- Title:
-
That Deadman Dance
- Written by:
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Kim Scott
- Read by:
-
Humphrey Bower
- Format:
-
Unabridged CD Audio Book
- Number of CDs:
-
9
- Duration:
-
11 hours 1 minutes
- Published:
-
September 28 2011
- Available Date:
-
January 28 2012
- Age Category:
-
Adult
- ISBN:
-
9781743101926
- Genres:
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Fiction; General Fiction
- Publisher:
-
ABC Audio
Qty
Format
Price
Bolinda price
Western Australian author
Shortlisted Miles Franklin Literary Award 2011
Winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards / Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction 2011
Winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2011
‘‘Fresh and original in its re-imagining the first years of contact between the Noongar people, British colonists and American whalers, That Deadman Dance explores the lively fascination these people felt for one another. It’s a testimony to Kim Scott’s skill and restraint that, right from the beginning, he leaves the reader’s own awareness of history to cast the long shadow of tragedy over the story. The result is a brilliant feat of understanding - a novel rich in compassion - from a writer bewitched by the thrill of breathing life into the past."
Rodney Hall, Miles Franklin Award winning author of Love Without Hope
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.
In playful, musical prose, this audiobook explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers, in the area what is now Albany, Western Australia.
The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.
But slowly – by design and by accident – things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock 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.
A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia ...
"Scott’s enormous achievement then, in this fascinating and beautiful book, is to register that openness as it once existed, and, without judgement or didacticism, and only a quiet nod to the tragedy that was and continued to unfold, to give us a poetic and wise vision of what form our cultural life could still take today.
Surely Kim Scott, with That Deadman Dance, has one hand on next year’s Miles?"
Readings