Kim Scott's Novel 'That Deadman Dance'

CULTURAL INTERCOURSE BY EUROPEAN COLONISATION IN KIM SCOTT’S THAT DEADMAN DANCE

Ms. P.M.S.Renuga., M.A., M.Phil., NET/SET

Guest Lecturer, Department of English, Chikkanna Government Arts College, Tirupur.

Kim Scott is an Australian novelist of Indigenous Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the Noongar community. He has written three novels and a children’s book. His novel That DeadMan Dance (2010)portrays the lively fascination felt between Noongar and British Colonists.That DeadMan Dance is Kim Scott‟s third novel, and wins the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (South East Asian and the Pacific) Regional Award and the

2011 Miles Franklin Award. It escalates a new fictive expedition into what is known as the friendly frontier in the south west of Western Australia in the early 1800s. It speculates imaginatively about the nature of cross-culturalrationality in the early days of settler/Noongar contact. His novel suggests that if the frontier was friendly for a time it was so largely because of Noongar hospitality, diplomacy and generosity in offering assistance and labour to the settlers, a diplomacy the settlers did not by and

This cooperation is epitomised by the relationship between Dr Cross and Wunyeran.Among the first colonists is Dr Cross who lets the Noongar sleep in his house and share his food. Cross, as his name suggests, exemplifies the charismatic intertwining of settler and Noongarpsychical, somatic and cultural habits and practices.He understands the land has been seized from them. “He is our friend,” (24) says Wooral, an elder Noongar. But already Menat, the sole female elder, is seeing what Wooral cannot, That white men more generally are “Devils! Smile to your face but turn around and he is your enemy. These people chase us from our own country. They kill our animals and if we eat one of their sheep … they shoot us.