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For me, it was a serendipitous moment when I came across That Deadman Dance – a literary masterpiece by Kim Scott.
During this coronavirus lockdown, I was searching through my home library shelves for books I hadn’t yet read. I received this particular book as part of a prize for having one of my poems accepted for publication in a literary magazine. It turned out to be one of the most beautifully and poetically crafted books I have ever read. The fact that it is set in the early colonization period of Australian history makes it even more relevant on this 250th anniversary year of James Cook’s arrival on the shores of Australia.
Bobby Wabalanginy is the spiritual protagonist throughout this incredible story; oh, there were others like Wanyeran, Dr Cross’ beloved friend. Those two were like brothers and were even buried in the same grave on a mound…until settlers trampled and desecrated it instead of allowing Time to whiten the bones and Rain to wash them out to sea together. But even when he was a small child, Bobby could ‘see’ things others missed. He wanted so much to believe in the white colonists, even though not all in his extended family, especially its tribal elders, trusted the ‘Horizon People’ …but wasn’t Dr Cross just like one of his tribal elders, wise and just?
Dr Cross was one of the First Contact leaders; he, Bobby and Wunyeran, were united in their desire to share all things, and to learn from each other. After all, wasn’t that the peaceful, traditional way of Bobby’s tribe, and all other Aboriginal tribes throughout their country? Cross was a teacher of his white man’s history and he wanted to learn about Bobby’s people and their history in return. Bobby and Wunyeran grew close to Cross and could sleep in his hut or eat with him, and at times when they disappeared for days, Cross understood, always, even though it made other settlers nervous.
Cross was to write of his dear friend Wunyeran; ‘He has the most intelligent curiosity…’ However, it was a characteristic they both shared. Cross and his superior agreed that their colonial outpost needed to build strategic relationships with the Indigenous peoples. ‘We are outnumbered, and this is their home.’ One wonders at this point what might have been.
After the untimely death of Wunyeran, and subsequently the death of his dear friend Dr Cross due to that settler’s ‘cough’, everything began to change; dark days were emerging across the colonies. Eventually, Aboriginals were again relegated by the colonizers to mere ‘blacks’ and ‘savages’; they could now be shot for climbing over fences the settlers had built to keep in their livestock and to keep the ‘blacks’ out. In the end, kangaroos disappeared, Aboriginal plants, tubers, were destroyed and their land trampled by livestock, their trees cut down for pasture. Even the whales had disappeared from their waterways.
Bobby was a dancer; light of limb, an actor, a storyteller, who could translate his ancestors’ lives and traditions through dance and cultural language. In the final, humiliating years Bobby had left to him, he was reduced to ‘entertaining’ settlers on the streets who sometimes ‘paid’ him a few coins if he pleased them. Yes, this is how Bobby’s ideals of mutual sharing and learning had ended…in a dead man’s dance of finality… evoking a time when the Aboriginal Noongar people of Western Australia first encountered the “Horizon People”: those British colonists, European adventurers, and whalers, ghost-like, intent on colonizing a land both harsh and seemingly of limitless future ‘civilized’ development.
“Bobby Wabalanginy never learned fear, not until he was pretty well a grown man. Sure, he grew up doing the Deadman Dance – those stiff movements, those jerking limbs – as if he’d learned it from their very own selves; but with him it was a dance of life, a lively dance for people to do together…”
Heartbreakingly, Bobby, deep down inside, knew the outcome from the start. But Bobby being Bobby, embracing two very different cultures as he had, clung desperately to his belief in mutual understanding, until the smallest, remaining whiff of hope had vanished forever into senseless killing, rape of their spiritual land, and the rape of their women. “We thought making friends was the best thing,” he says. “We learned your words and songs and stories, but you didn’t want to hear ours.” But the colonizers could not understand Bobby’s language, or interpret the deep significance of his dance.
“The man, scratching and making marks,” Wunyeran told them, “has hair like flame but keeps it covered. Cross.” It was a difficult word to pronounce. Wunyeran was patient, explaining it… “Yes, Dr Cross they call him. I slept in his shelter,” he said, and accepted the admiration of his fellows. “He is a man who scratches in his book all the time.”
“When Bobby Wabalanginy told the story, perhaps more than his own lifetime later, nearly all his listeners knew of books and the language in them. But not, as we do. You can dive deep into a book and not know just how deep until you return gasping to the surface, and are surprised at yourself, your new and so very sensitive skin. As if you’re someone else altogether, some new self, trying on the words.” That Deadman Dance is such a book in my view.
The last foreboding paragraph of the book is abstract in its telling, but we, the intuitive readers, know exactly what it foretells.
That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In poetic prose, it explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.
This is such a moving subject, and Scott’s research is impeccable. He uses settlers’ diary entries and traditional stories passed down through generations of Indigenous elders. However, you will not read about any vivid acts of violence; the words are sheer poetry, even when there is violence. Scott tells us so much with so few words.
Kim Scott has the moral authority to these stories of his country because he is a descendant of the Noongar People who have always lived on the south coast of Western Australia where the early whaling settlements brought in sailors, soldiers and scouting colonists. That Deadman Dance is the winner of the Miles Franklin Prize and many other awards.
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-Anne Frandi-Coory 29 April 2020
anne frandi-coory 