Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance (2010) is the author’s third and his second to win Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. His earlier novel, Benang (1999) was the first book by an Indigenous author to win this award. Benang was a complex novel about the practices of assimilation that governed Aboriginal policy in Australia for much of the twentieth century. Assimilation was based on a social Darwinist assumption that “full-blooded” Aboriginal people would “die out” and the remaining “mixed blood” or “half-caste” Aboriginal people would be “absorbed” by the more powerful genetic vectors of white Australia. As the son of an assimilated Noongar man, Scott is not writing about this matter from some abstract vantage point but from his own existential agony, one he shares with thousands of other contemporary Indigenous Australians. That Deadman Dance moves further back in the colonial timeline, into the nineteenth century, to focus on the initial period of contact between Europeans and Noongar on the south coast of Western Australia. The novel is easier to follow than Benang, less elliptical and with a stronger sense of narrative coherence. Reviews of the novel have been consistently favourable and the book has begun to receive the detailed critical attention (Brewster, 2011; Mead, 2012) that Benang has over the past fifteen years. In this essay I wish to consider the particular way in which the novel works as a “contact” novel; how it deals with the forms of interculturality that emerge when people meet in conditions of profound difference. My thesis is that the novel exemplifies the pattern of deferred action that characterizes the postcolonial treatment of the scene of contact.
But first a word on what “contact” means in Australia. In Australia we have that particular species of territorial appropriation known as settler colonialism, a phenomenon that has been the subject of recent and vigorous theoretical attention (Belich, 2009; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). Settler colonialism designates the mode of colonization deployed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States (in the northern colonies) in which land was granted to settlers for agricultural use. Settler colonies differed from earlier agricultural colonies in not being underpinned by slave labour. It is the milieu of settler colonialism that provides the frame for That Deadman Dance even though it does not figure extensively in the action. It is the 1820s and permanent European settlement on the south coast of Western Australia has just commenced. The western half of the continent was colonized later than the east, and this was motivated initially, not by the opportunity for settler agriculture, but by fears of possible French colonization. The natural harbour adjoining King George Sound in what would become the modern town of Albany was garrisoned in 1826 by a small contingent sent from Port Philip Bay in New South Wales. Three years later, in 1829, the Swan River Colony was founded under the governorship of James Stirling, laying the foundations for the modern city of Perth. In 1831, the garrison on the south coast was withdrawn and the administration of the township and adjoining district was absorbed by the Swan River Colony. The land at both King George Sound and Swan River is home to the Noongar people. The Noongar are a linked tribal network that lived by hunting, gathering and fishing in the temperate southwest of Australia. The name Noongar has come to signify this broad grouping of people who shared a common language (although with major differences in dialect) and other common social and religious practices. The arrival of the British in the early part of the nineteenth century initiated the catastrophic collapse of Noongar society, and it is this abysmal fact that Scott’s novel explores. In this sense, because it explores an unprecedented (for its participants) collision of cultures, That Deadman Dance is a “contact” novel, where contact encompasses the range of intercultural activity caused by colonization. The word contact is favoured, not because the distribution of power is even, but because the processes are always two-way.
In many ways the inaugurating novel of postcolonial literature, at least in the Anglophone world, is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Achebe’s novel still provides a model for the imaginative figuration of contact, one which is truly postcolonial. Crucially, the story is told from the side of the indigene, and we get a fully realized world built from an intimate, insider’s knowledge. The Igbo society that emerges in Achebe’s novel has a system of property, institutions for the administration of justice, there is conflict both within the tribal group and, externally, with others. Marriage, class and generational tension are all part and parcel of this world. Questions of ethics and metaphysics are encountered and resolved by reference to both tradition and reason. It is by no means a primitivist idyll, and many of the practices seem brutal, even barbaric, but never wild or capricious. Equally, a range of different personality types are on display and, in the end, the action is overdetermined, like any real community, by a conflicting combination of interests and dispositions. All of that is the pre-contact world and occupies the first two-thirds of Achebe’s novel. The final third of the novel — which gives the title its purchase — details the inexorable dissolution of that world under the pressure of European colonization. The eerie aspect of this catastrophe is that it does not take the form of a violent overthrow but an invisible hollowing out of the ontological basis of Igbo cultural reality. What occurs is that the very fabric of their belief system, the invisible framework for all their social relations, is suddenly exposed as provisional. Instead of being founded in the metaphysical substance of gods and tradition, Igbo culture is seen, hideously and shamefully, to be encased in a world of which they had only the dimmest intimations: Europe. This radical ontological demotion is captured in the novel’s concluding sentences, which abruptly shift the focalization to that of a local colonial administrator who thinks the suicide of the novel’s hero, Okonkwo, might make an interesting paragraph in the book he is writing: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
It is not this bleak telos which is the defining feature of Achebe’s novel. After all, something of this plot had long been in existence, inflecting both the title and the action of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a novel whose publication (it was set in 1757) is contemporaneous with the action in That Deadman Dance and which Scott’s novel alludes to on two separate occasions.
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In Australian fiction, novels from the mid-twentieth century like Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938) and Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) were concerned with documenting the dissolution of Indigenous society. Here the earlier invasion of colonization was reawakened by the contemporary imperilment of Australia by the rise of Japan as a Pacific superpower. Yet the crucial fact is that these novels are written under the sign of pathos, deriving their poignancy from contemplating the inexorable disintegration of these once proud, sovereign cultures. What Achebe’s novel introduces, thereby entirely changing the dynamics of colonial representation, is shock. The result of this is that we get in Things Fall Apart a genuinely post-traumatic novel and not one protected by historicism.
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The decisive phrase in Achebe’s book, which recurs throughout the novel is, “For a long time nothing happened”. This is the formula for what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, translated by Strachey as “deferred action” and by Lacan as après-coup.
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It references the basic psychoanalytic contention that temporality, in the way that it exists for humans, is initiated traumatically. Thereafter trauma is the organizing principle of how we experience time, even though we do not know it, providing the obscure horizons of both the remembered past and the anticipated future. There are slightly different versions of this but in essence deferred action specifies a lag or interval between the moment when something unbearable is apprehended (the primal scene) and a second point when the full import of this event is realized. Both points are unconscious in the sense that we cannot directly recall either. Freud postulated this delay to account for the fact that the emergence of neurotic symptoms (hysteria, obsession, phobia) was often well after the event that seemed (from clinical evidence) to initiate it. The question was why did the effects of the trauma not materialize instantly, but many years later? Freud’s theory was that the event only became horrific when it eventually met with the symbolic call upon us to take our place in the world. I have resisted colouring this account with the erotic dimension that libidinally powers the whole process, not because I disagree with it, but because I want to outline the formal quality of deferred action. To show the skeleton, as it were, minus the musculature. The structure is this: there is an event, and for a long time nothing happens, and then it has already happened and you can’t stop if from continuing to happen. It is my contention that this temporal structure — deferred action — is an inherent, constitutive feature of the postcolonial; indeed this deferred action is the precise content of the prefix “post” which has caused so much vexation over the years (Appiah, 1991).
If we turn then to That Deadman Dance we can, as in Things Fall Apart, see the principle of deferred action at work. The novel is focalized principally through the character of Bobby Wabalanginy who operates as cultural intermediary in the novel. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, sealers and whalers had made sporadic contact with Noongar on the south coast of Western Australia, but sustained contact took place with the arrival of the garrison in 1826 — the year Bobby was born. The coincidence of his birth with the stationing of the garrison is one of several ways in which we are pushed to understand Bobby as the embodiment of contact. One day, a few years after his birth, he stumbles into the rudimentary garrison’s barracks. He is ill and his parents have just died, presumably of the tuberculosis, which along with small-pox and influenza, decimated the Noongar in the years after contact. He recalls “his own parents forgetting how to breathe properly so they could only exhale and cough, always bent over, stooped, moving like their feet hurt from touching their very own earth” (129).
Bobby is adopted by Dr Cross, a naval surgeon attached to the garrison, who then stays on to take up land in the district. Cross is cast as the idealist in Scott’s colonial psychodrama, the one who sees the possibility of coexistence as a primary good, rather than a wishful goal, to be abandoned at the first sign of inconvenience. Cross stands in for the curious historical fact that relations around Albany did, by most accounts, remain harmonious for a considerable time after settlement. Indeed, because of the relative absence of hostility, Albany was known as the “friendly frontier” (Shellam, 2012). While conflict in other parts of Australia was not necessarily instantaneous, Albany is somewhat unusual in the length of time during which peaceable relations were maintained. In many ways, Scott’s novel tries to answer the question of why this was so, believing that in amongst this situation are the lost ingredients of equitable coexistence, since buried by the bulldozer of settler colonialism. Perhaps the most obvious reason why relations remained harmonious was that Albany was not settled as an agricultural colony in the first instance, but as a military garrison, and thereafter as a centre for shore-based whaling. This postponed the more intractable disputes that ensued once land and resources became firmly contested. What this gave rise to, postcolonially, was a particularly pronounced version of deferred action — for a long time nothing happened.
It is significant that, unlike Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or the plays of the earlier Noongar writer Jack Davis (1917–2000), That Deadman Dance does not attempt to render the indigene from within a pre-existing autonomous society. We do not get a portrait of Noongar society operating according to its principles and completely innocent of Europeans. This may seem a fairly minor point because of course the novel is not denying that there was such a world. But it is one of the defining features of this novel, as a contact fiction, that it does not hypostasize a primordial “before” moment. Instead, we join the story in medias res with the Noongar and settlers already in, as it were, long-term relationships with one another. In this respect, the temporality of the novel is welded to its central character, Bobby. For Bobby, settlers interacting with his elders was always already his reality, even though he learned through time that it had not always been so. So, instead of a before and after contrast, time and again the view we get of both the Noongar and the Europeans in That Deadman Dance is refracted through moments of contact. In other words, we are in contact, not after contact. It is a crucial distinction because it changes the orientation of what we might call the traditional “things fall apart” narrative. In that narrative, we await the moment when the rot sets in, anxious to identify the precise point when things turn. But here, in Scott’s novel, there is no such point — no moment of primal defeat. Or, to be more graphically Freudian, there is no castration complex.
Again, we can compare Kim Scott to Jack Davis. Davis’s groundbreaking play Kullark (1982), first performed in 1979, is centred on the lives of a contemporary 1970s Noongar family. The action is played in a vivid realist mode, but it is interrupted by flashback scenes to the decisive moments in the contact history of the Swan coastal plain — the killing of the leader Yagan in 1833 and the military punitive expedition known as the Pinjarra massacre in 1834. These two events have generally been regarded as having ended the organized resistance of the Noongar to the appropriation of their ancestral land. For Davis, these events stand in for the loss of Noongar society and his plays and poetry, although often set much later, take place in the wake of them. Davis does sketch in a brief period of coexistence prior to this violence, and again this is consistent with historical accounts. So how is Scott’s work different from Davis’s? The major distinction is that Scott’s entire novel takes place in the historical subjunctive. In other words, instead of a brief moment that is lost, the moment is preserved, against the odds. There is an odd calmness to the novel, an absence of urgency. The action is dilatory, the mood strangely upbeat without being quite joyous. There is the disconcerting calmness of fairytales. In this, we see again the effects of deferred action, because the atmosphere is precisely that in which consequences have not yet materialized; in fact, more than that, consequentiality itself is yet to be born. We are in the interlude of deferred action. The point when this ends and time is born, sends the subject frantically backwards, searching for the calamity that has befallen. But with two exceptions, which we will shortly address, That Deadman Dance is written in the uncanny innocence of prehistory, a term whose paradoxical quality is brought into view in this case.
All of this is to say, in short, that Scott’s novel transpires in the latency period opened up between the onset of colonization and the apprehension of its full meaning. But what was the full meaning of colonization for the Noongar? It was nothing other than the complete eradication of the Noongar world. This point requires some elaboration because it goes to the heart of settler colonialism, the prevailing mode of Australia’s colonization. At first blush settler colonialism seems gentler than its predecessors. Tillage seems preferable to pillage. After all, settler colonialism was not premised on the rapacious expropriation of resources that led, for instance, to the mass extinctions of seals, bison, sandalwood and various other species targeted as commodities in the “trade” colonialisms. Nor does it depend on slavery, indentured labour or the quasi-enslavement of a local people. At its heart, settler colonialism has a rather idyllic image to offer, a little house on the prairie, where families undertake the austere, ennobling duties of building farms and futures for their children, of owning, like the characters in Willa Cather’s novels, the land beneath their feet. In reality, for the indigene whose lands were subjected to settler colonialism, this mode was the worst of all worlds, because unlike mere pillage, which plundered willy-nilly then moved on once the resource or commodity was exhausted, the settler stayed. This was certainly the case in Western Australia. The problem is that in the end, the logic of settler colonialism is eliminationist (Moses, 2004; Wolfe, 2006). It was not just the material incommensurability of lifeways; the fact that owner-occupied, close agricultural settlement was incompatible with nomadic hunter-gathering. Indeed, the Noongar were found to be more than useful in the work of farming southwest Australia, initially as shepherds in the pastoral era (nineteenth century), and then for the labour-intensive tasks of clearing and fencing the paddocks of the cultivation era (twentieth century). But once this work was done and mechanization removed the need for labor, the Noongar were not just surplus to requirements, they were an affront to a new and active historicization which insisted on their absence (Haebich, 2004). For their sheer presence stood as a mute refutation of pioneer legitimacy. In this sense, far from being a kinder, gentler colonialism, settler colonialism was the relentless and genocidal enemy of the indigene, whose existence the settler, at the deepest level of their ideology, could not countenance.
In That Deadman Dance, the settler-colonist is represented by Geordie Chaine, an echo of the Albany pioneer George Cheyne (1790–1869). He is introduced early in the novel and embodies the entrepreneurial virtues of the settler. However, Chaine is not depicted as particularly venal or avaricious. Although hard-nosed in business, he is shown to be fair-minded in many of his encounters. This is typical of Scott’s work. In his earlier novel, Benang (1999), about the eugenicist doctrines that drove Aboriginal annihilation in the twentieth century, the key perpetrators are deeply ambivalent figures. Scott seems to insist that these people were not monsters, if only to then say: and that is precisely why they are monsters. Like Hannah Arendt, Scott wants us to realize that the worst evil is utterly banal, hiding in plain sight in the day-to-day cowardice of life. For much of the novel, in fact, Chaine is the successor to Dr Cross; that is, he forms the link (the “chain”) from the colonist to the Noongar. Chaine and Bobby form an intimate and respectful partnership, and Bobby gives Chaine the epithet “Kongk” meaning uncle. True, the partnership was not an even one, but there was a significant degree of inter-dependence, at least for some lengthy period of time. Moreover, in the move from Cross to Chaine, the basis of the relationship moves from Enlightenment idealism and Christian humanism to capitalist pragmatism. Yet one of the points of the novel is that this was not to be solely and simply understood as a defeat of ethics by greed, but evidence of Indigenous resilience. The novel wants us to replace the image of Noongar culture as a fragile flower that withered in the instant of contact, with an image of a people who were highly adroit at cultural diplomacy, comfortable in the face of change and confident enough in their own metaphysics to cope with the new dispensation that colonization was bringing. Central to this was that coexistence survived the descent from idealism to capitalism.
This explains one of the striking features of the novel, which is its celebration of whaling. In recent years, whaling has come to emblematize the psychopathy of the Anthropocene.
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Because the fate of these creatures so closely echoes that of the subaltern in the clutches of instrumental modernity, one would assume that a novel like Scott’s That Deadman Dance would place the Noongar and the whales into a structural homology. Instead, it is shore-based whaling that becomes the new basis for intercultural cooperation in the 1830s and ’40s, where Noongar like Bobby could participate, again not in absolute equality, but under the dignity at least of shared work, risk and enterprise. Whaling in the novel blends something of the fraternal praxis of Marxism, the entrepreneurship of liberalism and the derring-do and exoticism of colonial adventure writing, even that of the metaphysical majesty of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), another of the novel’s intertexts. But crucially, the activity is made to sit within a Noongar cosmology that is communal but also somehow uniquely Bobby’s. Scott’s hero is shown to be a cultural innovator, an inventor of new songs and new dances, indeed whole new forms — the dance that gives the novel its title being the foremost example — that imperiously and ingeniously apprehend the emergence of unprecedented cultural realities. Bobby begins to compose his own whale “song” which documents and dramatizes the incidents that take place. He sings it to the other men and his song is taken up on the whaleboats. Bobby becomes, in other words, an intercultural bard, whose value lies in his creative acumen, his ability to give back the lives of the men as mimesis, as a vivid scene in which they are the actors and their work is the action.
However, for all their allure, something is not quite right in the depiction of these events. The basic postcolonial problem of every contact novel remains and the events never quite break free of the inevitable dramatic irony that comes from the reader knowing that this situation does not last. So the question in the novel is how we are to regard this latency period? What will happen when Bobby grows up and history comes crashing down upon him? Again, the novel conforms to the rather attenuated history that has come to us. Certainly, there was a shore-based whaling industry in Albany, and Noongar people were employed in it. And this industry was the main economic activity on the south coast before 1850, dwarfing the rudimentary agricultural pursuits that were taking place here and there during these early years. This latency thus occupied a period of between 20 and 30 years, long enough for a man like Bobby to grow up believing in its actuality as a world, even for it to have a prehistory in the relations of his ancestors with the predecessors to people like Geordie Chaine.
The whole enigma of the novel is centred on the status of this cooperation of Noongar and settler. On the one hand, we glimpse moments which seem to portend the end of cooperation. Noongars raid the food stores of settlers and take their sheep. Settlers appropriate the hunting grounds of the Noongar and destroy their watercourses and aquaculture. There is the hideous decimation of the new diseases. There is, too, the dimension of sexuality that casts such an embarrassing (for the colonizer at least) shadow over the contact zone. To historians of settler colonial culture, and even to the average Australian citizen, none of this is especially surprising, indeed it may seem all too familiar. But what is not familiar is the way that the novel will not let us confidently seize upon the pathos of these “signs”. In fact, it refuses to let them be signs, and continues instead to treat them as activity, as life. And because we are saddled with the knowledge of the outcomes of the encounter, the pathos shifts not to these events (as signs of the inevitable loss), but to the activity of fabulation itself, apparently trapped in a heartbreaking but heroic denial. Because of this, the novel is tinged with something of that deep structural melancholy that prevails in, say, J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) or the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, where children valiantly replace, through heartfelt fantasy, the holocaust that surrounds them with something that would be adequate to their needs.
In point of fact Bobby never does grow up and perhaps, ontologically, cannot grow up. The novel implies this by repeatedly declaring that Bobby never learns fear (69; 164). At one stage, Chaine calls Bobby to one side after he seemed to be getting too forward with his daughter (making the frontier too friendly) and tells him: “Damn you, Bobby. You are not children anymore” (338). But actually Bobby still is a child and always will be. Like Oscar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), or any of the waif heroes in the films of Wes Anderson, the abandonment of maturation is the price he pays for the perpetuation of counter-historical reality. Without Bobby’s frozen adolescence, the novel could not occur in the way it does — it could not present us with an alternative to the train of events that led us to where we are now. The novel needs Bobby’s determined misreading of the signs to open up the possibility of us living in a different present to the one we presume to inhabit. Bobby’s delusions, in other words, are ethical delusions. They are what allow the novel to instantiate what Brewster calls “an alternative intercultural social contract” (2011: 63).
What this extended habitation of latency in That Deadman Dance, this refusal to enter the grief of the “post”, causes at the level of the narrative is a strange, episodic, fragmentation of the action. Again, anyone familiar with Scott’s Benang, will have encountered this. The point of the action shifts around in time and place so that it is difficult to gather one’s bearings. If the narrative were a porcelain bowl, it is as if someone has knocked it off the mantelpiece and given us the swept-up remains. In the analogy with cinema, this is a book with few establishing shots, scenic overviews in which we might apprehend the scope of the action, or to locate it. Instead, the narrative moves from point to point forcing us gradually, through cross-reference, to generate the matrix of action in time and space; what Philip Mead called, after Bakhtin, “Scott’s chronotope” (2012). This is not an unprecedented technique either in postmodern or postcolonial fiction (one need only think of another foundational text, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)), but it takes on a particular valency here as the world in view is itself structurally unable to sustain a consistent visage. The reason for this is that what we are seeing is “contact”, in the sense I have been using the word. Contact is two-sided and its two sides, beyond a certain point, are incommensurable.
Perhaps the key counter-historical fact in this novel is that Bobby does not die. He should have. His parents did, and he was all but dead himself. Indeed, his enraged extended family — led by his uncle Wunyeran — were seeking retribution when they became aware that his lifeless body was found on a soldier’s bed. The situation is initially reconciled by the intervention of the enlightened Dr Cross, who had previously befriended Wunyeran. However, the tense stand-off between the Noongars armed with spears and the soldiers armed with rifles is ultimately ended when Bobby abruptly wakes to life again. Thereupon he climbs atop Cross and Wunyeran — “one foot on each of the man’s shoulders” (132) — as they march the resurrected child down an avenue of astonished and appreciative soldiers and Noongar. Whilst the scene begins realistically — it is certainly plausible that the recently orphaned boy would have made his way to the nearby settlement — it swerves ever closer to the condition of fantasy. The condition of fantasy is the same as that of a dream: the fulfillment of a wish.
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Here Bobby is the embodiment of the wish for coexistence; more than that he is, as Lacan would say, the “object-cause” of this desire. Again, typically of Scott’s fiction, the fantasy is homosocial. Instead of a mother and a father, Bobby is the product in this fantasy of two fathers, Dr Cross and Wunyeran. One can see that Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) is something of a predecessor here; a foundling absorbed and cast into the Great Game of colonization, loved and prized by competing intercultural father-figures.
It is not quite magical realism that we have here. In magical realism, a miraculous causality is preserved and allowed to operate in tandem with that of literary (and empirical) realism. Postcolonial fiction is heavily marked by magical realism, both in the lineage of the Latin American fabulists, and in that initiated by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (in turn influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, Angela Carter and Günter Grass). Scott’s novel is not magically realist in quite this way because the more blatantly fantastic elements are usually subjectivized. The scene above concludes by noting: “Not everyone remembered this story like Wabalanginy did …” (132). Yet even without that declaration, the way that the novel is focalized — the absorption of diction and thoughts that can only be Bobby’s — places this event, and many others, into his fantasmatic domain. Indeed, Bobby’s fantasy is a structuring agency in the novel; an effervescent dialectical answer to the inexorable push of colonization.
It is this vigorous fantasmatic dimension that prompts us to approach the event of contact — the novel’s raison d’etre — as a primal scene. The primal scene is the name given to the modality of witness which forms retroactively to yield to the subject the initiating event of deferred action. Classically, the primal scene is Freud’s name for the moment in which a child witnesses her parents copulating. To cover the cases where this does not actually happen, the supposition is that the child will invariably fantasize this scene. Again, I would prefer just to emphasize the structural aspect of the primal scene, rather than delineate its libidinal motives. The primal scene discloses a distinct and paradoxical epistemology. The primal scene is a scene which we are compelled to see but cannot. The result of this impasse is a compromise, which in psychoanalysis is another name for a symptom. We are allowed to see the primal scene, but only in disguised form.
Thinking in this way allows us to understand something of the Deadman Dance itself, the very thing which gives the novel its title. Dancing recurs frequently in the novel and takes the form, primarily, of mimicry. In this it is true to the traditions of Noongar dance which delights in the mimicry of animals, and which in their totemic form, are the basis for the animistic religious beliefs of their society. But the novel seems at pains to emphasize, against a certain fossilizing assumption about traditional societies, that the activity of dance was a dynamic form of symbolization able to meet ever-changing cultural realities. And this is true of the Deadman Dance:
The dance? You paint yourself in red ochre, neck to waist and wrist, and leave your hands all bare. White ochre on your thighs but keep your calves and feet bare, like boots, see? A big cross of white clay painted on every chest. (69–70)
In other words, the Deadman Dance was a reenactment of the military drills that the Noongar had seen performed by red-coated British soldiers. Again, this is something that is well documented historically. But in the novel, the dance is taken away — by Bobby — from its origins in colonial mimicry:
But Bobby […] made the dance his own. One day when Menak and his woman companion Manit were leading the music, Bobby stepped out from among the others, stiff-limbed and moving jerkily to the sound of his own frightening whistle; a tune like the one we knew, but different all the same. The singing began to copy his, and all the other men — even the Elder — started to copy his actions, too, but then their minds went blank, their vision barren. They stepped back, they quailed before Bobby, went down on their haunches and clumsily backed away as he went among them, slapping playfully, hardly putting his hands on them, but laughing and grinning like a crazy man. Each man he touched lay down as if he was dead. Dead. People loved the experience of it. To have no will of their own but only Bobby’s, briefly. (71)
I do not think that anyone can claim to have interpreted the novel until they have made sense of this passage. What it enacts, in no uncertain terms, is a hijacking of the primal scene. Bobby’s parents are not Menak and Manit, but in this scene they function as such, and are “leading the music”. In this inflexion, the primal scene begins to acquire its classical, conjugal, connotations. The stiff-limbed jerking of the dance now hovers, almost obscenely, between its reference to the military conquering of the Noongar world, and the intimate movement of sexual congress. But instead of the position of rapt voyeur assigned to us in the primal scene, Bobby enters and takes command of the scene. The result is as “frightening” as it is fatal. Bobby becomes the vector of an epidemic, striking people dead, willy-nilly. The curious element is that people “loved” it.
Later we are told that Bobby’s mastery of the Deadman Dance began even earlier, when he had witnessed an incident following the death of his uncle (and symbolic father) Wunyeran. Mourning the death of his friend, Dr Cross had prepared Wunyeran’s body in the fetal position in accordance with Noongar practice. Later, someone had straightened the limbs of the corpse so that he was “laid out” in the European fashion. When Cross realized this affront he tried to reposition the body but the limbs had gone stiff. Bobby watched on in fascination: “Watching, the boy moved his limbs like a dead man, tried that style and so began his mastery of the Deadman Dance” (143). Here, we have the other side of the primal scene, not this time on the side of extinction, but on the side of uncanny procreation. Bobby saw the misshapen body, with its limbs laid out unnaturally, and emulated them. There could be few more pithy recapitulations of the subject’s entry into the symbolic order than this.
But the book’s basic question is which symbolic order? And which father’s name will sanctify it? The novel seeks, and Bobby embodies, for almost the entirety of the novel, a world that is doubly fathered. In other words it seeks to synthesize a new hybrid order. But this cannot finally take shape. The reasons are implied rather than stated. On the one hand, there seems some basic incommensurability between “tongue and paper” (137) — an order constituted orally and one mandated by documents. Again, Bobby (and Scott, too) work against the grain here, and the victories they achieve are significant. Bobby not only learns to read and write, but begins to write down the Noongar language, a breakthrough we see in the first word of the novel — “Kaya” (the word for hello) — which he writes on a slate with chalk before smiling and thinking: “Nobody ever done writ that before” (1). In his own life, it is worth remembering, Scott himself has learned to speak Noongar. This is more difficult than one might think because he has also had, as a first step and in concert with others, to rebuild the language from fragments and, moreover, to find these fragments!
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The novel, however, does not let us keep Bobby’s achievements in idealized form. There are two brief but devastating moments of relativization. The first occurs with a surprising proleptic shift in Part II of the novel. We suddenly see Bobby several decades later as an old man, performing for “tourists” so they could see “a real old-time Aborigine” (80). It is a shock to see the fearless intercultural hero of the novel reduced to a clown. This interlude then disappears as quickly as it had appeared and we spend the remainder of the novel in the unfolding early years of the Albany settlement. The second moment of relativization occurs in the final scene in the novel. Conscious of the decline in cultural relations, Bobby stages a performance for the benefit of the settlers. He begins by presenting his case, mixing reason with wit, rhetoric and magic tricks, and slipping between English and Noongar. To the discomfort of the audience he strips his western clothes and puts on his kangaroo skin: “He looked at his audience. Smiled. Knew that he’d won them” (402). But then, in the final paragraph of the scene, indeed the closing paragraph of the novel, this confidence abruptly collapses:
Suddenly, he felt not fear, but a terrible anxiety. Faces […] 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 dog yelping. (403)
So, in its final act, the novel pulls the veil away, leaving both Bobby and the reader naked in the face of the failure of this performance, and indeed the failure of performativity as such, which had triumphed so resiliently in the preceding 400 pages.
Belatedly, as it must always be, the deferred action arrives. For a long time nothing happened, at least nothing that was able to puncture Bobby’s enveloping fantasy. Then it is there and it is as if it had always been there and only sheer, wilful stupidity had stopped him (and us, welded to him by the narrative) from seeing it. I hope now that it is possible to apprehend why the primal scene is the epistemology par excellence of the postcolonial contact novel. One is tempted by the seduction of historicism to regard the past as something solid. Even though our knowledge of it might be imperfect, we retain a quiet assumption that the picture is theoretically perfectible. But contact exposes the limits of the historicist fantasy. Despite the seemingly empirical basis for our knowledge of contact through the colonial archive, we are left with a fragmentary and indistinct impression of the scene. From these scattered accounts and mixed signals we are left to draw our inferences. But the matter is not just incidental, it is for us in the former settler colonies, the origin of our world. For contemporary Noongar people, the evanescence of history coincides traumatically with the destruction of their cultural fabric. Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance is the first novel to capture — in its formal substance inasmuch as its thematic scope — the cultural import of the epistemological axioms of deferred action for Indigenous Australians.
