Miles Franklin award winner Kim Scott delivers a new novel - “That Deadman Dance” - this year, and boy, what a book! I have long been a fan of Scott’s complex and playful form of storytelling. This book was initially inspired by stories of Matthew Flinders early 1800’s visit to King George Town (now Albany, WA), in which Flinders apparently had his crew perform a military salute as a parting gesture to the local Noongah people, who had received his ship and its people amicably. More than a hundred years later, Daisy Bates recorded that the local Noongah people still incorporated an appropriation of that original military salute into their own dance. Scott’s novel, told from the point of view of both locals and newcomers in the early half of the nineteenth century in Albany, is a tribute to the strength of fiction, to its capacity to incorporate more than one world-view, more than one understanding, and to its ability to, as Scott puts it in an interview about this work, stand as “a machine to think with.”