AustLit

'In Sam Watson's first novel, The Kadaitcha Sung, the sacrosanct traditional concepts of 'Law' and `Business', firmly anchored in land and Aboriginal oratory, are given an additional contemporary meaning through print. It reaches from the realm of time immemorial directly into the political arena of a 1990s Australia or, in terms specific to Watson's narrative, from bora ring to city perimeter, from the sacred into the profane. There is an elegant twist inherent in this transition, however, because once sacred space makes its entry into profane place — the margin on which most Aboriginal people live today — its immense power to influence contemporary Aboriginal thinking is upgraded. The revisioning of the sacred, or, one might say, the re-adaptation of Law and Business to the public sphere of everyday life, effects a compelling re-politicization of the culture of Dreaming. ' (Introduction)