YEAR 12 ATAR LITERATURE
Samuel Wagan Watson
(Samuel Wagan Watson – Words, n.d.)
INTRODUCTION
Samuel Wagan Watson is an award-winning Indigenous poet and professional raconteur. Born in Brisbane in 1972, he is of Munanjali, Birri Gubba, German and Irish descent. Samuel’s first collection of poems won the 1999 David Unaipon Award. His fourth collection, Smoke Encrypted Whispers won the 2005 NSW Premier’s Award for the Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor poetry prize.
(University Queensland Press, 2021).
*Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that some of the resources on these pages may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons in photographs, film, audio recordings or printed material.
Created by: Ms Bright | Last updated: Feb 1, 2021
QUICK LINKS
Not freely available on the Internet
Freely available
BIMA Vision. (n.d.). Bound in Bitumen [Video]. https://vimeo.com/28650793
The Author
WEBSITES
Brennan, M. (2011). Samuel Wagan Watson. https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/19572/Samuel-Wagan-Watson/en/tile
This websites provide some brief biographical information, along with commentary about his poetry, with reference to ‘Gas Tank Sonnets’ and ‘Hotel Bone’.
Ladd, M. (2015, July 6). Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson on new book, Love Poems and Death Threats. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/love-poems-and-death-threats/6597276
Mike Ladd talks to one of his favourite Australian poets, Samuel Wagan Watson. He discusses his tensions with his Indigenous identity, the influence of Japanese verse on his poetry and the capacity to love and hate in the same breath.
SYDNEY WRITERS FESTIVAL – 2008 (VIDEO)
In this segment of the 2008 Sydney Writers Festival Samual Wagan Watson speaks about his influences and inspirations.
A RESPONSE TO THE 2008 APOLOGY (VIDEO)
Sam Wagan Watson recalls working as a security supervisor on an industrial site the night before the Apology, the political implications and how he came to process the meaning of the Prime Minister’s speech.
The Poetry
POEMS ON THE LIBRARY SHELF
A821.4 GUW
Watson, S.W. (2004). Smoke encrypted whispers. University of Queensland Press.
These poems pulse with the language and images of a mangrove-lined river city, the beckoning highway, the just-glimpsed muse, the tug of childhood and restless ancestors. For the first time Samuel Wagan Watson’s poetry has been collected into this stunning volume, which includes a final section of all new work.
A821.4 GUW
Watson, S.W. (2014). Love poems and death threats. University of Queensland Press.
This collection of poems is both wild and dynamic in its flair and vision, mapping the songlines – the poemlines – of an Australia scarred by invasion and injustice, but brimming, too, with the vital energies of creativity and resilience. With striking immediacy, Watson’s often satirical take on contemporary Australia, with its acquisitiveness and materialism, bears witness to an ancient culture protesting against the implacable march of development. From one of Australia’s most recognised Indigenous poets, this collection reveals the ways love might go wrong, but, equally, its transformative power to heal and resonate in unexpected ways.
A821.4 GUW
Leane, J. (2020). Guwayu, for all times : A Collection of First Nations poems. Magabala Books.
A collection of First Nations poems commissioned by Red Room Poetry over the past 16 years, and is a radical literary intervention for its breadth of representation, temporal depth and diversity of language. This fiercely uncensored collection features 61 poems from First Nations poets in 12 First Nations languages, and together they are an exquisite expression of living First Nations culture. Journey through a range of poetic forms from lyric, confessional, protest, narrative and song, showcasing new voices and established poets.
POEMS – ONLINE
Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). Samuel Wagan Watson. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samuel-wagan-watson
Features the poems:
- Booranga Wire Songs
- A one ended boomerang
Poetry International Archives. (n.d.). Poems. https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poems/filter/country/15/page/6/en/tile
This page links to various poems by Samuel Wagan Watson. Including:
- From: Of muse, meandering and midnight… (1999)
‘The crooked men’
‘Carefree’
‘Midnight’s Boxer’
‘White Stucco Dreaming’ - From: Itinerant Blues (2002)
‘The Dusk Sessions’
‘Fire’ - From: Smoke Encrypted Whispers (2004)
‘Smoke signals’
- From: The Cursed Words (2011)
‘Love Poem’
‘Apocalyptic Quatrains’
‘Throw salt’
Red Room Poetry. (2021). Sam Wagan Watson. https://redroomcompany.org/poet/sam-wagan-watson/
Listen to Samuel Wagan Watson recite the following poems and click though to the Rhyming The Dead radio episode for an interview with the poet.
Watson, S. W. (2001). Cold Storage. Literary Review, 45(1), 108.
The poem “Cloud burst” by Samuel Wagan Watson is presented.
LOVE POEMS AND DEATH THREATS (RADIO BROADCAST)
Ladd, M. (2015, July 5). Love poems and death threats [Radio broadcast episode]. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/love-poems-and-death-threats2c-the-poetry-of-samuel-wagan-wats/6532358
Recorded in front of the audience at the 2015 Adelaide Writers’ Week, Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson performs poems from his award-winning collection Smoke encrypted whispers and his new collection Love Poems and Death Threats and has a conversation with producer Mike Ladd.
List of poems:
- From: Smoke encrypted whispers (2004)
‘white stucco dreaming’
‘revolver’ - From: Love Poems and Death Threats (2014)
‘the light of two fires’
‘black tracker, black writer, black subject’
‘the grounding sentence’
‘throw salt’
HISTORY MEETS POETRY (RADIO BROADCAST)
National Musuem Australia. (2007, November 4). History meet poetry [Audio podcast episode]. https://www.nma.gov.au/audio/historical-imagination-series/history-meets-poetry
National Museum curator Margo Neale, historian and Indigenous biographer Peter Read and poet and writer Sam Wagan Watson discuss Indigenous issues and the intersection between historical research and imagination. Transcript available also.
Featured poems:
- ‘Midnight’s Boxer.’
- ‘Last Exit to Brisbane’
- ‘Crib Island’
REVIEWS
Heiss, A. (2004). Review: ‘Home’ and ‘Smoke Encrypted Whispers’. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2004/08/01/review-home-and-smoke-encrypted-whispers/
Obviously autobiographical, the work follows the journey of Watson as a writer, a traveller, a lover, and as an urban dweller in Brisbane. His journey covers miles of bitumen, observes numerous muses, includes a number of writer’s festivals and delves into the poet’s life as a child.
Rockel, A. (2005). Smoke encrypted whispers by Samuel Wagan Watson. http://jacketmagazine.com/27/rock-waga.html
The title of this collection of new and selected poems describes a series of permutations that drift through the work: the idea of language as smoke — shapeshifting product of combustion, transformed material; the idea of transformation as generator of language; the idea of language as breath, life.
POETICA PODCAST
Ulman, J., & Stapleton, R. (Producers). (2005). On the Road (Part 1): Samuel Wagan Watson and Martin Harrison [Audio Podcast]. https://www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/features/pod/poets/
harrisonwatson1.htm
In this edition, we’re taking a literary road trip with poets Martin Harrison and Samuel Wagan Watson.
In 2005, these two writers got together to read and discuss their work, both privately and with an audience at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Their readings form a conversation, a dialogue of poems, as they travel through urban and outback landscapes, noting the imagery of life on the road from their different perspectives.
Featured poems:
- ‘a bent neck black and flustered feather mallee’
- ‘the thousand-yard stare’
- ‘Trudging footsteps’
- ‘3 a.m. escape’
- ‘the golden skin of cowgirls’
- ‘deo optimo maximo’
- ‘gas tank sonnets’
- ‘hotel bone’
And for more CLICK HERE for Part II of On the Road.
‘DEO OPTIMO MAXIMO’ – DISCUSSION
Woodleigh Year 12 English. (2020, October 21). Episode 47 – Unit 4 VCE LITERATURE: Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘deo optimo maximo’. https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/vceenglishwoodleighschool/episodes/2020-10-20T22_47_12-07_00
English teachers discussing this poem. Search this site for more podcasts about Sam Wagan Watson’s poems. Includes: ‘Magnesium girl’, ‘Smoke signals’, ‘night racing’, ‘labelled’, ‘jetty nights’, ‘for the wake and skeleton dance’.
Wider Reading & Viewing
ERESOURCES – JOURNAL ARTICLES
McCredden, L. (2007). Contemporary Poetry and the Sacred: Vincent Buckley, Les Murray and Samuel Wagan Watson. Australian Literary Studies, 23(2), 153–167.
This article offers poetry criticism of works by poets Vincent Buckley, Les Murray, and Sam Wagan Watson, focusing on the theme of sacredness in poetry. The author analyzes poems including “Golden Builders,” by Buckley,” “Nocturne,” by Murray, and “The Dingo Lounge,” by Watson. Topics include ambivalence, arrogance, and humility in the poems, as well as the themes of prophecy, sorrow, and Christianity. Follow the link above click on ‘PDF Fulltext’ to access the article.
This essay argues that understanding the locatedness of poetry is crucial as a measure by which to sift the high rhetorics of national, cosmopolitan, globalising discourses. In an analysis of the poetry of Indigenous writers Tony Birch, Sam Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, and of the Federal Government’s Apology to the Stolen Generations, we can see more clearly the role of literature, and particularly poetry, in debates between the local and the global.
Search these databases for more.
FREE ARTICLES ONLINE
Bode, K. (2011). ‘We’re not truckin’ around’: On and off-road in Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Retrieved from http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p152901/pdf/ch071.pdf
Cars and roads traverse the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson, a self-identified Aboriginal man of Bundjalung, Birri Gubba, German and Irish ancestry. The narrator/s of the poems in Smoke Encrypted Whispers are repeatedly on the road or beside it, and driving is employed as a metaphor for everything from addiction and memory to the search for love. Road kill litters the poems, while roads come to life, cars become men, and men have ‘gas tanks that can’t see empty’. Watson’s poetry has received significant critical attention and acclaim: his ‘haunting, uncanny, layered poetics of history’ and depiction of ‘colonial degradation’ have been explored, and his poems—including those featuring cars and roads—have been analysed in relation to such themes as the sacred, locatedness, and creative processes.
Watson, S.W., Gomez, E., Quian, J., & Carruthers, A. (2016). (2016). Four perspectives on race and racism in Australian poetry. Overland. https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-222/feature-four-perspectives/
Scroll down this page for Samuel Wagan Watson’s reflection on race in the world today and, specifically, on the ways that racism manifests in the intellectual and literary fields, particularly in poetry, where thought and representation are crystallised and magnified.
References
Aboriginal dot painting [Image]. (n.d.). https://meditativemind.org/11-amazingly-beautiful-aboriginal-dot-art-wallpapers-for-your-phone/
Samuel Wagan Watson header portrait [Image]. (n.d.). https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/love-poems-and-death-threats/6597276
Samuel Wagan Watson -Words [Image]. (n.d.). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samuel-wagan-watson