Australian writer Kim Scott wins Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

This weeks column is dedicated to an Australian writer, Kim Scott who has won this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize - the Best Book of 2011, under the South East Asia and Pacific category for his latest novel, ‘That Deadman Dance’. Kim Scott who won this prestigious literary award was born in 1957 and grew up on the south west coast of Western Australia, and is a novelist turned academic with an indigenous Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the West Australian Noongar people who are the original inhabitants of the continent’s south.

The term Noongar is used for indigenous Australian people who lived in the south-west corner of Western Australia from Geraldton on the west coast to Esperance in deep south in Western Australia. The term 'Noongar' is also the name for their common language.

Kim Scott started his writing career when he became a teacher of English. His first novel, True Country, was published in 1993. His second novel Benang: from the Heart, won the 2000 Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary award. Scott has also published poetry and short stories in a number of anthologies and his work has been translated into French and Dutch languages.

Award winning author

Apart from the most recent 2001 Commonwealth Writer’s Award, the Best book for South Asia and Pacific, Scott has been awarded Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, (2000); Miles Franklin Literary Award, (2000); Kate Challis Award, (2001) and short-listed for Queensland Premier’s Award, (2000); Tasmania Pacific Literary Award, 2001.

His second novel Benang, jointly won the Miles Franklin Award for 2001. This novel also won, RAKA Kate Challis Award 2001. It is a novel which continues Scott's interest in his own indigenous identity and in indigenous issues generally.

Kim Scott is the first Indigenous Australian writer to win the Miles Franklin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Kim Scott’s first novel, True Country was translated and published in France in 2005.

According to Susan Midalia who has interviewed Scott to explore his views on his widely acclaimed novel ‘Benang’ writes: in short, [Benang] was written as a fictionalised version of family history, in order to investigate non-Aboriginal attitudes to Aboriginality, issues of power, and the psychosis which Kim believes lies at the heart of mainstream non-Aboriginal culture.

Kim Scott’s teaching experience included working in urban, rural Australia and in Portugal. Scott has also spent time of his teaching career at an Aboriginal community in the north of Western Australia, where he started to research his family's history. Both the novels are based on his research and considered semi-autobiographical. The themes of these novels have been described as, "explor[ing] the problem of self-identity faced by light-skinned Aboriginal people and examine the government's assimilationist policies during the first decades of the twentieth century".

His publication, Kayang and Me, was written in collaboration with a Nyoongar elder, Hazel Brown, Scott’s aunt, and was published in May 2005. The work is a considered a monumental oral-based history of the author’s family, the south coast Nyoongar people of Western Australia.

His latest novel which won him the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize That Deadman Dance (Picador, 2010) explores the lively fascination felt between Noongar, British colonists and American whalers in the early years of the 19th century.

In his ‘Author’s Note’ Scott writes: “This novel is inspired by the history of early contacts between Aboriginal people—the Noongar—and Europeans in the area of my hometown of Albany, Western Australia, a place known by some historians as the “friendly frontier’. In this novel which is based on extensive research Scott begins his tale during the early 1830s, focusing on a fledgling colonial settlement close to the present-day town called Albany. In this insightful narrative, Scott follows both black and white, young and old and the novel is divided into several parts, covering the stories little over a decade, but including as well a prequel of sorts back to the mid-1820s.

The over-arching narrator is a protagonist called Bobby Wabalanginy, whose life story spans the duration of events covered in the novel, and beyond. Scott, in some gently ironic asides, looks forward to when Bobby is an old (and tragically isolated) elder, acting as a guide and nominal ‘Aborigine’ to tourists who now call this country their own. He remembers the old tales, but must be careful how he recounts them lest he should offend – some things he must mutter under his breath.

The novel also tells the tales of Dr Cross, ambitious Mr Chaise, the guard Killam and convict Skerry – each with their own vision of the bounty the country can afford – and Bobby’s people, fishermen and hunters: Wunyeran, Menak, Wooral and many more. What starts as a tentative reconnaissance by both sides of knowledge and attitudes separates over the years into a more combative relationship. Bobby, who as a boy learns English from Dr Cross and is intrigued by what he comes to understand of the colonial enterprise, becomes the man who stands on his own and acting as the link between the old world and the new.

One unique feature of the novel is a key protagonists of the novel is the use of Noongar ancestor’s actual names: Scott states: “I have used the names of my own Noongar ancestors— Wunyeran, Menak and Binyan— and modelled a fictional geography around places today referred to as Princess Royal Harbour, King Georges Sound, Torrindarup National Park... and small rivers of my ancestral Noongar country along the south coast of Western Australia.”

It is quite evident that Kim Scott has clearly established his own Sense of Place in this masterpiece to tell us a tale of vanished history of Australia through meticulous research. It is indeed different to the tales by Tim Winton, a Western Australian white Anglo-Celtic writer, who also has written stories on the same region, and a town using the fictionalised Angelus, the last whaling town in Australia.