Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007 for her surreal and sweeping

‘I have seen swans all my life. I have watched them in many different countries myself. Some of them have big wings like the Trumpeter Swan of North America, and when the dust smudges the fresh breath of these guardian angels, they navigate through the never-ending dust storms by correcting their bearings and flying higher in the sky, from where they glide like Whistling Swans whistling softly to each other, then beating their wings harder they fly away. I know because I am the storyteller of the swans.’

- Bella Donna from *The Swan Book*

Alexis Wright hasn’t seen swans all her life. There are no swans in her Gulf of Carpentaria country. There are brolgas. She knows them intimately. But swans are new territory.

It is characteristic of Wright to tackle new territory. She is a writer whose mind is ever on the loose even as her instincts stay close to country, to the land she knows in her bones (‘I do take notice – I’m a bush girl really’), the ground she can render with such breathtaking beauty and lyric precision (‘Even if it is coming fast, I still go over it and over it until it sounds exactly right’). She is a disconcertingly varied writer – factual, satirical, political, fanciful, poetic. In Grog War, she diagnosed the alcohol disease affecting many Aboriginal communities with the straight talk and clear eye of an investigative journalist. In Carpentaria, the novel that won her the Miles Franklin, she soared, taking her readers into another dimension, an Indigenous world where myth and reality merge.

The Swan Book marks a further development of Wright’s gift for poetic intensity and vernacular verve (she injects Waanyi language into her narrative, and admires Patrick Chamoiseau’s play with Creole in Texaco). The novel chronicles a broken world, a dystopia, a ‘slice of humanity living the life of the overcome’, but it does so with the wing-beating thrust, the relentlessly propulsive energy of the swans that are the novel’s heart. Wright’s characters might be miserable, ‘standing on the mountain top ready to die’, but they are – the whole novel is – ‘bizarrely joyous’. And subtly, splendidly defiant. This is its epigraph:

A wild black swan in a cage / Puts all of heaven in a rage - Robert Adamson, ‘After William Blake’

The Swan Book is set in the north of a land that is recognisably Australian but also universal in its apocalyptic dislocation. It straddles future and present, reality and dreamscape, with the insouciance one has come to expect from Wright (no surprise that she is also an admirer of Sátántangó, the visionary novel by Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai). It is a land of refugees, of fringe dwellers, of desiccating weather changes, a lawless (yet law-haunted) landscape where ruthlessness dictates social policy and people turn in on themselves and on one another. Wright says she was galvanised in part by the policy meanness, the cutting of Indigenous programs and the stifling of hope during the Howard years, and the lack of meaningful dialogue in the Labor years that followed. But her novel, we agree, is not a tract, rather an exploratory fictional world, more at home with uncertainty than political rhetoric.

The uncertain eyes of the book belong to Oblivia, a young girl rendered mute by brutality (a rape she remembers in nightmares). She is lost, coiled in the heart of a tree, given up by her shamed parents, but found by Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, a refugee, European flotsam, washed up on the Northern shore but determined to survive, and have Oblivia survive alongside her. It is Bella Donna who will teach her reluctant adoptee to ‘navigate through the never-ending dust storms’. Bella Donna is a life force. It is she who will be correcting their bearings and insisting that they fly ‘higher in the sky’.

‘She was a lovely character to write about – and she brought the swans,’ Alexis says, smiling as though remembering an exotic friend, someone pre-existing. That is the way she describes all her characters. They ‘arrive’ like unexpected guests – bearing gifts. Often her answer to my questions about their origins is simply ‘I don’t know’. She knows that she did want, in The Swan Book, ‘to explore the way we treat people, people who are different, people who are in need, who don’t have a home’. Bella Donna, Alexis explains, is part of that ‘movement of refugees, people being turned away – by the whole world’.

But Bella Donna is no cipher. Like all Wright’s characters, she is rambunctiously alive, quirky, inexplicable. As is her Falstaffian friend the Harbour Master, and her silent, recalcitrant ward, Oblivia, whose extraordinary soliloquies open and close the book. Oblivia, whose ‘brain is as stuffed as some broken-down Commodore you see left dumped in the bush’; Oblivia, who will be the promised bride of Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia; Oblivia who will follow the swans. (Wright’s novels, with their breadth and cavalcade of characters, are as resistant to summary as Dickens’.)

Uncertainty is creative principle for Alexis Wright. Her character Oblivia is so beset by the world that ‘she is not sure about a lot of the things that are happening around her’. It is that tentativeness that Wright renders so effectively: ‘That is what I was trying to do, create that uncertainty about what’s happening, about what is real and what is not real.’ In Wright’s created world the distinction is often a distraction, an irrelevance. Reading her, you have to stretch your mind.

And finally, the swans: eloquent creatures, embodying myth, pathos, stimulating art and poetry in every language. They had no story in Alexis Wright’s Waanyi culture. But they fascinated her, so she went hunting. She found them in poetry, on the Liffey in Dublin, in America, in Wagner, in Russian ballet and in the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne. Now, in The Swan Book, she has wound a story around them. And such a story: swans in their creatureliness, every feather distinct, every muscle comprehended, providing coordinates from the natural world for humans in their pride and in their vulnerability.

Photo credited to Vincent Long

Morag Fraser is the former editor of