That deadman dance

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is a novel from a different time in which relationships between colonists and indigenous people were friendly and each was curious about the other's culture. Set in early 19th-century Western Australia, the novel is based roughly on historical accounts, some of which involve Scott's own ancestors. It depicts contact among Aboriginal people, the Noongar, and British colonists and American whalers. The central character is a Noongar youth, Bobby Wabalanginy, who warmly embraces the settlers and their ways but ultimately has to choose between them and his own people as the coastal colony grows. The nuanced characterization and intriguing style of writing are pleasures. VERDICT Scott, who won both Australia's Victorian Prize for Literature and his second Miles Franklin Literary Award for this work, deserves notice from a broader international audience. This well-written, insightful novel will be enjoyed by readers interested in Australian historical fiction, indigenous literature, and postcolonial fiction in general. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/11.]-Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ. Lib., Marshall, VA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Australian novelist Scott's (Benang) complex Commonwealth-winning (South East Asia/Pacific Region) third novel begins in 1833 with Bobby Wabalanginy, part of the Aboriginal Noongar people, befriending early white English settlers who've arrived in southern Australia to establish the port of King George Town. Among his white associates are the military surgeon Dr. Joseph Cross, the merchant Geordie Chaine, and Chaine's young daughter, Christine, who Bobby perhaps likes too much. Characterized by Dr. Cross as "animated and theatrical," Bobby maintains an upbeat attitude that will serve him well once race relations sour. Until he dies, Cross is a mentor to Bobby, and then the Chaines fill the position. Short, titled chapters group into four parts demarcated by sweeps of nonlinear time, from two years to four. Always piquant and lyrical, with some Aboriginal dialect words translated and some not, Scott is at his most picturesque when Bobby assists the whalers, bringing boom times to "blackfellas" and "whitefellas" alike. The historical interaction between these two cultures in a changing 19th-century Australia is given full play in Scott's ambitious, elegiac storytelling (the author's mother is white and his father Aboriginal). Agent: Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary Management. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

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. By the early 1830s, there is a small colony at King George Town, its inhabitants struggling to farm the rugged land, learning from their Noongar neighbors, and joining them in offshore whale hunts, a lucrative annual event. The Native faction in this cultural encounter is encapsulated in the character of Bobby Wabalanginy, whose foster parents are befriended by the colony's governor, while Bobby is tutored with the governor's children. Scott moves back in time to those idyllic years when whites and blacks learned each other's customs, embodied in Bobby's spirited version of That Deadman Dance, and forward to the years when things begin to fall apart with the arrival of a new, racist governor and the Noongars' increasing resentment of the intrusive 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.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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