Kim Scott and That Deadman Dance

Like a large number of recent novels by eminent writers, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance has been sitting on my bookshelf for months now, clamouring to be read. Its success in the 2011 Miles Franklin Award, however, pushed it to the top of my reading pile, and one extra-cold night last week I finally opened it.

That Deadman Dance is the story of a community on the west coast of Australia, a fledgling settlement – an outpost, really, in the eyes of colonisers – looked down upon by the big-wigs who come to visit it. But the community is distinctive in that the relationship between the local Noongar people and the colonists is primarily positive: oscillating between parley and peace, the new town is part of a ‘friendly frontier’.

Nevertheless, this is anything but a utopia, and an undercurrent of tension runs through the town. Early in the novel, two Noongar men and a group of women are kidnapped by whalers. They rape the women, kill one of the men and leave the other stranded on a rock off the coast. The convict who receives the payback does not take to it kindly, and not all the new arrivals are so open-armed to the Noongar people as the percipient Dr Cross, a man whose relationship with the Elders is at once familiar and respectful. And then there is Bobby Wabalanginy. As a child, like so many of the local Indigenous population, his parents died ‘from coughing’, and yet he grows up excited and interested in these strange people from across the sea. He is the lively central force of the novel, evoking sheer joy and profound sadness simultaneously, carrying the reader above his shoulders, as it were, through the weaving, multiple-perspective narrative.

This is not Scott’s first novel to win acclaim. Benang: from the Heart was a joint winner of the Miles Franklin in 2000. His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993. That Deadman Dance is of a much more conventional structure than either of those two, and I have to say that my tastes run more to the style of something like Benang, where fragmented descriptions of memory, and the experiences of the present and the past slide into metaphor and dream-like deliberation. Nevertheless, Scott’s prose is beautiful, taking the reader into unexpected places with the simplest of phrasal twists:

The pianist’s hands danced across black and white, and that hand-dance made the music and did not just follow the sound.

Sometimes when I’m reading a book, the part of my brain that conjures up images of place divorces itself entirely from the details provided by the text: my own house becomes the base structure for the protagonist’s home; the topography of the land becomes like a malleable dreamscape, distended and elastic, shifting as the narrative changes. Even realism results in this kind of plasticity, evoked by the feeling of the prose rather than the facts communicated, and in reading That Deadman Dance I can’t help imagine as if the whole narrative is occurring directly on the beach. The houses are built on sand, sliding sideways, the seafoam licking at the walls. The bush is an almost oppressive presence: cold, quiet, wet and dark, punctuated only by the warm orange light of campfires and the flickering of pinecone-flames carried around by oil-slicked Noongar people under their animal-skin cloaks.

This slippage feels appropriate to me though, not only because of the setting but because of the way the novel deals with the tentative relationships between people of different cultures. In the past, Scott has spoken about how he sees ‘the continuing history of “Aboriginal / non Aboriginal” interaction and relationships as the crucial and defining element of Australia’s culture and national identity’. And his fiction is nothing if not an exploration of the different ways that has occurred, recognising not only the things that stood in the way, but also offering new perspectives on the things that might have been – and still could be yet – created.

On Kate Grenville, politics and imagination

Kate Grenville and I go back years. Four years, to be precise. Not that she is aware of this.

Four years ago yesterday, the Northern Territory Emergency Response was announced by the Howard Government under the guise of moral righteousness. Four years ago on the same day, Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin for her novel Carpentaria and used her acceptance speech to criticise the Intervention. Four years ago, I was halfway through my Honours degree as I listened to a lecture on creative writing about Indigenous Australia, and the lecturer discussed Grenville’s work.

At the time, it felt like everyone had been talking about The Secret River: an imaginative retelling of the story of Grenville’s ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, and his journey to Australia as a convict in the late 18th Century. It had become the subject of some feisty debate thanks to a 2006 Quarterly Essay by Inga Clendinnen discussing the discipline of history and its relationship to fiction, but also because of its depiction of Indigenous characters, which is where my lecturer dove in.

The Secret River (2005) is the first part of a trilogy about early colonial Australia. The novel traces the character William Thornhill’s journey from England to Australia, where he does his time as a convict before deciding to take land on the Hawkesbury River and make it his own. Crucial as they are to the plot, the Indigenous characters are still peripheral: the story is Thornhill’s, the crises are Thornhill’s, and the epiphanies are Thornhill’s too. But for Grenville as the author, the Indigenous characters were pivotal. As she discusses in Searching for the Secret River, it was the complete absence of any Indigenous people from the stories her family told about their ancestor’s arrival in Australia that encouraged her to write the novel in the first place. She responded to a personal political issue with an act of imagination – to engage with a historical reality through the art of fiction – and The Secret River is the result.

The second book in Grenville’s trilogy, The Lieutenant (2008), still focuses on the perspective of an English man, but it takes a step further by detailing the relationship between Daniel Rooke, an astronomer of the First Fleet, and a young Cadigal woman named Tagaran. The narrative is told from Rooke’s perspective, but Tagaran in particular is given a voice, has charm, humour, independence and a temper, and the Indigenous characters generally are given much more shape and personality.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the most interesting thing about The Lieutenant to be the extensive use of Cadigal language and the reflections on the writing of fiction that are embedded in the narrative. Many of the issues Grenville came up against relating to colonial Australia and writing about Indigenous Australia were the catalysts for the research that would become the basis of my own PhD. And while my own fiction has moved in a much different direction, in the final frantic few months of thesis rewriting and revision, I’ve been going back through Grenville’s work and thinking over those questions that pushed me towards my project in the first place: what are the differences between fiction and other kinds of writing? What are you ‘allowed’ to do as a white writer writing about Indigenous Australia and what is considered bad form? Are there, or should there be, limits on fiction that falls into this political context? How does identity – and the political implications of identity – influence what fiction can do?

More than just meaty topics for academic discussion, those kinds of questions have become crucial to my negotiation of fiction and art in general. Australia is still a colony. The Intervention continues. The politics of Australian fiction is important. What we do with our imaginations influences what we do with our realities, so what do we do next?

Kate Grenville is currently working on the third book in her trilogy. She will be discussing The Secret River and her own reading habits as part of the 2011 MWF Schools’ Program.