Swallow the Air: 12. Painted Dreaming Summary & Analysis

For a while, May goes to stay with some of her friends in an abandoned building, which they decorate with graffiti scrawls. However, soon the police arrive to eject them. May says ironically that, “living, making camp, was no right of ours.” Some of her friends spray paint in the policemen’s face and they all get arrested and spend the night in jail.

In her cell, May dreams of Windradyne, a 19th-century Wiradjuri resistance leader. In the dream, he is angry and ready to fight for all his people. It seems to May that Windradyne “visited the polished cement freezer box where I lay” and looked out onto the city with her. When she wakes up, she knows she has to find Johnny and get out of this city, where the people are “only faintly dreaming.”

In Joyce’s house, May finds Johnny smoking a bong. He laughs when he finds she has been arrested, telling her she’s a “criminal like the rest of us.” When May tells him excitedly that she wants to leave, he seems uninterested. She urges him to join her, but he seems uncertain and tells her he has “stuff to do here,” and that people from the Block “don’t go nowhere.”

Angry, May yells at Johnny that he’s not going to change or move for anyone’s sake, not even his own. In fact, he’s just a “nobody like everyone else.” Johnny yells back that if he’s a nobody he doesn’t need her. He tells her to get out.