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That Deadman Dance
Kim Scott
Bloomsbury Press
March 2012
On Sale: February 28, 2012
368 pages
ISBN: 1608197050
EAN: 9781608197057
Kindle: B00745YWJ4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
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.
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