That Deadman Dance (29 page)

And finally, Jak Tar and Binyan arrived with the Governor and Hugh, though immediately Jak and Binyan moved to one side and a little apart. It might not seem an auspicious audience, Bobby knew, but it was mostly friends and family.

Menak had waved a hand, dismissed him. Manit had sworn and sneered when told of Bobby’s plan.

Bobby laughed. Hadn’t he escaped the lockup just from a few words on paper? Child’s play. What was that against dance and song? They’d seen how people fell back before him, joined their voices with his.

It is like the dance to dodge the spears; they cannot match us.

Bobby Wabalanginy knew that he could sing and dance the spirit of this place, had shown he could sing and dance the spirit of any gathering of people, show them what we gathered together here really are. He reminded them he was a dancer and singer, what Dr Cross called
a gifted artiste
, and by those means and by his spirit he would show them how people must live here, together.

Afterwards, he’d sign their paper. We will sign a paper with them about how we might live. There will be no more gaol. We show our talent and good grace, and Wooral and them no longer need use fire and spears and fight them and their guns.

The old people shrugged. Let him try it his way.

*

The sun had almost reached the hills on the far side of the harbour, which seemed to have absorbed the blue of day even as the sky grew pink and the soft light trembled in the whitewashed room. They could hear one another breathing. Be sincere, Bobby told himself. Speak straight like a spear.

He began. My friends, you here are all my friends,
blackfellas
and
whitefellas
I hear people saying, but we are not just our colour. His eyes rested upon Binyan, moved onto Christine, moved on … Years from now, our grannies’ grannies will be old people and our same spirit in them still, but maybe they won’t look like us or know about us or … I’m guilty taking food from you but that’s not stealing and I did no wrong. I can’t be sorry I share and look after families and friends and many of you sitting here today. In my language there is no need to say please and thank you. My old uncle knows this language I am speaking now, but he keeps his tongue away and says it is not worth the sound of it. He would not understand the spirit of words on paper, only in their sound.

We all different from when we babies, you and me too. I change, doesn’t mean I forget all about my people and their ways. But some people come to live here, and wanna stay like they never moved away from their own place. Sometimes I dress like you people, but who here I ever see naked like my people?

No one laughed. Binyan’s little grin was just as quickly gone again.

One time, with Mr Cross, he share his food and his beds with us, because he say he our guest. But not now, so we gotta do it ourselves. One time we share kangaroo wallaby
tammar quokka yongar wetj woylie boodi wetj koording kamak kaip …
Too many. But now not like that, and sheep and bullock everywhere and too many strangers wanna take things for themselves and leave nothing. Whales nearly all gone now, and the men that kill them they gone away, too, and now we can’t even walk up river away from the sea in cold rainy time. Gotta walk around fences and guns, and sheep and bullock get the goodest water. They messing up the water, cutting the earth. What, we can’t kill and eat them? And we now strangers to our special places.

Ngaalak waam
.
Naatjil?
Why?

Bobby saw figures at all the windows of the room, watching. Figures he thought he recognised, but somehow too faint and obscure for him to be sure.

These shoes, he said, looking down and moving sideways without moving his legs so that the shoes seemed to carry him, and his audience had to smile at the way he waved his arms as if he was about to lose his balance.
Djena bwok warra booja kenning.
These shoes might stop me feel the dirt I tread.

He stepped lightly out of the shoes, and left them balanced on their toes, propped against the base of the naked hatstand in the corner of the room.
Booja djena baranginy.
Sand can hold my feet instead.

Noonook kaatabwok koorl baranginy.
Take this hat … He bowed, and as the hat fell he caught it and, straightening, flicked his wrist so that it went hovering across the room and gently landed at the very peak of the hatstand. Oh!

The hat up high, the shoes balanced on their toes, no body between.

Naatjil kaatbwok.
Why wear this hat?
Ngayn yirra yak koombar maar-ang kaat koombar.
Clouds around my head just like a mountaintop;
Ngaitj nol-ok darrp koorl, dabakan, dabakan, dat nyin.
I want shade? Slip beneath the big trees, slow down, stop.

He took off his jacket and, dancing across the room as if with a ballroom partner, left it buttoned below the hat. A human form was taking shape.

Nitjak bwoka.
My shirt.

Bobby pirouetted, and the shirt spun from him; he gave a flourish and there it was within the coat, buttoned and secure as if there were still a body within. Oh this was going even better than he’d expected.

Bwokabt, ngaank ngayn maarak ngabiny.
No shirt means the wind and sun caress you better.

In moments, Bobby wore little more than a thin belt made of human hair, with blonde strands woven through it. A mysterious, well-dressed human form hovered on its toes in the corner of the room like a ghost, a silent witness, a hanging man; like all those things at once.

Bobby was singing softly.

Now look here, began Chaine, but fell silent as Bobby—somehow staring into all their eyes at once—held his arms out to each side and made the muscles under his glistening skin quiver and jump.

On his feet now, Chaine glanced around; Christine had turned away, but only a fraction, and Mrs Chaine’s cheeks were flushed.

Bobby leapt into the air, landed smartly on a single foot and Chaine sat down again.

Bobby knew his audience felt animal fur and feathers brush their skin, so softly, knew they breathed the scent of sandalwood smoke wisping across them …

A fine bright bone pierced Bobby’s nose, brightly coloured feathers bobbed in his hair, and a cloak of soft animal skins hung from shoulder to shin.

He looked at his audience. Smiled. Knew he’d won them.

Wunyeran and Dr Cross were at one window, nodding and grinning their pride and their pleasure. Manit and Menak, too, little dog in his arms, its alert ears turned and leaning forward. Wooral?

Boodawan, nyoondokat nyinang moort, moortapinyang yongar, wetj, wilo … Nitja boodja ngalak boodja Noonga boodjar, kwop nyoondok yoowarl koorl yey, yang ngaalang …
Because you need to be inside the sound and the spirit of it to live here properly. And how can that be, without we people who have been here for all time?

Bobby saw a scene spread before him like a sandplain, and he on lookout: guns and horses and flour and boats and people shimmering plants animals birds insects fish, all our songs and dances mixing together because here in this place we are like family: friends, becoming family. Binyan and Jak Tar doing that already. Who knows, maybe he and Christine next despite all old man Chaine’s worry.

This is my land, given me by
Kongk
Menak. We will share it with you, and share what you bring.

Boonj boonj boonjinying.
He sang the sweet melodic refrain and lyrics of the kissing love song, pouted his lips so that sound and gesture were united.

Bobby knew he was storyteller, dancer, singer, could dance around a spear and make a song to calm any man. Yes, Bobby Wabalanginy believed he’d won them over with his dance, his speech, and of course his usual tricks of performance-and-costume stuff. He was particularly pleased with the red underpants, worn as a concession to his audience’s sensibility.

Suddenly, he felt not fear, but a terrible anxiety. Faces—other than those of Jak Tar and Binyan—had turned away from him. Bobby felt as if he had surfaced in some other world. Chairs creaked as people stirred, coughing. Chaine led them to their feet. Figures at the periphery of Bobby’s vision fell away. He heard gunshots. And another sound: a little dog yelping.

Author’s Note

This novel is inspired by the history of early contact between Aboriginal people—the Noongar—and Europeans in the area of my hometown of Albany, Western Australia, a place known by some historians as the ‘friendly frontier’.

I’d like to acknowledge my debt to historians and other sources. Neville Green’s
Nyungar—the People: Aboriginal customs in the southwest of Australia
brings together most of the significant colonial diarists, including the notable Alexander Collie, and Green’s collaboration with Paul Mulvaney to produce
Commandant of Solitude: the journals of Collet Barker 1828–1831
has revealed insights that would otherwise have been virtually inaccessible. Neville Green is also largely responsible for
Aborigines of the Albany Region 1821–1898,
which provides, as it were, ‘snapshots’ of many Noongar individuals, albeit through the coloniser’s distorting lens. Tiffany Shellam’s
Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George Sound
is a much more recent work, and I wish to thank her for its cogent argument that Noongar people saw ships as ‘vehicles for significantly extending kin networks and enhancing geographic knowledge and perspectives of country’. Similarly, Martin Gibbs’s
The Historical Archaeology of Shore Based Whaling in WA 1836–1879
demonstrates the extent of Noongar involvement in the nineteenth-century shore-based whaling industry, and also pointed me to examples in the Daisy Bates collection of English language and colonial experience contained within an historical Noongar worldview. Edward Eyre’s published reports and journals also inform parts of the novel, along with research by the late Bob Howard (www.kiangardarup.blogspot.com). The advice of the poet and academic Dennis Haskell was also invaluable.

Most importantly, I wish to thank the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Regeneration Project; most especially Edward Brown, Iris Woods, Ezzard Flowers, Roma Winmar and, of course, the talented Mary Gimondo, Marg Robinson and Lefki Kaillis.

I say the novel is ‘inspired’ by history because, rather than write an account of historical events or Noongar individuals with whom I was particularly intrigued, I wanted to build a story from their confidence, their inclusiveness and sense of play, and their readiness to appropriate new cultural forms—language and songs, guns and boats—as soon as they became available. Believing themselves manifestations of a spirit of place impossible to conquer, they appreciated reciprocity and the nuances of cross-cultural exchange. In the earliest months of colonisation, the Noongar man, Mokare, is reported as interrupting a conversation with soldiers to sing out to an arriving brother, not some traditional Noongar song, but, ‘O where have you been all the day, Billy Boy?’ This is as witty a cross-cultural performance as any I have encountered. But Mokare was not exceptional. According to an observant colonial diarist, a verbal account by another Noongar guide—Manyat—exploited structural characteristics of the ‘expedition journal’, a popular literary form of the time. The military drill Matthew Flinders’s marines performed on the beach was transformed into a Noongar dance. That Noongar choreographer’s grandson, Nebinyan—one of the Noongar men forming some 40 percent of the nineteenth century shore-based whaling workforce along the south coast of Western Australia—composed a song cycle around the novel cultural experience of rowing a boat out to a whale, spearing it, and being taken for a ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’.

Also important to this novel are the lively, late-nineteenth-century letters of Bessie Flower, and English phrases such as ‘King George Town’ and ‘captain on a rough sea’ that blossom so strange and alien among the rolling Noongar sound of songs composed by members of her Noongar community. Other Noongar heroes of mine are Nakinah, Gallypert, Wylie, and the many individuals given the name ‘Bobby’: Candyup Bobby, Cape Riche Bobby, Doubtful Island Bobby, Gordon’s Bobby …

Of course, there were admirable colonists at the ‘friendly frontier’, too, including Alexander Collie and Collet Barker.

I have used the names of my own Noongar ancestors— Wunyeran, Manit and Binyan—and modelled a fictional geography around places today referred to as Princess Royal Harbour, King George Sound, Torndirrup National Park, Cape Riche, the Kalgan River, Mandubarnap, Balongup, Cocanarup, Pallinup, Bandalup and several easterly-facing headlands, bays and small rivers of my ancestral Noongar country along the south coast of Western Australia.

A Note on the Author

Kim Scott was born in 1957 to a white mother and an Aboriginal father. His first novel,
True Country
, was published in 1993. His second,
Benang: From the Heart
, won the 2000 Miles Franklin Award and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. He again won the Miles Franklin Award for
That Deadman Dance
, as well as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South East Asia and Pacific Region.

Scott has also published short stories and poetry. He currently lives in Western Australia with his wife and two children.

By the Same Author

True Country

Benang: From the Heart

Kayang & Me

Copyright © 2010 by Kim Scott

First published in Australia by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited, 2010.

Electronic edition published in March 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Scott, Kim, 1957–

That deadman dance : a novel / Kim Scott. — 1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978 1 6081 9741 5 (ebook)

1.  Nyunga (Australian people)—Fiction.   2.  Aboriginal Australians—Fiction.   3.  Western Australia—Social life and customs—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PR9619.3.S373T43 2011

823'.914—dc22

2011014163

First U.S. Edition 2012