Melba Recordings

Samuel Wagan Watson

Samuel Wagan Watson was born in 1972 in Brisbane but spent much of his childhood on the Sunshine Coast, north of the city. He is of Munanjali, BirriGubba, German, Scottish and Irish descent.

It is not surprising that Samuel is passionate about Indigenous matters and, given that he comes from a longstanding activist family, that he is also interested in working class issues. His great-grandfather was sold into bondage to a white station owner in central Queensland. He was one the first Aboriginal people to be freed from the Aboriginal Protection Act, having worked to get enough money to hire a lawyer. Wagan Watson’s father was a pioneering Indigenous student at the University of Queensland in 1971. A prominent Murri activist, he is a writer, has been a lecturer at the University of Queensland in black Australian literature and an organiser and speaker at many protests.

The Watsons are a family with writers in a variety of genres. Wagan Watson’s father has written much on activist issues over the years and a novel, The Kadaitcha Sung. His sister, Nicole, recently published a novel, The Boundary.

He cites music as a major influence on his work. He gives credit to Johnny Cash, Iggy Pop and the Warumpi Band as formative in his development. Other major interests include Tom Waits, particularly for taking risks with collaboration, and Robert Johnston and his delta blues. He has been involved in collaborations with musicians and bands over the years, even as far away as with a Saami band in Norway.

His first collection of poetry, of muse, meandering and midnight, won the 1999 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers. In 2001, he published a collection of ‘road poems’, titled itinerant blues and a chapbook hotel bone for Vagabond Press. He is also the co-author of the award-winning website, ‘blackfellas, whitefellas, wetlands’. In 2004 his previously published poetry was included in a volume smoke encrypted whispers along with the new poems included on this CD. This collection won the 2005 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry Book of the Year in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. He has also received a Highly Commended in both the Anne Elder Awards and the 2000 Award for Outstanding Contributions to Australian Culture.

Samuel has toured around the world, reading his poetry in Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Germany and Norway. Samuel is also a writer for one of Australia’s most established Indigenous radio stations, 98.9FM Murri Country. (Murri is the collective term for the Indigenous people of South East Queensland.) His poetry, which has a strong ‘on the road’ flavour, features his travels. His work is anchored in local specifics but reaches out internationally, even into space. He was commissioned by the Japanese Aeronautical Exploration Agency to write haiku for the pleasure of the astronauts on the International Space Platform.

Some of Wagan Watson’s poetry focuses on the West End area of Brisbane where Boundary Street acts as a reminder of the boundary which excluded Murris during curfew periods. He draws parallels in the poetry between this infamous boundary and the Berlin Wall to bring home the oppression of his people. However, it would be inaccurate to pigeonhole his work as purely political. There is a much wider aesthetic in play:

All good wordsmiths get ‘the thousand-yard stare’. That’s when you’re looking beyond the page. Some writers never cross beyond the second or third dimension of a page… After words are yanked from the pool in my head, I hang them out on the ‘wire’ to dry, and then after the sun goes down, I throw them on the ‘rack’ and stretch them out a bit. (author’s notes #2)

Issues about consciousness exist in the poetry alongside gritty realisations of lived reality. Many critics have commented on the ‘whispers’ of the title: how the meanings of the poems reverberate between themselves in an implied, subterranean dialogue between layers of reality and time.

While there is much that is recognisable in Samuel’s work, it also takes us beyond his personal history into the collective cosmos of Queensland’s Murri people and their cultural world. This gives the work a resonance beyond its already profound exploration of personal dilemmas. Shifting between the very physical reality and an allusive, numinous dimension, Wagan Watson moves us into worlds with which we might be unfamiliar:

Doorways whistling breezes, a cadence of toothless old skeletons that filtered the smoke encrypted whispers of this mass grave. I think of those whispers every time my plane lands on the unmarked tombstones of one of Brisbane’s least known burial grounds. (cribb island)

Though his work is very serious, it isn’t without a strong sense of fun. As his son says in ‘rip’, ‘Look here Dad…I’m playing with your memories!’ In experiencing Wagan Watson’s poetry, we get the opportunity to do the same.

Bruce Simms