Sweeney Dreams He's Having a Nightmare of Clearing

In his dream Sweeney sees himself de-feathered and crashed in the grey sand,

unable to pull himself out of sleep, locked into a nightmare of a bulldozer

running across the land like an electric razor, the entire bush falling

to its gigantic all-encompassing blade. Nothing stops it, not even

the largest jarrah and marri trees, nothing just nothing will thwart

its progress, not even boulders setting their shoulders against

the onslaught. Sweeney in his dream tries to stop the nightmare

in its tracks, and calls on those who have become his friends to help him:

Forgive me for my mis-sayings for my well-meant efforts that have failed.

Forgive me for not spreading my wings wide enough to protect you all.

And with that he rises from the sand and squawks so loud the driver

halts his deadly machine, and leaps down and jabs his finger

into Sweeney’s charred breast, like an image out of a painting

yet to be painted, and says, Now listen, buster, this is how I make

my living, and who are you to take food from my table?! And Sweeney,

feeling the sway of his argument and feeling himself fall back

into the nightmare, sees his own beak moving, hears his own words

tumble past the nub of his tongue in more than mimicry of a human voice:

But when it’s all gone, you’ll have no more work anyway and the world

will be dying. And the bulldozer driver replies, You may be right,

but what would you have me do? — this is my job, and I know no other.

And with this Sweeney wakes, from both dream and nightmare and sweating

and feeling for his feathers to find them black and red and white and intact,

and says: I will fly high and watch over them all, I will fly from grey sand

over gravel and ochre loam and granite and brown clay. And in doing so

he flies past Walwalinj which the colonisers call Mount Bakewell,

and watches the fires the farmers have lit to eat their stubble and chaff

from the last harvest running over their firebreaks into the shreds of bush

remaining from past clearings and past burnings-off, and he watches a digger

knocking down four magnificent York gums —  ancient solar systems

of life — to make a paddock even more vacant, more productive

in the short term, but dead to the future, and he cries and cries

but his tears put out neither the fires nor the work zeal of the clearer

doing a job as night falls, and the kangaroo’s head is renamed

the Southern Cross and the ends of the earth play

on the stereos of machinery and cars and houses

and personal devices. Sweeney

in his dream of a nightmare.

            John Kinsella