That Deadman Dance
Sydney
:
Picador
,
2010
Z1728528
2010
single work
novel
historical fiction
(taught in 43 units)
Big-hearted, moving and richly rewarding, That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in the area around what is now Albany, Western Australia. In playful, musical prose, the book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.
'The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. He is even welcomed into a prosperous local white family where he falls for the daughter, Christine, a beautiful young woman who sees no harm in a liaison with a native.
'But slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is developing. Stock mysteriously start 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. A friend to everyone, Bobby is forced to take sides: he must choose between the old world and the new, his ancestors and his new friends. Inexorably, he is drawn into a series of events that will forever change not just the colony but the future of Australia...' (From the publisher's website.)
This subject focuses on writing across borders. It facilitates story production that crosses different cultures and worldviews, and creative and critical approaches informed by writing techniques involving image, structure, voice, style, theme, and the fact-to-fiction transition. Students will explore the following border-crossing approaches: cross-cultural writing, magical realism, metafiction, creative non-fiction, cross-platform writing. They will critically reflect on the aesthetic, ethical, political implications/underpinnings of the creative process: how the self negotiates borders to write the other.
