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Synopsis
Throughout Bobby Wabalanginy's young life, the ships have been arriving, bringing European settlers to the south coast of Western Australia, where Bobby's people, the Noongar people, have always lived. Bobby, smart, resourceful, and eager to please, has befriended the settlers, joining them as they hunt whales, till the land, and work to 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 so pleased with the progress of the white colonists. Livestock mysteriously starts 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 haunted by tragedy, as most stories of first contact between European and native peoples are. But through Bobby's life, the novel exuberantly explores a moment in time when things might have been different, when black and white lived together in amazement rather than fear of the other, and when the world suddenly seemed twice as large and twice as promising.
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Review
WINNER Miles Franklin Award, Victorian Prize for Literature, Regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (for That Deadman Dance)
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 remarkably similar to those in the U.S. (Deborah Donovan Booklist)
The truth of all indigenous peoples is in this book. But 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... 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)
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)
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, author of Schindler's Ark,The Great Shame, and A Commonwealth of Thieves)
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- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication date2015
- ISBN 10 1608197794
- ISBN 13 9781608197798
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages368
- Rating
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That Deadman Dance: A Novel
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Paperback. Condition: Good. Reprint. Ships in a BOX from Central Missouri! May not include working access code. Will not include dust jacket. Has used sticker(s) and some writing or highlighting. UPS shipping for most packages, (Priority Mail for AK/HI/APO/PO Boxes). Seller Inventory # 001467445U
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