Sam Watson (activist)


Samuel William Watson was an Aboriginal Australian activist and a socialist politician. Through work at the Brisbane Aboriginal Legal Service in the early nineties, Watson was involved in implementing the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. In December 2009, Watson was appointed a deputy director at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland and taught two courses in Black Australian Literature. He was also a writer and a filmmaker. He received honours for his 1990 novel The Kadaitcha Sung.

Life

Watson was the grandson of Sam Watson who was of the Birri Gubba tribe. His grandfather worked in ring-barking camps and saved enough money to hire a lawyer to release him from the Aboriginal Protection Act. He was one of the first Aboriginal people to achieve this status. Watson's son is the poet Samuel Wagan Watson.
Watson died at a hospital in Brisbane on 27 November 2019.

Career

Through work at the Brisbane Aboriginal Legal Service in the early nineties, Watson was involved in implementing the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The film Black Man Down is a fictionalized exploration of the commission's findings.
Watson ran as the candidate of the Socialist Alliance in the 2004 and 2007 federal election in Queensland. He was a candidate for that party at the 2009 state election for the seat of South Brisbane, running against the ALP state premier Anna Bligh. Watson received 344 votes. He represented the Socialist Alliance again as a candidate for the Senate in the 2010 federal election, where he received 3,806 votes.
In December 2009, Watson was appointed a deputy director at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland and taught two courses in Black Australian Literature. He is also a writer and a filmmaker. He won the National Indigenous Writer of the Year Award in 1991 for his 1990 novel The Kadaitcha Sung and acclaim for his 1995 film Black Man Down.
In October 2009, the supermarket chain Coles announced that it would rename its house brand line of "Creole Creams" biscuits following a statement by Watson that "the word Creole comes from a period when people's humanity was measured by the amount of white blood they had in their bloodstream. This is the same kind of thought that underpinned horrific regimes like the Nazis." This reading of the word "creole" was rejected by the Australian academic linguist Roland Sussex who could find no basis for this claim.
Watson's essay, Blood on the Boundary, shortlisted for the 2017 Horne Prize, was highly commended by the judges who commented that it "stands out for its vigour, for its muscularity and recklessness of style. It is also very funny, in its own weird way".

Works