‘That Deadman Dance’ by Kim Scott
Kaya everyone, welcome to #DeadlyWABookClub! Over the next three months I’ll be analysing and celebrate the writing of Aboriginal authors from Western Australia. I’ll also be sharing some essays published in the journal JASAL, to raise awareness of the big thinkers of today who are discussing and critiquing Australian literature. This is all thanks to my writer’s fellowship from ASAL/Copyright Agency - thank you! Find out more at ASAL.
Today we’re talking about Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin Award Winning historical fiction, ‘That Deadman Dance (2010)’. Kim Scott is a Noongar man and his novel is a poetic retelling of his own family’s history, as well as other historical occurrences, during the ‘friendly frontier’ period of early colonisation in the southwest of WA. Scott waxes and wanes pure lyricism with his writing, and this one was such a pleasure to read. We jump through various character’s perspectives, including settlers and convicts, but predominantly we see the world through curious and wide-eyed Bobby Wabalanginy’s eyes, a young Noongar boy growing up in a turbulent time who must traverse through two very different worlds. Through Bobby, Scott makes a compassionate plea to the readers for a different future, one where Aboriginal people and settler descendants can live harmoniously together – if only respect and balance for one another can be achieved. With a tendency to hope rather than despair, this story comes alive with Scott’s carefully precise and yet flowing creation of place, spirit and humanity. His novel, with its refusal to merely be a factual retelling and rather play with the ‘what if’s’ of that time, is done both in honour of the Noongar tradition of playfulness, mimicry, and imagination, and a contribution to its continuing saga. Writing from the past, present and future (with, I believe, the jury members of the court in the final chapter being a mirror to ourselves as readers now), and with no chronological timeline, Scott is a true storyteller who takes a courageous leap in attempting to re-discover the voices of his Noongar ancestors.
Natalie Quinlivan’s ‘Finding a Place in Story: Kim Scott’s Writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project’ (2014) names this process I’m describing here as an act of decolonisation; that after the loss of stories that have occurred for Aboriginal people through European invasion, Scott “writes into and from these spaces, making fertile ground out of murky territory through exchanging and sharing stories… We can come back to the hope in his writing and the possibility of continuity through creating something new (Quinlivan, p. 9).” This process of telling and building upon multiple stories of heritage and community, stories that are often overlapping and simultaneous, is an attempt by the writer and his community to locate themselves in our modern world. The different perspectives and characters Scott writes from, as Noongar, settler, convict and freeman, represents Scott’s own mixed heritage – an attempt to sort out where he himself comes from, to strengthen his own idea of self. As with many works by other Indigenous authors, Scott’s writing also discusses unequal power relations between the coloniser and the colonised, and in doing so, both represents the oppression of his community while empowering and uplifting their own voice. In this way, the novel is far from just a look into our shared colonial past. It is an act in and of itself of “‘shaking up’ and making space” for Noongar ways of thinking.
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Question for your next book club: Why do you think ‘That Deadman Dance’ is told from multiple perspectives, including settlers and convicts? What effect does it have on the reader?
Image: Writing from Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance.
Note: If you’re interested in reading more regular book reviews for books by Aboriginal writers, I highly recommend you follow @blackfulla_bookclub on Instagram, they are fantastic!
