'I value Kim Scott's fiction so highly because I feel that his approach is to put the flags aside. That Deadman Dance asks us not to consider who we were so much as who we could be, collectively, in the future.'

Noongar writer Kim Scott has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for his novels. In this moving essay, Tony Birch shows how Scott uses fiction as a pathway to truth. We meet a writer who 'inhabits a range of guises, faces he wears to interrogate the complex and messy frontier history of colonial encounters'. The result is 'new stories' for the nation. This, says Birch, is the work that Kim Scott has been doing for many years.