That Deadman Dance: A Novel [Hardcover]

Kim Scott (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 28, 2012

Set in Western Australia in the first decades of the nineteenth century, That Deadman Dance is a vast, gorgeous novel about the first contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the new European settlers.

Bobby Wabalanginy is a young Noongar man, smart, resourceful, and eager to please. He befriends the European arrivals, joining them as they hunt whales, till the land, and establish their new colony. He is welcomed into a prosperous white family, and eventually finds himself falling in love with the daughter, Christine. But slowly-by design and by hazard-things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is progressing. Livestock mysteriously start to disappear, crops are destroyed, there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever-stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind, and Bobby is forced to take sides, inexorably drawn into a series of events that will forever change the future of his country.

That Deadman Dance is inevitably tragic, as most stories of European and native contact are. But through Bobby's life, Kim Scott exuberantly explores a moment in time when things could have been different, when black and white lived together in amazement rather than fear of the other, and when the world seemed suddenly twice as large and twice as promising. At once celebratory and heartbreaking, this novel is a unique and important contribution to the literature of native experience.

Editorial Reviews

Review

WINNER: Miles Franklin Award,Victorian Prize for Literature, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South East Asia and Pacific Region, Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction, Adelaide Festival Premier’s Award for Best Book

"Piquant and lyrical…The historical interaction between these two cultures in a changing 19th-century Australia is given full play in Scott’s ambitious, elegiac storytelling." —Publishers Weekly

"Scott’s exuberant third novel is both an evocative paean to his Aboriginal roots and a meticulously researched account of early nineteenth-century encounters between his Noongar people, living on Australia’s southwest coast, and newly arrived European settlers. Scott writes lyrically of this lush land and its initially naive inhabitants in this elucidating chronicle of early Native confrontations." —Booklist

"The truth of all indigenous peoples is in this book. Never has a first contact story been so true and powerful with its happiness and heartbreak all wound up together in one insightful, potent novel. Kim Scott’s words are like stones that strike together and create fire. Yet they remain graceful as they strike. So perfectly written, so deeply filled with real history, That Deadman Dance is the best new novel by a native writer I have seen in a long time." —Linda Hogan, author of Mean Spirit and People of the Whale

"An enchanting and authentic book, giving us an insider’s view of Australia before it was Australia . Enormously readable, humane, proud, and subtle." —Thomas Keneally, winner of the Man Booker Prize, author of Schindler’s List and A Commonwealth of Thieves

"A subtle portrayal of cross-cultural contact . . . Scott is an assiduous researcher and a deep thinker . . . But in That Deadman Dance, it is the author’s imagination and his graceful prose that shine brightest . . . [A] compelling and beautifully constructed novel." —Australian Book Review

"An extraordinary work, both realist and visionary . . . Scott’s scope is vast and his way of telling complex . . . That Deadman Dance is a novel to read, recite, and reread." —Sunday Morning Herald

"A writer of arresting talent . . . Scott’s fiction is innovative but inspired by a passion for truth." —The Australian

"Extraordinary . . . Scott’s prose shimmers. This is a book that demands to be savoured . . . Scott’s flawlessly written tale adds both meaning and depth to this deeply Australian story." —Bookseller + Publisher (AU)

"[That Deadman Dance] is a strong dramatisation of a consciousness poised at the intersection of magical and materialist cultures . . . It is a book of lyrical energies, held in check by a realistic sense of history, which balances the elegy for what we know was lost with possibilities of mutual understanding that have always been there." —from the citation for the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

About the Author

Kim Scott was born in 1957 to a white mother and Aboriginal father. His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993. His second, Benang: From the Heart, won the 2000 Miles Franklin Award and the Western Australia Premier's Book Award. He has also published short stories and poetry. Scott currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and two children.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (February 28, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608197050
• ISBN-13: 978-1608197057
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,058,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "We thought making friends was the best thing. We learned your words and songs and stories, [but] you didn't want to hear ours." March 25, 2012

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Numerous authors, in recent years, have written about the settlement of Australia and the taking of aboriginal lands by white settlers, something the Australian government has recently tried to rectify through legislation and for which they have apologized. Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance is unique, however. The son of an aborigine (Noongar) father and white mother, Scott has written this novel from the Noongar point of view, bringing it to life through the stories surrounding Bobby Wabalanginy and his family, who are named for members of the author's own family.

From his earliest recollections, Bobby has been connected to whales, and he remembers Menak, the King of the Noongars (and his father), telling him about sliding inside a whale's blowhole, warming himself beside its heart, and joining his voice to the whale's roar, a story Bobby vividly imagines reliving himself. At one point, he even describes his mother acquiring him when his father cuts open a whale on the beach. Now, at age nine, Bobby travels between his own tribal group and that of the "horizon people" who have come to his land, learning to read and trusting in the people he has met. As more and more people come to King George Town, including British, Yankee whalers and the French, however, the "horizon people" begin to claim more property, and each time they do, they take it from the Noongars. Noongar women are stolen, and both blacks and whites begin to deceive each other, provoking vengeance.

Though it is divided into parts which have dates, the novel is not completely linear. Bobby is larger than life, a mythic figure, absorbing and relating many of the stories of his people, including one in which he "dies" and flies through the air. At several points, he is speaking as a very old man, amusing tourists with his lore and throwing flaming boomerangs for their entertainment. Eventually, "there were no more of his people and no more kangaroo and emu and no more vegetable. After the white man's big fires and guns and greed, there was nothing."

Many exciting subplots evolve in the course of this hypnotic and important novel, told as an old-fashioned, "once upon a time" narrative, with incredible scenes of the slaughter and rendering of whales bracketing much of the action, the whale symbolism clear. Bobby and his people follow the seasons, wet and dry, warm and cold, and as the action unfolds, much of their lives as wanderers becomes real - their values, their feelings, and their intense love of nature and the land. As events and the growing population take their course, however, one culture is obviously poised to win from the outset, and one to lose. The ending, though completely expected from the glimpses one gets of Bobby's old age throughout the novel, is nevertheless devastating emotionally. Bobby, like his ancestors, deserved better. The novel is breathtaking and important, and I suspect that few readers will finish it without feeling exhausted by its intensity. Mary Whipple

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars `We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn't want to hear ours...' July 29, 2011

By J. Cameron-Smith TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition

This novel, winner of the 2011 Miles Franklin Award, is set in the early nineteenth century, when American whalers, British colonists and the Noongar people first made contact in the south of Western Australia. Much of the novel is set in a period of almost 20 years, and covers a stark change in the relationship between the indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants. From their early reliance on the Noongar in the beginning, as the settlement becomes well established, the colonists come to see the Noongar as a problem.

Bobby Wabalanginy is the central character in this novel and, as the novel opens, he is a boy. Bobby grew up doing the Dead Man Dance, a symbol of first contact with the men from over the ocean's horizon:

`By the time he was a grown man everyone knew it had never been dead men dancing in the first place anyway, but real live men from over the ocean's horizon, with a different way about them.'

For Bobby, this was a dance which celebrated life and which all people could dance together. Unfortunately, the colonists with their newfound confidence in their established settlement had different views. Different peoples, different concepts of ownership, different views about sharing. Few people, from either group, saw things as flexibly as did the young Bobby.

`Understood that there were other people he must be with on his way to becoming a man.'

Dr Joseph Cross, who led the first contact group, was a wise leader. When he and Bobby work together, both sides learn from each other. When Dr Cross dies, he is buried (as he requested) beside his friend Wunyerun. A memorial is raised to Dr Cross, but there is no mention of the Noongar man beside him. This does not augur well for the future.
We see, briefly, Bobby Wabalanginy in old age, putting on a performance for tourists: dancing, singing tales and launching boomerangs. Has Bobby become a clown?

`Bobby danced many of the people in the settlement of King George Town, and it was as if they had all come here to join in the festivity.'

This may be a novel set in the past but it holds a mirror in which could be reflected a different future. The novel is told through the eyes of white characters as well as black, of young people as well as old. And echoing through the novel are questions for the reader to consider: what if there was genuine friendship between equals? What if colour was seen as simply difference instead of a barrier? What if there was a place for indigenous expertise as well as the benefits of white settlement? The narratives do not have to be mutually exclusive, and in this book Kim Scott offers possibilities. So that Bobby's lament: `And we now strangers to our special places.' - need not be an immutable fact.

I enjoyed this novel. From the descriptions of the landscape, to the characters who occupy it, and the languages used - there is a shifting in the balance of power between the participants in the story as well as between the story and the reader. There are a number of different journeys contained within That Deadman Dance: coastal journeys, the business of whaling, the endeavours of hunting and farming. The characters come to life: especially Dr Cross; Bobby Wabalanginy; Menak, the tribal elder; Jak Tar,the escaped sailor; and Christine Chaine, once a childhood friend of Bobby's but later a very proper young white lady.

And I need to read the novel again, to more completely appreciate what Kim Scott has achieved.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Story Rarely Told August 11, 2011

By GVC

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Kim Scott's story of the early contact between European and Indigenous people in Western Australia applies more broadly than just WA. The first settlers relied on the Noongar indigenous people for support or even survival when they had few resources and food was in short supply. Twenty years later when the colony is firmly established the colonists expand rapidly to take land and resources and the Noongar people are the ones facing starvation as sheep replace Kangaroos on the plains.The Noongar people initially did not see these over the horizon people as a threat as they believed in their own religious relationship with the land that had continued since the beginning.

Other early european settlements went through similar experiences. The first settlement in New South Wales and also the early settlements in America nearly starved in the first few years and relied heavily on indigenous support. What Kim Scott has done extremely well is to bring these times and experiences to life through the eyes of the indigenous people and europeans involved. The main character is Bobby Wabalanginy who welcomes the newcomers, learns much of their customs despite reservations by some of his own people. The Colonists are seen through the eyes of first the kindly Dr Cross who treats the Noongar as partners and builds a relationship with them . Cross dies and the main Colonist view is taken up by the hardheaded businessman Chaine. Chaine respects and appreciates Bobby's talents but business comes first. Other Colonists like the Governor and his smart son have little regard for the Noongar. The Noongars traditional sources of food are destroyed by over whaling and killing of Kangaroos to make land available for sheep. When the Noongar kill sheep for food , as they are staving and as the colonists have killed their Kangaroos they are put in jail.

At the end the novel shows how things might have been if a partnership like Bobby and Dr Cross wanted was allowed to proceed.

Kim Scott used the technique of telling the story in the first person through the eyes of alternatively Bobby and the other Noongar and Cross and the other Europeans. I found this approach helpful in seeing the various points of view but challenging at times in following the story line. In awarding Australia's most prestigious literary award the Miles Franklin award for 2011 the judges described the book as having significant historical and national significance. I see is as having international significance as well.