Reading Matters

'That Deadman Dance' by Kim Scott

  Fiction - paperback; Bloomsbury Circus; 416 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of publisher.

If there was one book I was really looking forward to in 2012 it was Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance, which had been published in Australia to critical acclaim in 2010. Prior to its long-awaited publication in the UK last October, it had gone on to win almost every award going in the antipodes, including the 2011 Regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the 2011 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2011 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.

But perhaps that weight of expectation proved too heavy for me, because I found myself struggling to enjoy this book, even though I very much appreciated Scott’s “message” and his thoughtful, often beautiful prose.

First contact between black and white

The story, which is set on the south-west coast of Western Australia in the mid-19th century, charts the colonisation of the land by white settlers and the impact of their arrival on the native inhabitants, the aboriginal Noongar people.

Scott, who is a descendant of the Noongar, is more than authorised to tell this tale, which shows how an initial spirit of co-operation between the two groups sadly erodes over time.

The Europeans, once outnumbered by their aboriginal counterparts, become dominant and all-powerful as the settlement takes shape and new buildings, new roads and new systems of governance are put into place. As the population grows and more people arrive from the motherland, the Noongar are no longer viewed as equals but as a threat — in all kinds of ways.

By comparison, the Noongar, a resourceful and welcoming people who had initially embraced their new visitors and their strange ways, find that the land which had sustained them for thousands of years has now been parcelled off into farms for crop and meat production and they are no longer free to roam it. Their incomprehension is only matched by the white settler’s fury when sheep and other food is stolen from them.

This almost imperceptible shift in power is what makes this book so fascinating, because at what point did it go wrong? What would modern Australia be like if black and white relations had not broken down in this terrible way?

Unusual structure

The book is structured in an unusual way — and I think this is probably why I struggled to enjoy it. It is divided into four parts, which are not arranged in chronological order — for instance, we start in 1835, before going back to 1826-1830, then we move forward to1836-1838 before jumping forward again to 1841-1844.

There’s not much of a plot either (except, of course, the breakdown in black and white relations) and there’s not really a main character with which the reader can identify. While much of the narrative revolves around Bobby Wabalanginy, a young aborigine, who has a remarkable gift for mimicry and learning new languages, Scott provides a range of perspectives, so we get to see things through the eyes of a vast array of characters, including Dr Cross, Bobby's uncle Mendak, the Chaine family from Britain and former soldier Alexander Killam.

It is this constant jumping around (many of the chapters are very short) from person to person and from one time frame to another, that complicates the narrative. And despite this almost schizophrenic approach, I did occasionally find that the storyline lagged.

Portrait of Australia's past

Of course, it's not a bad novel and I'd urge anyone who is interested in Australia's early history and its landscape to give it a try. Scott's prose is wonderfully evocative, particularly of the bush and the ocean, and his descriptions of the whaling ships and the whaling industry — which becomes such a dominant force along this part of the coast — is rich and eloquent.

The strength of the story lies mainly in its examination of how the values of the colonisers were at odds with that of the Noongar — a dilemma that remains unreconciled to this day. But Scott does this in such a gentle, nuanced way that the full force of his detailed portrait of white arrogance and ignorance, coupled with black incomprehension and despair, doesn't fully hit you until you come right to the end of the novel.

I came away from the last page feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness, best summed up in this quote (from page 109):

We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we'd lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn't want ours...

For a different take on this book, please see the reviews at ANZLitlovers, Tony's Reading List and Book Sexy Review.

A note of warning: the blurb on my edition suggests this novel is a romantic tale between an aboriginal man and a white woman, but that paints a false premise. While there is a short romance between Bobby and Chaine's daughter, this is not the central focus of the novel.

'Benang: From the Heart' by Kim Scott

Fiction - paperback; Fremantle Press; 502 pages; 1999.

Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart is a story about Australia's history of white subjugation of indigenous people. I had every good intention to read it for Anz LitLovers' Indigenous Literature Week in early July. But when I started it I soon realised this was not a book to rush through. Indeed, I found it so upsetting in places I had to put it away for a bit, so that I could chew things over until I could summon the courage to pick it up again.

The first white man born

This deeply poignant and haunting story is narrated by Harvey, who describes himself as "the first-born-successfully-white-man-in-the-family-line". From the age of seven he goes to live with his grandfather, who runs a boarding house mainly inhabited by alcoholic men. It is here that he is "raised to carry on one heritage, and ignore another" but as a teenager he begins to "reconsider who I am".

In that search for self, Harvey comes to slowly understand his place in the family line — "the product of a long and considered process" to create a white man from a long line of people with aboriginal blood. This process has been overseen by his grandfather as part of a bold — and disturbing — scientific experiment in which he has been trying to "breed out" the aboriginal blood in successive generations in order to achieve "biological and social absorption", to "dilute the strain" and to "uplift a despised race".

His efforts mirror those of the settlements and missions in the early part of the 20th century in which Australia operated a crude system of apartheid designed to separate whites from blacks.

A blending of fact and fiction

The narrative is littered with real-life archival documents, many of them from the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, who presided over a misguided — and cruel — policy of cultural assimilation, culminating in the removal of aboriginal children from their families to be raised as "white". This factual content — which stands on its own and is not editorialised or commented upon — serves to make the fictional storyline more compelling and heart rending.

Scott, who is of aboriginal ancestory himself, refrains from casting judgement, but it would be the coldest of readers who did not understand the deep pain, sadness — and sheer immorality — of the story presented here.

According to an article by Susan Midalia, the author wanted Benang to be "educative in both historical and emotional terms — to inform us about the shameful history of the white treatment of Aboriginal people and also, and centrally, to 'speak from the heart'." On those levels, he wholly succeeds.

Memorable storytelling

He also succeeds in crafting a compelling and memorable tale. The prose is  succinct and journalistic when it needs to be, at other times it is lyrical and poetic — at all times there is never a word out of place.

Occasionally, the narrative, which loops around in non-chronological order, borders on repetitive, but I suspect this is a deliberate attempt on Scott's behalf to show how history repeats and the lessons of the past are not learned. There are also forays into what could be best described as "magic realism" — Harvey has the ability to hover or fly — but perhaps this is merely a metaphor for "aboriginal dreaming"?

It was a white bird with bright red at its beak. [...] Flying low at the edge of the rock, its wing beats regular and powerful, it arrowed straight to where the younger bird was hovering, and then arced up to join it.

I looked to my children, and  — oh, this was sudden, not at all a gradual or patient uplift — I was the one poised, balanced, hovering on shifting currents and — looking down upon my family approaching from across the vast distances my vision could cover — I was the one to show them where and who we are. [...]

I told Uncle Jack and the others of what had happened, and as I was speaking I found myself suddenly aware of how they listened. How they looked at me so closely, so attentive as I spoke. "Those birds. That was the spirit in the land talking to you. Birds, animals, anything can do it. That is what aboriginal people see."

 An emotional read

I came away from this book feeling a mixture of joy and sorrow, anger and regret. It challenged me on many levels and I'm so grateful for having snapped the book up when I found it in a second-hand store last year.

Kim Scott's Benang was joint winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1999, an honour it shared with Thea Astley's The Drylands.

For another view on this book, please see Lisa Hill's thoughts.