I’ve perhaps known Sam a little bit longer than Liam, but not by much. At least we always got Sam’s age right…. I think? The 1990s in West End, Brisbane, Queensland will be remembered for its launch of the literary careers of many outstanding, young, Australian poets. Sam was foremost among this new generation of poets who started off reading their work like everyone else at café open mike nights at Metro Arts or at Chalice Poets in Woolloongabba or at No Boundaries at the Boundary St Hotel in West End, and at various fringe arts festivals at Sailing Clubs, Leagues Clubs, the Princess Theatre, Avid Reader and the Sitting Duck Café; who then stuck with us to read at the Subverse: Queensland Poetry Festival and later at events such as Brisbane Writers Festival.
Sam was and still is one of the most generous of all poets I’ve ever met. Time generous. He will do anything for a mate, for a fellow poet, or for a Writers Centre in need of an urgent master class. Jump in his car and take off to help someone out like a turbocharged Kerouac or Cassidy, hitting the road like a guitar riff or like a poetry superhero whose fabulous powers for good originate from his selflessness and kind-heartedness. I’ve shared Sam’s poetry, his generosity, his family’s grace, his wine, even in times past, the cool linoleum floors of his various West End share houses.
Sam’s publication career continues to impress. In 1999 his first collection, Of Muse Meandering and Midnight won the David Unaipon Award and was published by UQP. This was followed by Hotel Bone published by Vagabond Press in the Rare Object Series in 2001. That was number 34. It is wonderful to see Sam return to this important poetry series a decade later. A third major collection, Itinerant Blues published by UQP followed in 2002. In 2004, UQP published Smoke Encrypted Whispers which won the NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards – Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize and in 2005 Picaro Press published a fifth collection, Three Legged Dogs and other Poems.
I worked with Sam and Liz Hall-Downs in 1996 on the Black Fellas White Fellas and Wetlands website project which had our asses in the grass at Boondall writing about the European, Indigenous and natural history of that area. Indeed, themes which Sam tapped into then are still prevalent in this sixth collection – The Curse Words, published again by Michael Brennan of Vagabond Press in the Rare Object Series. This is number 60.
Sam is a hard poet who moves through the Australian contemporary cultural landscape; through time, place and experience, motoring over mainstream Australia’s moral decay and reporting back from the frontlines like a J.D. Salinger or a Robert Kappa from the D-Day landings of his Mununjali and Birra Gubba background and identity.
Sam’s poetry has always explored his ‘white stucco dreaming’ – to coin a phrase from an earlier book – a city boy who grew up immersed in the invader culture’s trashy, kitsch values which overtook his people’s graceful imagination and unique connection to the land. He has watched the songlines of his ancient and familial clans replaced by our stuccoed cultural façades. He has seen the white, painted lines on broken bitumen highways supplant Aboriginal tracks that had been used for thousands of years; seen the white, lime strips circling boundary line fences exchange with the stones and mounded earth of bora rings, and the white chalk marks of handball courts on school playgrounds substitute for corroboree. But enough is enough. The poet must put the hard word on the White culture that has turned him into as he says, ‘the most ignorant savage of them all’.
As Sam advocates in the poem, The Grounding Sentence, ‘For too long I have listened to the wind as it is spoken by passing semi-trailers and luxury cars. For too long I have complacently existed on these killing fields and built a house of straw in the down-wind of the enemy.’ This collection then is the Muhammad Ali feint, the 5 round ‘roper doper’ of Sam’s voice as a poet. Sam has taken everything the dominant culture can throw at him in his earlier collections and absorbed it. Now with The Curse Words he lashes out from the ropes and bludgeons his younger, fitter and stronger aggressor culture into painful humiliation. This is a poetic rumble in the jungle.
As Sam suggests in the first poem of the collection, Apocalyptic Quatrains – “The dark skin ripped apart/perished seeds of the Dreamtime/to the new crops of the Invader/blood furrows this occupied soil of neo-pestilence”. The ‘new crops of the Invader’ are White Australian economic, cultural and social ideals that have been transposed over Indigenous Australia to the detriment of the first people. From the stolen generation to the NT intervention, White Australia has sought over the last 220 years to dominate Indigenous way of life, like a new teacher in a country school laying down their university learnt behaviour management to mature age students who don’t need to graduate from their dodgy board subject.
The ‘neo-pestilence’ is the moral plague of the Australian Wheat Board Iraq Bribery scandal, where the AWB allegedly paid bribes to the Iraqi government for beneficial treatment in negotiating wheat sales. It bemuses Sam that wheat grown on the stolen land of his ancestors, on the ‘occupied soil’, a morally bankrupt act in itself, should be centre stage in an Australian corruption inquiry, where the white stuccoed ideal of a ‘fair go for all’ becomes a ‘fair go for some’.
This moral decay or ‘neo-pestilence’ continues in the poem, Terror (Welcome to No man’s Land) when Sam suggests that mainstream Australia’s expert efforts in the ‘war on terror’ over the last decade, have their roots in how White Australia has terrorised its own Indigenous population over the last 200 years. The poems recounts how good governments are at evolving semantics to create their special breed of ‘curse words’ to occupy the moral high ground in controversial issues, as in the David Hicks case when ‘POWs’ became ‘Enemy Combatants’, so prisoners could be held without trial for more than 5 years in detention.
You can still see the galling evidence of this negative bureaucratic spin in Australia from an earlier age, driving over licentious landmarks such as ‘Black Shoot Creek’ near the Hinze Dam on the Gold Coast.
‘There’s no place like home’ says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, yet what if you realised that the home, the home you thought you grew up in, the home you sat and watched test cricket in, the home you thought you knew and were a part of, was really stuccoed over with the blood of your ancestors?
In the last poem of the collection, There’s no place like home… the reader lands in Parallel Oz, not Dorothy’s brightly coloured and dancing/singing extravaganza with Munchkins and wicked witches, but a nastier Australian universe where, ‘The yellow brick road is pockmarked with massacre sites’. These are fighting words; rare curse words from an Australian poetry heavyweight.
Sam Wagan Watson is arguably one of the most important Indigenous poets in Australian poetry today, as evidenced by the development of his seething and mordant contemporary voice.
The pugilistic tone of The Curse Words packs a powerful social punch that will knock the stucco right off White Australia’s hegemonic dreaming.
I hereby declare, “The Curse Words” launched like an Ali right hook.
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