The Making Of The Black Swans
 

 
In this painting can be seen:

Top Left: One of the Hawks picking up one of the Swans and shaking off its feathers during a beating.
Middle: The Swans after the beating soon to be clad in Black Crows feathers.
Right: The Crows shaking their feathers to clad the naked Swans. Surrounded are flowers, which have grown from the Swans white feathers, painted in red blood and other colours from the original white Swans

 
The Story

In the days of Dreamtime, all Swans were white. During that time, two Swans rested on a lagoon, but they soon found the lagoon was the home of the Eagle Hawks.

The Eagle Hawks resented their intrusion, and attacked the Swans, beating them severely before picking them up and carrying them with their sharp strong claws far south.

Finally they dropped the Swans on rocks near a stony dessert continually beating them and plucking out all of their feathers.

There, naked and almost dead, the Swans heard the call of the black Crows. They looked up and saw hundreds of them. The Crows called out in their strange croaking voices "The Eagles are our enemies too, but we won't let you die. We will send you via the wind some of our feathers to keep you warm."

So the Swans, having all their feathers plucked with blood running over their white feathers, clad themselves with the black feathers.

And ever since that day red and white flowers grew up in the dessert from the Swans, plucked feathers painted with blood. And the Australian Swan now comes in two colours, not just all white but black as well.  

Price:  $3,250.00 AUD