4 ideas
In the novel's early King George Sound settlement, the colonial surgeon Dr Cross and the Noongar man Wunyeran form a close friendship of shared language, food and country. The novel bases this on the historical Alexander Collie and Mokare, and uses it as the high-water mark of cross-cultural intimacy that later settlers find embarrassing and try to forget.
Bobby Wabalanginy builds a dance out of the soldiers' drill, the sailors' movements and the settlers' gestures, folding the newcomers into Noongar ceremony instead of simply resisting or copying them. The mimicry is an act of cultural confidence: it treats the strangers, seen as a kind of returned dead, as material to be incorporated into an existing order. The same performance later becomes a curiosity staged for colonial audiences, which shows how incorporation turns into spectacle once the power balance flips.
The friendly exchange lasted only while the British and the American whalers were few, transient and dependent on Noongar knowledge of food, water and country. Once settlers could farm and graze for themselves, with fences, sheep and private title, they no longer needed reciprocity. Sharing was then recast as theft, and Noongar movement across their own land was recast as trespass.
The novel tells colonisation from inside a Noongar world that is secure, generous and curious. In that telling, Noongar people are the hosts, deciding how to include newcomers through language, gifts and kinship. Seen this way, the collapse stops looking like the inevitable conquest of a weaker people. It looks instead like a specific betrayal of offered inclusion, which reframes what was lost and what might still be recovered.