5 For example, in The Swan Book, homeless people are described thus: “Those who slept there in rubbis (.).The novel finishes on Oblivia remaining in the swamp as a ghostly figure yelling to people that “their country waits for them” in a voice sounding like “the sigh of a moth extending out over the landscape” (Wright 2015, 334). Following Warren’s mysterious death, Oblivia returns home following her swans’ migration route. He plans to wed her in accordance with old promises made between his family and hers. 4 After her foster parent Bella Donna dies, Oblivia is taken away by Warren Finch, the future president of Australia. When the girl witnesses black swans arriving on her Country from the south, an inexplicable bond forms between her and the animals. Gang raped by petrol-sniffing youths, Oblivia is left mute and her growth into a full-fledged woman is somehow stunted. Set some decades in the future when Australia has become a republic and climate change and political unrest are exacerbated, the story follows the trials and tribulations of an Indigenous Australian girl called Oblivia Ethylene.

4 In line with Indigenous Australian usage, this paper uses Country with a capital C to refer to Indi (.)ģ The Swan Book (2013) is a dystopian cli-fi 3 novel.

The genre is speculative and explores a future where ecological a (.) Alexis Wright’s voice and her third novel The Swan Book found their way to me in Naarm (Melbourne), as I was studying there in 2017. My cultural background and my training in literature, paired with a deep concern as to how people are resisting and mitigating climate change in Oceania, have led me to read novels by Indigenous Oceanian authors, in search of voices that would speak about climate stories, fears, hopes and responses. 2 On the contrary, scientific reports confirm what many already perceive is happening in Mā’ohi Nui or French Polynesia. Reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) successive assessment reports that have been published since the 2000s does not leave me challenging the “scientify” to quote from Wright’s Carpentaria (2007a, 118).

2 The IPCC is a United Nations scientific body which prepares exhaustive reports about climate change (.)Ģ With two decades of increasing wave surges ushering coastal land disfiguration, cyclones and tropical depressions punctuating my observation of the eroding littorals and bleaching coral gardens around where I was brought up in Tahiti Iti, I understand climate change as unquestioningly real.

The swan book by alexis wright