That Deadman Dance
Acclaimed Australian writer Scott draws on his Aboriginal heritage in a sweeping novel that reimagines the story of colonizer and colonized with fresh lyrical power and hopeful vision. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the South East Asia and Pacific Region.
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Full details for this title
| ISBN-13 |
9781608197057 |
| ISBN-10 |
1608197050 |
|
| Stock |
Available |
| Status |
Internationally sourced; usually ships 2-3 weeks |
|
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Imprint |
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Publication Date |
28 February 2012
|
| Publication Country |
 United States |
|
| Format |
Hardback |
|
| Author(s) |
By Scott, Kim |
| Category |
Modern Fiction
|
|
| Interest Age |
All ages |
| Reading Age |
All ages |
| Library of Congress |
Aboriginal Australians, Western Australia - Social life and customs, Nyunga (Australian people) |
| NBS Text |
General & Literary Fiction |
| ONIX Text |
General/trade |
|
| Number of Pages |
353 pp |
| Dimensions |
Width: 148mm
Height: 215mm
Spine: 32mm |
| Weight |
440g |
|
| Dewey Code |
823.914 |
| Catalogue Code |
245160 |
Description of this Book
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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Awards & Reviews
| NZ 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 |
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Author's Bio
There is no author biography for this title.
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