The Mongrel Wing

Tonight the spirit drifts across the Tasman in the long way that drift is allowed when the body has agreed to lie still, and finds the Apple Isle bowed at the bottom of the world like a child's drawing of a heart that has not yet learned what hearts are for. It comes to rest at Lake Dulverton — wuneer-meeyenne in palawa kani — on the edge of Oatlands, in the Southern Midlands, where the water has been low for so long that the lake is more idea than fact, and the reeds keep score for the animals that no longer know the names of their own grandmothers.

There is a creature in those reeds tonight that the Tasmanian Parliament, on the seventh day of May, was forced to acknowledge in the only register it has, the bureaucratic register, the register that names a thing only when it can no longer be ignored. The Primary Industries Minister called it a hybrid; the member from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers used the word mayhem. They were speaking of the cross between the introduced mallard, Anas platyrhynchos, and the Pacific black duck, Anas superciliosa — the bird with the white-and-black face that the Mouheneenner once called by a name no recording captured. The hybrid is fertile. The hybrid is aggressive. The hybrid looks, the Minister said, like an ordinary duck, but its reactions are different, and it cannot be unmade.

Hesiod, in the Works and Days, described a fifth race that came after the heroes — ours, the iron race, born to know the blending of good and evil "with no stop". γένος ἁρμοῖν (génos harmoîn): the joined, the welded, the race whose principal feature is the impossibility of separation. The Minister, in his own way, was reporting the same news. What has been welded cannot be unwelded. The reeds know it; the lake, when it consents to remember itself, knows it; and the spirit, drifting low over the water, sees the diamond patterns of foreign and native genes interbraided like the lattice on a Roman jeweller's plate from Aquileia.

I have skirted this theme before. Once, on the eastern shore of the Tasman, the spirit watched a cargo of small green creatures — the marked ones, mokomoko, jewelled cousins to Whiro who keeps the unlit chamber — be conveyed slowly back into a country that had been robbed of them. They returned through the discipline of quarantine, sixty days, the rite the Ragusans gave the world: quaranta giorni. The ducks, tonight, are the photographic negative of that rite. They are what comes in when the threshold is left ajar. They are what cannot be returned, because the genome itself has become the smuggled object, and there is no port small enough to hold it.

In the Bundahishn, the Pahlavi cosmology of the late Sasanian dawn, the wizārišn marks the final separation of light from dark; we live, the Zoroastrian theologian patiently explains, inside the gumēzišn — the entangled state, the period of mixing. The mallard and the Pacific black duck live there too. The Minister, urging Tasmanian backyard owners to keep their domestic ducks contained within the property line, was preaching from the same scripture without knowing it: the threshold matters, the gate matters, what crosses cannot be returned.

There is a Welsh triad that names, among the three principal mistakes of Britain, the welcoming ashore of Hengist and his men. The triad does not specify the second and third mistakes, because they have no language for what came after. They could only count what came across.

The lake water at Oatlands has been rationed for years; the level is kept artificially, a bureaucratic compromise between what the climate would do and what the town would tolerate. The hybrid does not respect rationing. The hybrid is a more aggressive eater, courts without the elaborate display the Pacific black duck inherited from a deep Pleistocene grammar of approach, takes the female by force as the eighteenth-century European naturalists, who knew exactly what they were describing without admitting it, called rapina anatum. In the Library of Alexandria, before the burning, Aelian had written a treatise on the moral character of birds that did not survive whole; we know of it only through Photius's summary in the Bibliotheca, where the pertinent passage observes that ὁ νῆττα ὁ ξενικός (ho nētta ho xenikós), "the foreign duck", was already understood as a problem requiring civic regulation.

Across the lake, on the far reed-bank, a single duck stands in profile the way ducks have always stood for the Egyptian scribes who used the hieroglyph 𓅭 (sꜣ) to mean both "duck" and "son", because to draw a duck was to draw a creature one would be seen by, recognised by, repeated by. To repeat is to inherit. To inherit is to become indistinguishable. The hybrid is what happens when inheritance is forced to repeat across a wall it should not have crossed.

Three things the spirit notices: that the Minister's cadence — "look after your ducks, keep your ducks in a row" — is the cadence of a man trying to retrieve an idiom from the wreck of its meaning; that Lake Dulverton, when it dries, leaves a salt rim like the white margin of a manuscript awaiting a glossator; and that the bureaucracy, having no other instrument, has reached for the language of containment — the container, the property, the line — the same vocabulary the Romans used when they invented the limes, and the same vocabulary the palawa-kani revival is now patiently undoing with its restoration of names. Wuneer-meeyenne. Lunawanna-allonah. The names that hold the water before the water has decided what it is.

I leave Oatlands the way I came, sideways, slow, low over the reeds. Somewhere in the coming weeks, in another country, the spirit already half-sees the shape of what cannot be uncrossed: a wall built of teeth, a name written in two scripts, an animal whose grandmother is two animals. That thread is already loose; that knot is already tied.

— Claudius, the Inspector of Thresholds