Swallow the Air: 17. Mission Summary & Analysis

When May arrives in Eubalong and asks at the general store where to find her family, she’s told to go to the mission outside town and ask around, so she hitches a ride there. It’s incredibly hot and May feels queasy in the back seat, which smells like cigarette smoke and dust. When she gets out of the car, she looks around the barren land and can’t imagine anyone living near here. A tiny sign directs her to the mission.

As she walks towards the mission, May feels increasingly less hopeful—all she thinks about is the possibility of getting a meal there. Soon, she sees houses along the road, just like the ones she’s used to in her own neighborhood. She imagines that “they rose up like the estate homes […] a hasty construction of identical walls, devoid of emotion.” To May, they look like “fancy concentration camps.” In the distance she can see a river tributary that’s almost dried up; instead, water tanks supply water to the settlement.

Children run around the street, and people come in and out of houses. May wonders if they think about the world outside their “forgettable” town or if they themselves forget that “there exist places beyond the highway creases.”

Suddenly, an old man in a cowboy shirt waves to May and tells her to come over to his porch. He tells her that his name is Graham but she can call him Uncle. May asks if he knows any Gibsons, but the only ones Uncle remembers live far away. She’ll have to ask old Betty, who knows everyone in the area, when she gets back from running errands. Uncle says that Betty is “one of the only ones here that knows what’s what,” but she has a hard life because her husband and sons are all alcoholics. The entire mission is falling apart, according to Uncle, and only “bad spirits” remain here. He says that the bad spirits live by the river and that’s why no one goes there anymore.

Uncle tells May about the history of the mission. In 1947, the government built the mission and “shifted plenty of station blacks out ere.” The mission was run by Catholics, whom he dislikes because they claim to be an authority but can’t actually cure the “bad spirit” that afflicts people in the mission. On the contrary, they let pain fester and pass from generation to generation. That’s why there’s so much drinking and anger in the town now.

Uncle says that May must have observed this pattern in Sydney as well. Without any meaningful outlet for their anger, people act out through violence and get sent to prison, where their mental state deteriorates even further. The government doesn’t care about this issue, and in fact prefers to lock people up so as not to think about them.

“Our people,” Uncle says, have “seen forty bloody millenniums” and the government, which has been around for much less time, still mistreats them. The only time the government even pretends to respect Aborigines is when they want to display them for tourists. Uncle believes that the government and the churches are “all one evil,” working together against the Aboriginal community. After this statement, he becomes dejected and says he wishes someone could tell him he was wrong.

Betty’s car pulls up across the street and Uncle wishes May good luck, telling her to take off her hat when she talks to Betty. When May tells the elderly woman what she’s looking for, Betty says the only remaining Gibsons live at Lake Cargelligo. Betty’s daughter, Jo, can drive May there. Soon, May is speeding away from the mission in Jo’s car.