Metaphore used by Kate Grenville in The Secret River

When Kate Grenville writes, she uses the metaphor “This is a town of scares … by a shameless black man”, to describe how the ‘black man’ had endured a lot of pain. The metaphor makes the sentence sound more interesting, Grenville could have written, “There were a lot of scars on the black man”, or “The black man carried a lot of scars on his body”, but those to sentences don’t make the sentence sound as interesting.