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Deadly Unna Essay

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Phillip Gwyne’s novel, “Deadly Unna?” explores how the main character Gary Black, a white boy from the “Port” also known as “Blacky” grows up by not agreeing to racism. Blacky experiences prejudice and friendship from both the aboriginal and white communities. Blacky begins to develop a greater tolerance for aborigines and their culture, and then he further attempts to apply this knowledge to the intolerant and prejudiced town in which he lives. The boy who helps him shift in his opinion of aborigines is a local aborigine named “Dumby Red”, who lives in the aboriginal missionary “The Point”. Dumby is of Blacky’s Football team and helps Blacky in various ways to become more tolerant. Throughout the book, Blacky learns many things about …show more content…

Nice girls, but they’ve all got the clap (Gonorrhea). Every last one of ‘em’.” (Gwynne, 1998, p.122). Blacky thinks about this for a moment and agrees that Darcy is quite smart so decides to be careful of Clarence. Later in the story Blacky is sitting at the bar and Big Mac, the bar tender starts to tell a racist joke. When he finishes and the entire bar starts laughing, Blacky does not, he has heard and told the joke before and laughed at it, but it did not seem funny now because of his new friendship with Dumby and Clarence. This shows how Blacky has grown and how he has no humour for racisms. Blacky’s thoughts about prejudice in the town are confirmed after the football presentations. When the McRae medal was won by Mark Arks (from the white boys footy team), Blacky could not believe that his town could go this far and be so racist, Dumby had contributed so much to the team all season, he had been the true team player and was the best and everyone in the Port new it, but they continued to say nothing, Blacky then became really angry. Blacky states; “its bullshit, that’s Dumbys trophy,” (Ibid, p.133). Blacky realized how racist his town was against the Nungas (Aboriginals). This was the turning point of Blacky's view of the town. Blacky realized how much the Goonyas (white people) in his town hated the Nungas. Another example of Prejudice is when Blacky told Pickles and Darcy about Dumby’s funeral both of them thought Dumby deserved to die just

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