That Deadman Dance
That Deadman Dance is the third novel by Western Australian author Kim Scott. It was first published in 2010 and came out in the UK, US, and Canada in 2012. The book won several major Australian literary prizes in 2011 and 2012.
Set in the early 1800s near Albany, Western Australia—an area some historians call the “friendly frontier”—the story follows a young Noongar man named Bobby Wabalanginy. He befriends European settlers and American whalers, joining them to hunt whales, farm land, and explore the region. But tensions grow as the colony imposes stricter rules, crops fail, stock disappear, and accidents occur.
Bobby’s elders decide they must respond, and he is torn between his old world and his new friends. His choices help shape the colony’s future and, more broadly, Australia’s.
The novel aims to recreate what early encounters between colonisers and the colonised might have looked like, mostly through Bobby’s eyes. It explores the impact of colonisation on the Noongar people and their culture. Critics describe it as powerful and innovative, noting how it blends Noongar language with Australian English and shows both the destruction of a culture and the possibility of a new world born from these encounters.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:53 (CET).