***22/06/2011 Lisa has just blogged (while at the ceremony mind you!) that Kim Sott has just received the 2011 Miles Franklin award for 'That Deadman Dance' - so I thought I'd include it here. A deserving win for wonderful book. Congratulations Kim!


What's not in a song

Early in part four Bobby Wabalanginy, Scott’s Noongar protagonist, is at the peak of his powers. He has just returned to the company of his white coloniser friends and his role in their whaling enterprise after a period of absence in which he was inducted into manhood by his own people. Now once again rowing out to the hunt, Bobby sings. He sings about the hunt, the experience of it, and because that experience includes the newcomers to his land his song necessarily incorporates both their presence and voices; “Asked to describe the song many would have struggled. One of those blackfella songs, they said, but with some of our words in it.” (That Deadman Dance p.318) But there are elements which Bobby’s song does not include, such as the “business of a white man thinking he was too good for a Noongar” (That Deadman Dance p.317), and there was “little of cutting up the whale” (That Deadman Dancep.319), “little of the thick blood that ran in rivulets” (That Deadman Dance p.319). This is because “Bobby had no part in these things. He could find whales, and could chase and run with them. But his hands could not kill a whale. He was only steerer.” (p.319) Recognisable here is Bobby’s self denial at his own complicity in the destructive activities of the whalers, and more pointedly his glossing of their depreciative attitude toward Noongar people. But contained here also is the conceit that Bobby will be able to maintain a distance from his new acquaintances; that he can somehow be involved without consequence, use their words and actions in his song without himself being changed.

Add the fact that That Deadman Dance so conspicuously deals with such a meeting and merging of cultures to the even more indisputable subject of whaling, and it is small wonder Morag Fraser should “Think Melville...” when reading Scott’s novel. Moby Dick is surely required reading for any author wishing to treat the whaling industry, and Scott seems to evoke the same motley, worldly crew for his schooner as mans the Pequod, and shares with Melville a polyphonic, inclusive writing style capable of evoking multifarious voices. Furthermore, both authors allude, perhaps obligatorily, to the story of Jonah in their novels, Melville

“go[ing] down in the whirling heart of such a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison.” (Moby Dick, p.52)

Jonah here is lost in what is seemingly “masterless”, or Godless, chaos, the whale representing a purgatory only Jonah’s submission and gratefulness to God will free him from. Bobby’s spirit on the other hand passed into the womb of his mother from a stranded, dying whale, this representative of a Noongar always-already connectedness with the natural world, figured in Bobby’s remembrance of a story his tribal elder Menak told him, in which it is possible to be drawn into a whale’s body and

“Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whale’s roar. Sing that song your father taught you as the whale dives, down, deep.” (That Deadman Dance, p.2)

While Melville’s Jonah prays God’s grace will deliver him from the threat of the external world, the Noongar celebrate that very “chaos” in song, dance and what Scott presents as being an almost symbiotic relationship to their environment; “Outside and inside, ocean and blood; almost the same salty fluid.” (That Deadman Dance p.294) This represents the fundamental cultural difference being treated in That Deadman Dance; as the English colonisers slowly gain a foothold their cultural hegemony also consolidates, its gravity drawing up even those individuals hitherto open to the possibility of a mutually respectful relationship between newcomer and Aboriginal. This is a culture that differentiates between inner and outer, us and them and which thus can’t help but view what is “other” as a threat to ipseity, and King George Town, then the country entire, as belonging exclusively to them and threatened by savages. As Bobby wryly points out; “Jonah woulda been alright if he was a Noongar man.” (That Deadman Dance p.295)

This is the point at which That Deadman Dance concludes; the sad history which follows all the more so for the brief flaring of an alternate, miscarried possibility of accord between cultures. However Scott is too sensitive a writer to structure his historical re-telling around a reductive “us/them” binary; and as an author he is concerned with language (both English and Noongar), how it works through and upon us. When the narrative dips into the voice of its Noongar characters Scott’s prose collapses the distance between subject and object so that, for example “Cygnet River Colony was a strong wind blowing all morning from land” (That Deadman Dance p.25). In this way land, objects and people come to be identified with somatic qualities (Cygent River Colony with the feeling of wind on skin, for example), Scott presenting Noongar epistemology as deriving directly from experience and thus open, able to assimilate whatever should come into its field. For this reason, before Bobby was born, his ancestors had been able to develop the deadman dance from watching a beach drill, assimilating the alien movements of the equally alien mariners into their own language and expressions. Likewise, Bobby (among others) demonstrates great facility in acquiring English, and even phonetic writing. However, for Scott language and knowing are inseparable from identity, something Elizabeth Jolley is sensitive to in his writing;

“Kim Scott captures the ambiguities, the troubles and the rewards which accompany the brutal and delicate nuances of relations when particles of one culture pass, as if through a fine sieve, into the heart of another culture.”

Although Jolley was writing about Scott’s first novel, True Country, this seems equally apt to That Deadman Dance. And the character Wunyeran begins to experience this slow epistemological shift within himself;

“And Wunyeran, up close now, motionless, waiting for the water to settle, saw part of his reflection but also, behind the reflection, that the sand was not white, but coloured like bark or ochre. Why? Because the water is dark. Why? Is the bush staining this shallow part of the ocean? Or is it the smoke, colouring the light and therefore the water, too? The questions you ask, learning a new way of speech. How it drives your thinking.” (That Deadman Dance, p.133)

These are questions Wunyeran is not accustomed to asking – these questions, this way of thinking about the colour of the shallows, didn’t exist before his relationship with the philanthropic Dr. Cross. And while this broadening of thought at this stage might be considered one of Jolley’s “rewards”, an entity Scott has dubbed Bobby, but which exists beyond Bobby’s lifetime (presumably in our own) and who regales tourists with stories of the past, is much more ambivalent about the benefits of exposure to white culture, suggesting that something valuable has been lost;

“...nearly all his listeners knew of books and of the language in them. But not, as we do, that 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.” (That Deadman Dance p.85-86)

What is being presented here (besides the potential of literature to invoke new states in sensitive readers) is that the cost of an objective/objectivising knowledge is a loss of openness toward the world and people. This is why Bobby “never learned fear, because he was not just one self.” (That Deadman Dance p.128).

With the gradual accruement of white ways and knowing Bobby falls out of the thrall of Menak and his other elders, and on the deadly cross-country journey after having been blown off course in a bid to explore eastward for fertile land with his entrepreneurial patron, Chaine, Bobby is siren-song tempted by the recently appointed Governor’s servants, two Aboriginal boys who have also been sent as part of the mission and who wish to abandon the party and try to get back without the white man contingent. These boys are almost symbolic characters in an almost allegorical parenthesis within the novel, representing as they do two Aboriginal people raised in white colonial society in Sydney, and at the end point of alienation from their cultural birthright, bitter and vengeful and a sign of things to come in King George Town (and surely meant as a none too subtle reminder of the effects of the White Australia Policy). After they shoot Killam, the other whitefella on the mission, so as to steal food and guns and brave the desert alone, Chaine murderers them, telling Bobby to keep quiet about what he’s just seen. But Bobby is unsettled;

“...it felt as if [he and Chaine had] come from a dead place. What people stay there? Bobby knew stories of how they drank blood and ate their enemies. Well, they’d left behind some cranky spirits to trouble them. Those boys. He looked back the way they’d come.” (That Deadman Dance p.235)

Told to walk a straight line out of Jonah’s hell into the promise of civilisation, this Orpheus takes his first uncertain glance back, and his first step toward the revelation that;

“We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want to hear ours...” (That Deadman Dance, p.106)

But if Bobby’s deadman dance has transformed into a dance with death, it is equally important to recognise that Scott’s novel follows and is given narrative cohesion by the ley lines of white colonial history, his novel engaging with a western literary tradition rather than attempting to translate into the novelistic form an Aboriginal or Noongar modality of storytelling. It is significant that in That Deadman Dance, Noongar culture is barely represented in its own right; it is only ever present at the interface with the colonial world and even then filtered through the narrative of Bobby’s passage from child to adult. As such Scott would have his novel perform its own deadman dance and “attempting to fuse [voices] [...] prepar[e] for the birth of a new world.” (That Deadman Dance p.129)



Sources

Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, Picador, 2010.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Norton Critical Editions, 2nd Ed., 2002.
Elizabeth Jolley quote, Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Morag Fraser review, The Sydney Morning Herald.