[1][2][3][4] That Deadman Dance is set in the first decades of the 19th century in and around what is now Albany, Western Australia, an area known by some historians as "the friendly frontier".

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.

As the new arrivals impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby Wabalanginy's elders decide they must respond.

The Miles Franklin judges described That Deadman Dance as "a powerful and innovative fiction that shifts our sense of what an historical novel can achieve.

At the same time, there is the enchanting possibility of the birth of a new world in the strange song, dance, ceremony and language that are produced by these encounters of very different peoples."