indigenous people were the same, since even the great Warren Finch could just come straight out and voice his personal business to all and sundry – to anyone at all.
Good old financial controller! He raised his grey eyebrows and remembered he had visitors in the room, which prompted him to get back into the saddle of managing the social, political, economic and cultural life of these people. You could trust him on this. He averted the staring at hands and the silence in the room with the appearance of busy work, pulling out of his white plastic shopping bag the remote control for the overhead fans, which instantly from a flick of his finger, spun a cool breeze on sweat-dampened skins.
Looking for my wife! The assembling representatives of Swan Lake’s Aboriginal Nation Government were very surprised by what Warren Finch had just said. But they waited until everyone had sat down at the table dedicated to the ancestors, after they had greeted each other in their own languages, and an ancestral anthem song had been sung to the mighty ones, plus an obligatory Advance Australia Fair to show some interest in closing the gap. A few words were said about what Warren wanted, then the oldest one they called No One At All – who would rather be speaking in his own language, but spoke in old time blackfella English to Warren Finch to affirm the controller’s beliefs – simply said in a few reluctant grunts that no one had seen a woman arrive in that piece of rubbish car they saw Warren Finch cruising around in without even thinking of coming into his place to say hello. Her spirit must be living inside his head, that’s what I think. His wife’s spirit was either controlling him, or he had lost her himself – must have, inside all of that rubbish overseas knowledge stuff he got cutting loose in his brains.
The Aboriginal Government seemed to agree since they were being cordial, they were practised people in governing too, just like the government in Canberra he was more used to dealing with. They commonly sat around this table being nice and eternally grateful, patting the table, or looking at it. It was the table of expectation, like an empty plate. They did what was expected with the expectation that, after he had delivered the berating that they usually received from politicians about their mismanagement, and the lack of transparency that was always how Australians regarded Indigenous people in remote places whom they could not see anyhow, Warren would announce some good news. It was to be expected, since no one important enough had ever travelled to the swamp, without giving them news of extra funding – a relief to save the little housing program once again, or a few biscuits to carry them over a few more weeks with essential services like fuel for the generator, or sewerage disposal.
What else could politicians do with the enormous, gigantic mess that they had created? No One At All explained, by concluding what he always needed to say, We are all living in the age of anxiety here, Mr Sir whatever-your-name, what’s your sustainability for us?
Welcome to the dystopia of dysfunction. The controller Weisenheimer again reclaimed the meeting by dismissing, or not hearing this local speech by the most important and most senior man still alive at Swan Lake. He was keen to have the first word about the business that needed to be completed in this impromptu meeting. He needed to bring proceedings back to a professional standing, and he made his stand, by saying that he was not interested in loose change from Canberra. He deliberately spoke in terms that he thought Warren Finch would know exactly what he was talking about, while at the same time knowing that his words would be full of mystery to these uneducated, local people. It was his place to speak to Warren on behalf of the meeting, and he gave this address:
We have been waiting for a long time, Warren, for a bit of action. Isn’t that right that we have been waiting for somebody to turn up here and tell us how we are going to fix this crisis? We need someone to tell us how to run the community store, the health centre, get the bums on seats at the school, fix up all the violence, alcohol, petrol-sniffing, criminality, over-housing, maintenance, tell mothers how to have babies, healthy babies, pretty babies, clean babies, immunised babies, and to implement Canberra’s policy to teach these people how to love their children, and while I am mentioning health, to rid the place of diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, mental health, eye, ear, nose disease and dogs; not to mention training people for work, to go out and be useful to society, to drive a bulldozer, build houses, be electricians and plumbers, grow and cook their own food, feed it to the children, and then to lift a box and bury themselves in a box. To have a choice! We really need we-can-do people, that other old black man Barack Obama-type people who become Presidents and leaders of some sort or other – of their people. Warren! We will need money to do that.
How do you do? When the controller stopped speaking, each of the councillors got up from his or her seat like sovereign kings and queens of the place, and went and shook Warren’s hand, and his minders’ hands, and returned to their seats.
My associates, Warren said briskly. This is Dr Snip Hart. Dr Edgar Mail. And Dr Bones Doom. Then Warren paused, to check whether his audience was still listening, and continued slowly. Dr Hart here has a doctorate in hagiology, mythology and oneirology. Dr Edgar Mail holds a PhD of palaeontology, palaeoecology and ontology. Dr Doom has many doctorates too, of ornithology and oology. Mystagogy. Musicology. In other words, you might say between them, they are pulsatory omniscientific, very scientific! Scientists in the laws of two ways, in all of the things a black man needs to know about today’s world in the bush up here, down in Heaven, or Paris whatnot, to make music.
All hands gripped the tear-stained table, though not the sceptic Weisenheimer. Only his eyes had not glazed over from Warren’s music about Black science, but it did not seem to matter for the whole room was experiencing bedazzlement. How it felt to feel grand. These people agreed that they felt close to God! Real close actually. They smiled to be amidst so much omnipresence – the omelette of ology words floating gaily in the breeze of the noisy fans, and then dissipating featherlike, over and over in the ear en route to the brain cells.
Play something nice Edgar, Warren said quietly, when no one could break from the word net that had been thrown over their heads; and now even furthering the sense of amazement and pure wonderment, the one called Edgar it turned out, was a musician as well. The Swan Lake Government men and women looked like statues under the appraisal of those soft, pale brown eagle eyes of Warren Finch studying everyone in the room.
Sure, Boss, Edgar said. I’d love to play.
Edgar was a tall and beautifully proportioned, strong-boned, golden-brown-skinned man with a face so flat and smooth, it made him look like the brother of an owl. He cradled an old wattlewood violin in his arms as though it was a spirit creature and then, the silence in the room was broken by a long melody. The music softened his smoothly shaven face, and the sounds floated away like moths flying off softly to clear away any residue of hardness in the room, and with their little hair-coated legs, to coax gentleness back on the faces of those gazing on the musician angel. The music flowed outside, past the boomerang monument clapping thunder and lightning, and over the swamp and into the hull where the girl and the circling swans outside were listening to the sounds from faraway, like the murmurings of owls spreading across the distant range country of ancient cypress trees and coming up through the stillness of a freezing night.
This music of far-away places poured through the building and the call of owls seemed to come from every angle over the swamp. The swans swarmed into a giant serpent formation on the water. The brolgas rose in skittish, frenzied flights up into higher altitudes to escape the owl-like sounds floating below them. The music drowned the sounds of barking dogs, and inside homes there were small children imagining it was flowing from the pumpkin flowers on the rampant vines which interlaced the buildings and covered them with large green leaves. In the Swan Lake Government chambers, the men and women of the government saw themselves swimming in medicines with the thought of the three doctors. They had never had a real doctor visit before. Never had a real doctor stationed there.
The sweet violin music kept blurring the here and now, and more of the fantastical escaped from minds usually locked in despair, even bringing back memories of the Harbour Master whose responsibility he now chanted to all the black consciousnesses sitting around the table, telling them to continue keeping a watchful eye on the sewers of thought.
The heads of the old spirits popped up from the manholes in their minds to see the travelling music passing by the cornerstones of memory. Lights were switched on. The despaired room spun with too many thoughts! But only thoughts, after all, of oodles of money from Shangri-La! Fancy that! Fancy sending three doctors to the swamp on fish and chip night. Oh! Man! Hear the gratefulness rising. Thank you! Thank you! Now black consciousness could see fat cattle everywhere in the room. Who mentioned cattle? The feast of music stopped suddenly. Warren Finch’s voice had a way of slamming the door on any more thoughts about poor health, and people needing to eat a bit of fat steak, and having doctors galore arriving way out here in the sticks to do some good. Forget the cattle!
I am looking for my wife, Warren said it once more in plain English, and since no one spoke, he sat back with a slight smile on his face and continued to sift the room with his eyes.
Warren knew he had shocked these simple people to the core, by talking about a wife when no one thought he had one. The noise from the fans now paralysed anyone’s ability to think in the room, but quite honestly, there was nobody in Swan Lake who would even resemble the wife of someone as important as Warren Finch. Swan Lake Government now thought outside of their own beloved homeland, something they rarely did, and tried to imagine Warren Finch’s big life elsewhere – overseas, looking for his lost wife in a European café – at another Swan Lake in a Mozart setting in Austria, or a beautiful model wife in Paris swanning around as she should, because these were places they thought any wife of his would belong.
He kept checking his watch to quicken the thinking in the room about how to respond to his demand to find his wife. Now think fast, and forget the cattle. There will be no cattle for you.
The financial controller Weisenheimer was not easily intimidated. He did not care for Warren’s attitude and asked several pointed questions.
Why would your wife be here? Where did she come from? You can see for yourself that this Swan Lake Government is highly managed, and we know all the people living here. After all, and as you know yourself, this is an isolated community controlled by the Army. Everyone knows who comes here. Don’t you? Weisenheimer only expected nods from his people. He intended to keep the meeting from entering into the known nightmares of bad terrain and talk about cattle. He had had a gutful of Aboriginal whingeing and complaining.
But a discussion erupted. It turned into genuine interest about the lost wife. Everyone tried in vain to remember anyone who might be his wife – names of famous women, movie actresses she might look like, as well as trying to recall whoever had recently turned up. No! Not Really! There had been no ladies leaving or arriving for many, many months. Only dead people leave. Only babies arriving. That’s all, if we are lucky!
Still! It is really hard to remember everyone who turned up on our doorstops, who was looking for someone else by running away from who they should be living with, and taking care of, like they are supposed to do. Or something. You know, my Sir, said Mr No One At All, as the delegated speaker of the Swan Lake House.
The discussion took a strange exploratory route, analysing the blocked tributaries of Western matrimony, and being a distinct Nation themselves and people of the longest surviving culture in the world, they had become world-wise at studying such marriages. They favoured a cynical critique, where each member of the Swan Lake Government had their own peculiar but excellent first-hand knowledge about other people’s relationships; the warring spouses, neighbours, or adult children, and numerous family dealings with bad marriages in countless Western soap operas. They presumed the right to ask questions, when a husband comes looking for his wife, you have to think whether there is anything good in marriage?
Was this the bloody butcher’s shop? The abattoirs? Nobody hesitated or blinked an eye at the fact that Warren Finch wanted to collect a piece of meat. He hardly noticed the fakery in the cynicism in their enquiring about his personal affairs. Mr God Sir. Well! Who didn’t suffer in marriage? Mr No One At All asked. If Warren worried about his wife, so what was the mystery in that? He could join the club of broken marriages in Swan Lake. There was a bad smell in the room circulating with the fans, as if a very fat rat had died in the ceiling. The smell reached down the nostrils and mixed with the fish dinner into a nauseating retch but the Ministers for Government seemed unaffected, used to problems like that, and asked if the putrid smell was still there to avoid Warren Finch glaring at them. And someone, probably the controller, changed the subject by bluntly asking: What wife?
So what does your wife look like? It was insulting for the minders to hear anyone speaking to Warren Finch as though they were talking to a piece of scrap. The retorts came thick and fast. What was wrong with you people? Don’t you know who you are talking to? You are speaking to the Deputy President of Australia here. This man is so highly respected abroad, they call him Deputy Right Excellency, Deputy Mr President of Australia. Show a bit of respect!
Warren held up a gracile hand in a gesture that was like a blessing given by a holy man. This was the hand frequently seen on television news from countries throughout the world. It was the very hand that had stopped atrocities and made peace amongst war-torn peoples. The hand was loved throughout the world. Here though, it simply meant, enough was enough! The ghostly Harbour Master panicked in his ethereal heaven somewhere up where the rat smelt in the ceiling, and stirred-up extra doubt in the room: Does he really stop destruction?
The question about his wife was a difficult one to answer without resolving what residual similarities lay between him and the people of Swan Lake. They could only answer him by asking what old bridge still existed between them and this top Australian? Did it mean if they spoke plainly to him that they were Australian too? Or, were they really invisible in anyone’s language no matter what they said, and would remain un-Australian for loving ancient beliefs of their traditional lands too much. All history had to be tested in these questions. Why? All history needed to be addressed in their answers. So what wife was he looking for?
A wife, a wife, in any case, might end up being a piece of meat. Someone who might have been called Does it matter, then asked a simple question really, and very politely, What’s her name then – your wife?
I sent you people a letter, Warren snapped, while checking the time once more on his watch, and blimey, he kicked his brain for wasting time.
Honestly, nobody remembered receiving a letter: Can you tell us what was in the letter? Weisenheimer asked.
It was explained in the letter. Warren Finch said – full stop. He was in no mood to explain what should have been read in a letter.
Was it that impossible to read a simple letter? He was clearly annoyed that these people were trying to force him into talking about what was really, after all, a delicate matter. His minders thought so too. A man of his position expected to have things organised properly. It happened that way everywhere else on the planet, so what was the trouble with this place? Why could one simple thing not be done right in this place of all places – his homeland? You want to tell me if someone wants to play around with me here? He suspected the financial controller was lying. If you are running the show you must have seen the letter.
The meeting waited while some clerk was called up to the office to find the letter. Meanwhile, Warren looked miserably around the building at paper piled and paper strewn, and then blankly at one of his minders who immediately left the building to make a call on his mobile phone to an office so far away from everything abysmally slack-assed that he could see in the dismal swamp, and cheerfully spoke to the real world of Heaven, where things happened with a single snap of one’s fingers, where people could not run fast enough to do things properly. When he returned, the minder reported that the letter had been sent a long time ago and there had been no reply. The two-line, three-short-sentenced letter was now emailed to the mobile phone that was passed around the room, so everyone could read the contents of Warren’s letter.
Well! Wasn’t that just typical, just typical.
At this point the electricity suddenly stopped flowing from the malfunctioning power station down the road, and the fans rumbled to a halt. There was sweat in the room. The Army mechanic, who had gone away fishing for the weekend with ‘neglected’ children, would not be able to fix the problem, Weisenheimer announced. He was uncontactable. Finch had now clearly had it up to his eyeballs. What use was a mechanic if you can’t even contact the bugger when you haven’t got any power?
Well! You tell me? Who is the boss? You, or the flaming mechanic? Finch glared at the controller. Or who the parents are around here? He was now counting the bad vibes, all falling like dominos. All the ammunition! He was a master at pinpointing incompetence. Unlike beef cattle, this was what fed the belly of Canberra, the paradise hungry to shut down the Indigenous world. A bloody lost letter, and the lost wife, now the lost power, plus the smell of a dead rat in the ceiling, who could dream of what was coming next? The question of Warren’s lost wife quickly became a lengthy in camera discussion in the full-blown humidity of the tropics in the closed room where swarming mosquitos were playing noughts and crosses on exposed skin.
So it was in this inner sanctum of the swamp’s Aboriginal Governmental Nation, which was trying to find a pleasing resolution, while Warren Finch was simply wondering if they were even worth saving at all. Then, the last-straw cold tea circulated to the meeting by a young girl – long after she had responded without much enthusiasm to repeated loud, clicking fingers by Weisenheimer, because she was too busy ear-dropping at the closed door and dreaming that she was Warren Finch’s wife – blasted the lid off politeness. No tea tipped the balance.
She was a promised wife. A promised wife? Ah! Now that was different. This is very different to what we were thinking. Sorry, but we didn’t think about that, because we don’t do that kind of thing here anymore. It died out years ago. Nobody wanted to continue with this old law. The old elder said this straight out because he said he was nobody, and not just because everyone knew that a discussion of a highly contentious issue like this might end badly by the end of the night.
One of the older women said she had been a promised wife. Another woman said that she was more concerned about how the township kept moving by itself, and if this moving around of people kept going on, soon there would be so many of them, they would be living off their traditional country, and something needed to be done about this. The controller urged the meeting to think very carefully about what Mr Finch was talking about. He too wanted to hear the truth about the lost letter that might explain the reason for such a highly prominent person in the Australian community behaving this way – like what the locals would gleefully think was a deranged hobgoblin sent by Canberra to personally annoy him, so of course he asked: What age would this ‘so-called’ promised wife be? He wanted to know if Warren required a child. Was it a virgin? What hymn sheet were they to sing?
The Aboriginal Government men and women saw all kinds of awful ramifications for Swan Lake and stayed quiet. Actually, they knew the reality of his request, but Weisenheimer was on a roll, becoming emotional – nothing would stop him. Now he lost the plot by asking a lot of questions on behalf of his people’s welfare:
Why did you come here like this, making these demands of us?
Why didn’t you just come here with good intent?
What about those doctors? Why were doctors being wasted as bodyguards? We need doctors here to look after the sick people. We’ve got plenty of sick people here.
Yes, Warren Finch could have gone anywhere he liked while he was busy out saving the world, other than visiting the people who needed him most, his own people in Swan Lake. And! Gosh! A man like Warren Finch was too busy, he did not need a wife.
So why come here and bother the little people on a Friday evening when people needed to be home relaxing after a hard week and eating their dinner while it was hot?
Warren Finch had obviously thought the whole thing through – start to finish – beforehand. He had come to collect his wife and expected a wall of silence, but he knew he would push on through the night if he had too, and he was digging in. He was prepared to get no sleep for days to get a result, and knew the ramifications of naming his mission.
Dr Hart, Dr Doom and Dr Mail, his long-time minders, who always thought that they knew everything there was to know about Warren as his closest confidantes, now exchanged questioning looks. Warren Finch already had all the women he could ever want. Didn’t he have some sort of long-term relationship with somebody in Canberra? What about Marcella of Milan? Wasn’t he seeing a Maria in Warsaw? It was hard to keep track of the women in his life. Why would he want to do this? What kind of wife was he thinking of?
Names, names, names, Warren continued, clicking his fingers impatiently. It was only a simple name that a person needed. This was a reciprocal agreement and it must be honoured, said one of the ex-boxer-type minders. His minders were quick to take up the thread of what was news to them, while not knowing how a promise wife fitted into Warren’s grand plan, in which he had always been honest enough to admit that he had no time for wives. The painful issue was prolonged further by excuses from the Swan Lake Government suggesting it would be happy for the promise to be annulled. It was time to go home. Time for bed. But it was up to him to make the final decision since they knew the families involved in the first place were now deceased.
Weisenheimer pushed on.
Warren, I can guarantee you as real as I am sitting here that we do not have anyone around here who would even remember this promise wife arrangement.
He encouraged others to say something to end the matter, and they did.
You do not have to go through with it, Mr Your Highness. You should feel free to marry someone else and we give you our full blessing our boy.
Yes. This is what people do now because the Army is in control here for the Australian Government punishing us people. We still live in punitive raid times. They do not worry about the promise. We just get married with the controller’s permission.
No! No! No! The minder called Dr Doom fired the shots in a deep operatic voice of the likes you would hear in the Teatro la Fenice in Venice; a soaring ghostly phoenix roaring, that as sure as hell did not belong in this swamp. The boom killed free speech in an instant. Meandering talkathons were pronounced dead. There were no other cards to play except Warren’s, and he had placed those squarely on the table. Men like Doom made many people wonder whether there were other Aboriginal people coming up through the education system who could use their voices like that.
Still, what was pretty much the vox populi of wishes in Swan Lake became grist for eyeballs bouncing back and forth, where they looked up from the bottom of a Rio Grande chasm between one of these super humans and the next. Warren Finch’s eyebrows rose, and he transformed himself into television Warren with legs stretched out under the table, but nobody copied his behaviour. It did not matter to them how much Warren Finch was relaxing because it just felt like intimidation. They knew that feigning to be relaxed was one thing for the champion peacekeeper of the world, but this type of person does not travel out of his way, just to reach a swamp and settle for rejection, be bluffed by diversions, or just plain mucked around. His relaxed state only emphasised his intransigence and he casually restated what he wanted, with a smile: The law is the law. He simply wanted what was his to claim from an agreement made between families, of Our nations, he said.
It should not be that hard to understand.
But nobody told us, somebody nervously chanted.
But nobody told us? Warren’s sauna-soaked minders whispered, in mocked shock. The pressure-cooker room was not to everyone’s taste.
You had to give it to the bosses of this swamp for being true masters of their own game. They were not going to be duped by anyone walking in off the street so to speak, or more factually, coming in off the road like some unannounced hobo Black fellow, and aiming to rip the dirt from beneath their feet. They knew what people like this try to do. He was making a claim on their traditional land. They dug their heels in. Claimed no knowledge of the letter. Claimed there was no misunderstanding, and the reason being, they were always kept in the dark. Nobody could blame people who were kept ignorant to whatever was going on behind their backs. A few words on a mobile phone? Blah! Meant nothing. It was not a letter they received. You can’t receive letters on a telephone. Never heard of such a thing. They accused the financial controller: Ask him! He never spoke to any of us Aboriginal people.
The fuming controller’s many freckles looked like a nest of redback spiders about to burst as he shouted that if anyone wanted to make an appointment to get information about themselves, his office door was always open. Wasn’t that true? He yelled at each of the people he pointed to around the table. In the end, a mumbler spoke into his chin and called the controller a rude man. The controller was uncontrollable. He had lost the letter, but it was plainly obvious that no harm had been intended, so the meeting agreed on the spot that such an agreement might have been cemented between two families, and the good news was that the misunderstanding could be put right. A likely name was whispered, that matched Warren’s information about a family promise he received a long time ago at the bedside of his dying father.
The financial controller took Warren aside, outside the building, over on the lawn, far from the meeting, to be discreet. The girl you are looking for is called Oblivion Ethyl(son), Ether(son), something or other like that. The Aboriginal Government was betrayed by Weisenheimer who could not keep his mouth shut for a minute about anything. They always knew that she had been promised to Warren Finch so they had banned promised marriages. She lived down on the hull. And everyone knew why she was there.
Very unfortunate business they say. She was interfered with. (Sigh). But that happened a long time ago mind you. Long before I arrived here.
I already know about that. Warren Finch snapped – his words slamming against each other. Back inside the office, he saw the flinching and twitching, but he smiled like he had hit the jackpot, and the meeting resumed admirably, with everyone getting on with polite letting bygones be bygones.
The financial controller finished the meeting by limply saying. She shouldn’t be down there all by herself anyway.
You got our backing Warren. We vote for you all the time here. There was a line formed and everyone took their turn to clearly state their allegiance to Warren. Whatever he thought was good enough for them – anything would be okay – a few cattle? And just like that – they personally acquiesced as though the girl had never existed.
The brolgas outside wished to dance all day, but the day was gone and now they too were walking away into the night. The swans overhead sent a few peals of their toy trumpet calls through the dust, and continued flying down the swamp to the hull.