AustLit logo

AustLit

Australian Society, Aboriginal Voices (LANG 2007)
Semester 1 / 2012

Texts

y separately published work icon That Deadman Dance Kim Scott , 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.)

Description

The significance of Aboriginal writing as an emergent genre over the last twenty years; Aboriginal representations of Australian society and race relations this century; non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal people in the history of Australian literature; Aboriginal texts as literature, history, and historiography; postcolonial theory and interpretation; Aboriginal cinema and performance and its relation to the emergence of Aboriginal writing and specific cultures; oral histories and questions of transcription and translation; publishing contexts, audiences and autonomy; questions of cross-cultural understanding and Reconciliation.

Assessment

Review 600 words 15%

Presentation 30 minutes 30%

Essay 2500 words 55%

Other Details

Offered in: 2011, 2010, 2009
Current Campus: City West, External
Levels: Undergraduate
X