AustLit

Titles in order: Oodgeroo: Bloodline to Country; The Kadaitcha Sung; CityCat Project 2006–2016

For an in-depth presentation of Sam Watson’s literary and artistic works, long-term involvement in Aboriginal and Brisbane politics, as well as contributions towards the betterment of Indigenous Australians and Australian society, see: Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson CityCat Project 2006-2016, David Pestorius, Rex Butler, Sally Butler, Michele Heimrich, Sternberg Press in partnership with Australian Fine Arts/David Pestorius, Berlin, 2017.

Sam Watson (b. 1952) hails from the Birri-Gubba (through his father) and Munaldjali (through his mother) nations; he also has blood ties to the Kalkadoon, Jagera, and Noonuccal nations. He was born in Brisbane into a politically active family that spearheaded campaigns for Aboriginal rights and which was marked by the history of his grandfather, a senior man of the Birri Gubba tribe. Watson explains that, as a young child, his grandfather was sold into bondage to a white station owner. “After his day’s work, he was chained up like a dog under the station house and fed on a tin plate.” He later fled and worked in ring-barking camps until he was able to hire a lawyer who secured his freedom.[1]

During his school years at Mount Gravatt State High School, where he participated in the school debating club, Watson’s political consciousness was sharpened by national events such as Charles Perkins’ 1965 Freedom Rides and the Gurindji strike and walk-off, as well as international ones such as the political actions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa.[2] With his family, he campaigned during the lead-up to the 1967 referendum, as well as against the White Australia Policy and the Apartheid regime in South Africa.[3] He was one of the founders of the Brisbane Black Panther Party in 1971.[4] The same year, he enrolled as a student at the University of Queensland, but then decided to undertake work with the Brisbane Aboriginal and Islanders Tribal Council, as well as with pioneer organisations assisting the Indigenous community in the areas of health, housing, education, employment, and legal aid.[5] In particular, Watson started to work for the newly established Brisbane Aboriginal Legal Service.

When he was a teenager, he was taken by his father to the Woolloongabba Police Citizens Youth Club, where he formed “lasting friendships with the small group of community-minded police who gave up so much of their free time to run the club and all its activities”.[6] As “the only law clerk” at the ALS, though, “the world began to look different”. “In that setting”, he explained, “my mob were the absolute victims and the police were the lords of the earth”.[7] Coming from a man who has “never seen himself as a victim” (see interview), this statement is indicative of the inequity of the justice system for Aboriginal people and of their mistreatment by the police. In Brisbane, Watson also took part in the “Pig Patrol”, an activity initiated in the U.S by the Black Panthers that sought to monitor police harassment of black people.[8] During the first week of February 1972, Watson was invited to join the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, where he stayed until July of that year.[9] During that month, Watson was taken unconscious to the Canberra Base Hospital after a violent clash with the police. “We tried to put the tents back up and the kops [author’s spelling] moved in and smashed us. I was knocked out by the kops. I recovered pretty quickly; but I still have the scar on my head”, he related.[10] Shortly after this event, he declared: “I picked up a little saying a few months ago. I would like to tell you about it because I think it is very appropriate: When the government becomes the lawbreaker, we the people, black and white together, must become the law enforcer.”[11]

This quote can provide useful insights into The Kadaitcha Sung, the novel Watson published in 1990, for which he received the National Indigenous Writer of the Year Award and the FAW Patricia Weickhardt Award to an Aboriginal Writers. The novel was also short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. The Kadaitcha Sung, which is discussed at length in the interview, is one of the first novels published by an Aboriginal writer and has been the focus of numerous national and international research essays, books, and PhD theses.[12] One of the characteristics of the book is that it depicts Aboriginal people as responsible for what happens on “the South Land” of Australia at all times. As Watson said during our interview: “I have written that out as a direct result of a conflict between the leading Kadaitcha people, so that we have control of everything in the book”. Praised widely by critics and scholars alike, the book can also be confronting to some readers for the violence it depicts. Watson explains that: “Violence has been a part of our lives ever since day one of the British invasion of our sacred homelands. Kops have used violence to harass us, to terrorise us, and to brutalise us. As Aboriginal people we live with violence every day of our lives.”[13]

In the 1990s, Watson worked as the manager of the Brisbane Aboriginal Legal Service. On the night of Sunday 7 November, 1993, he wrote a powerful piece that was first published in The Age a year later under the title “Turning Point”, as part of a “series featuring some of Australia’s leading writers”, and republished in 1995.[14] Its topic features in the first paragraph:

It was the night they killed the song. Sunday 7 November, 1993, was the night that life finally burnt itself into my soul. One of my very special street kids became the latest statistics in the continuing tragedy of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Because, that was the night the young life of Daniel Alfred Yock came to an end. ‘Boonie’ was only 18 years old when he died in the custody of Brisbane police, the same men and women who had sworn to protect him and keep him safe in a world of violence.

This vividly composed piece challenges the discordance between what the police proclaim to defend and the violence Aboriginal people have suffered at their hands. It also addresses 200 years of colonial history and an event that has deeply moved the writer up to this day, as well as highlights the volatility and danger of situations where people feel, in a moment of despair and anger, that they have nothing to lose. As such, the piece would be well suited to (101) courses on Australian and/or Aboriginal Literature.

Watson also wrote the script for the short film Black Man Down, directed by Bill McCrow, which deals with Indigenous Australian deaths in custody:

https://aso.gov.au/titles/shorts/sand-celluloid-black-man-down/clip1/

https://aso.gov.au/titles/shorts/sand-celluloid-black-man-down/clip2/

Informed by the work Watson conducted at the ALS to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the film features in From Sand to Celluloid, a series of six short films by Aboriginal filmmakers which toured internationally and was released in 1996 by the Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Commission.[15]

For over forty years, one of Watson’s priorities has been to give “Aboriginal people security”, “a sense of power and a sense of place within the legal system”.[16] A life-long activist and prominent voice against Aboriginal deaths in custody, he has also been a public speaker and an educator. From 1998 to 2011, Sam Watson worked at the University of Queensland, where he taught Black Australian Literature, Black Australian Politics, and became Deputy Director (2009-2013) of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit. His and the unit teaching included taking students on fieldtrips to significant places, such as the Glasshouse Mountains, Quandamooka (the Moreton Bay) and Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). At the time of the interview, I was taking his classes on Indigenous Literature. His soft-spoken tone and encouraging ethos was greatly appreciated by the students. One of my Australian classmates once commented that he was like a “teddy bear”, thus highlighting one of Watson’s notable traits that people who listen to his unwavering political voice in the media might not immediately discern. During the two years I took his classes – in 2003 and 2004 – some of the less expected points he raised during his classes included an invitation to students to write, the firm assertion that violence against women was unacceptable (he stated clearly that this was a problem that the Aboriginal community also needed to address), as well as his strong support for AustLit.

Watson has written two plays, The Mack (2007) and Oodgeroo – Bloodline to Country (2009). The Mack was performed at the Brisbane Judith Wright Centre in 2007. Oodgeroo was commissioned by La Boite Theatre and premiered at the Roundhouse Theatre for the 150th anniversary of the State of Queensland.[17] The tribute to Oodgeroo – also known as Kath Walker – was created with the involvement of her family and initially developed in collaboration with Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts.[18] Additionally, since 2006, Watson has collaborated with American artist, Dave Hullfish Bailey, on the multidimensional and sophisticated CityCat Project. Receiving the formal title of Maiwar Performance by Watson in 2014 (Maiwar is the Brisbane River), the project consists of choreographing, unbeknownst to the passengers, a “diversionary manoeuvre” aboard the Brisbane CityCat Ferries in the vicinity of sites of Aboriginal significance, where specific performances by Aboriginal people, at times Watson himself, as well as Torres Strait Islander people in the 2016 performance, are also staged.[19] Conducted with the cooperation of the Brisbane City Council, this ever-evolving performance has been staged on numerous occasions and been described by Watson as a “source of empowerment within the Aboriginal community” and a “manifestation of the Dreaming”.[20]

Watson’s political engagement led him to be a founding member of the Socialist Alliance Party. He was a Socialist Alliance candidate for the Senate in 2001, 2004, 2007, and for the Queensland State Election in 2009.

Sam Watson has been invited to talk internationally, notably in the United Kingdom, where he was a guest of the British Arts Council on three occasions; in Austria, where he travelled for a Commonwealth Languages Conference; in Spain, where he was a guest of the University in Sitges; and in Germany, where he gave a talk about CityCat Project 2006-2016 at the Berlin Nagel Draxl Galerie. In 2017, an essay he wrote was short-listed for the Donald Horne Prize. He is the current chairman of Link-Up (Qld) and continues to be dedicated to justice for Indigenous Australians and to empowering his community through political actions and the arts.[21]

The writer gives credit to his “mentor and wife, children, and a small group of friends” for the support he has received over the years.[22] Wherever Sam Watson is with his wife, Catherine, you will see them walking holding hands, a demonstration of affection they have enjoyed since they first started to date in November 1968. “We have been holding hands for fifty years”, Catherine reflected in Paris, France, in June 2017. Their son, Samuel Wagan Watson, is a renowned poet, and their daughter, Nicole Watson, is a law scholar, solicitor, and prize-winning writer. Across their extended family, they have thirty-five grandchildren.[23]

Estelle Castro-Koshy, College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia, January 2018.

[1] Karen Fletcher, “Sam Watson: A Life-long Fighter against Racism”, Green Left Weekly, 19 September 2001: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/sam-watson-life-long-fighter-against-racism, retrieved on 7 January 2018; Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson CityCat Project 2006-2016, David Prestorius, Rex Butler, Sally Butler, Michele Heimrich, Sternberg Press in partnership with Australian Fine Arts/David Pestorius, Berlin, 2017, p. 9.

[2] See Tim Stewart, “Indigenous activist’s long struggle for justice”, Green Left Weekly, 22 September 2004: http://radicaltimes.info/PDF/samWatson.pdf or https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/indigenous-activists-long-struggle-justice, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[3] See for example Tom Orsag, “1971 Springbrook Tour: When Campaigners Scored a Victory against Racism”, Solidarity.net.au, 21 September 2011: http://www.solidarity.net.au/aboriginal/1971-springbok-tour-when-campaigners-scored-a-victory-against-racism/, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[4] http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/home/bpp_program_platform.html, retrieved on 7 January 2018. See also Black Panther Woman, dir. Rachel Perkins, 2014, 52’.

[5] See http://www.nma.gov.au/indigenous/organisations/pagination/national_tribal_council, retrieved on 7 January 2018; for the “National Tribal Council, Policy Manifesto, adopted 13 September 1970), see The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights – A Documentary History, Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, Allen and Unwin, Corws Nest, 1999, p. 246-252.

[6] “Turning Point: It was the night they killed the song”, The Age, 19 November 1994, pp. 3-4.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Black Panther Woman, dir. Rachel Perkins, 2014, 52’; Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson CityCat Project 2006-2016, p. 12.

[9] In S. Robinson’s article “The Aboriginal Embassy: an Account of the Protests of 1972” (Aboriginal History, Vol. 18, No. 1/2, 1994, pp. 49-63), Robinson mentions that Sam Watson and Gary Foley were amongst the prominent activists who arrived every weekend:  http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p72441/pdf/article0712.pdf, retrieved 7 January 2018. Watson clarified that Foley and he were living at the Embassy. “Every weekend we would get visitors and supporters from Sydney and Melbourne.” Email from the author, January 2018.

[10] Email from the author, January 2018.

[11] Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson CityCat Project 2006-2016, p. 12. This declaration was made on 30 July 1972. For an interview with Watson on the 40th anniversary of the Embassy, see Jim McIlroy, “Aboriginal Activists Speak on Tent Embassy 40-year Milestone”, Green Left Weekly, 13 January 2012: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/aboriginal-activists-speak-tent-embassy-40-year-milestone, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[12] Including (non-exhaustively): Suzanne Baker, “Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Strategy: The Kadaitcha Sung”, SPAN, April no. 32, 1991, pp. 55-63; Suzanne Baker, “Binarisms and Duality: Magic Realism and Postcolonialism”, SPAN, October no. 36, 1993, pp. 82-87; Susan Lever, “The Bicentennial and the Millennium: The Dissident Voices of David Foster and Sam Watson”. In ‘And What Books Do You Read?’: New Studies in Australian Literature, edited by Irmtraud Petersson and Martin Duwell, UQP, St Lucia, 1996, pp. 101-11; Gareth Griffiths, “Representing Difference in Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung”, in Essays in Honour of Anna Rutherford, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier and Geoffrey V. Davis, Rodopi, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1996, pp. 471-84; Bronwyn Davies, “Reading and Writing The Kadaitcha Sung: A Novel by Sam Watson [with Sam Watson]”, in (In)scribing Body/Landscape Relations, ed. Bronwyn Davies, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2000, pp. 189-214; Kate Hall, “Harmony and Discord: Evocations of Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Australian Magical Realism”, Antithesis 14, 2004, pp. 111-23; Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori Literature, Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York, 2004; Estelle Castro, “Imaginary (Re)Vision: Politics and Poetics in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung and Eric Willmot’s Below the Line, Anglophonia no. 21, 2007, pp. 159-170; Kate Hall, “‘All Are Implicated’: Violence and Accountability in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung and Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise”, in Frontier Skirmishes: Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992, editors Russell West-Pavlov and Jennifer Wawrzinek, Winter Verlag, Heidelberg, 2010, pp. 199-216; Sally Butler, “Secrecy, Sensuality and Politics in the Writings and Spoken Word of Sam Watson”, in Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson CityCat Project 2006-2016, David Prestorius, Rex Butler, Sally Butler, Michele Heimrich, Sternberg Press in partnership with Australian Fine Arts/David Pestorius, Berlin, 2017, pp. 96-97; Iva Polak, Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction, Peter Lang, Oxford, 2017.

[13] Email from the author, January 2018.

[14] The introduction to the series in The Age, 19 November 1994 reads: “There are moments in a life that cause it to be looked at differently. A thought, a revelation, an unexpected event can change its direction forever.” The piece was republished in My First Love and Turning Points, ed. Graham Reilly, Albert Park, Victoria, Julie Morgan Marketing, 1995, pp. 127-31. I first heard this piece read by Sam Watson in Brisbane in 2003, at the Writers Speak Easy Cafe, a series of events featuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers, poets, performers, storytellers, and musicians, which Sam Watson had encouraged his students from the University of Queensland to attend. He then generously agreed to record his reading of this piece, which was provided with my PhD thesis. In recent years, Watson has stopped giving readings of this moving piece (discussion with Sam Watson, June 2017).

[15] Liz McNiven, “A Short History of Indigenous Filmmaking”, https://aso.gov.au/titles/collections/indigenous-filmmaking/, retrieved on 7 January 2018. For the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, see https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/indigenous-deaths-custody-report-summary, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[16] Elizabeth Dean, “An Interview with Sam Watson”, Famous Reporter #11, June 1995: http://walleahpress.com.au/int-watson.html, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[17] For a presentation of The Mack, see “Author Profile: Sam Watson”, Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature Project, editors Anita Heiss and Peter Minter: http://macquariepenanthology.com.au/SamWatson.html, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[18] Oodgeroo – Bloodline to Country was published in 2009 by Playlab, Brisbane, and includes 17 pages of Teachers’ Notes written by Hayley Milner and Saffron Benner.

[19] http://www.sternberg-press.com/?pageId=1734, retrieved on 7 January 2018. See page 29 for example, as well as pages 59-60 for Watson’s “reminiscence” entitled Kurilpa Point Sitting Down Place on the significance of one particular site on the river.

[20] Ibid., p. 30.

[21] See for example “Sam Watson: The Police Attack on the Aboriginal Sovereign Tent Embassy”, Green Left TV, 21 May 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uINVfR_ss7c, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[22] Elizabeth Dean, “An Interview with Sam Watson”, op. cit., http://walleahpress.com.au/int-watson.html, retrieved on 7 January 2018.

[23] “aged from 24 years to 7 years” as of mid-January 2018. Email from the author, January 2018.