Cars, Roads and Sharks - Why Colonisation was a God Tier Idea

 Welcome back aspiring poets! 

After last week's journey into post World War 1 modernism, this week we return closer to home to consider the work of local Brisbane poet Samuel Wagan Watson. Of course, anyone familiar with Wagan Watson's poetry will be familiar with the recurring theme of Australian identity and what it means to be Aboriginal in modern Australia, but have you ever noticed the frequent references to roads and cars? 

Wait, who is Samuel Wagan Watson you say?

Well if you've never pondered the multi-layered representation of Australian suburbia in "white stucco dreaming" or spent an afternoon lost in the enticing images of childhood innocence in "brown water looting" you are seriously missing out! Wagan Watson is a multi-award winning Australian poet of Aboriginal (Munanjali) and Irish/German descent. Born in 1972 and raised in Brisbane, his Smoke Encrypted Whispers (2015) won the New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year, the Kenneth Slessor Prize and is regularly studied by enthusiastic literature students in classrooms around Australia.

So you really don't want to wait on this!

Onward to roads and cars! A brief perusal of Smoke Encrypted Whispers immediately reveals a number of references to "bitumen" and "roads", street names such as "Boundary St" and "Brunswick St" and a variety of vehicles from "ambulances" and "police cars" to "18 wheelers", a panel van called a "black banana" and a... shark(?!)

The tone of these poems is sometimes mocking, but often grim, with distrubing references to death e.g. 

"a verse for the cheated" and even roadkill, like "the deadened crow with eternal lockjaw" in "a bent neck black and flustered feather mallee". So, what is this all about? Have we wandered onto the set of the latest Mad Max movie??

Historically, in Australia, we know that the laying of bitumen roads by British colonists, sometimes even along Aboriginal songlines, to allow access by cars and other vehicles and the building of fences and settlements was synonymous with Aboriginal poeple being dispossessed of their traditional lands, often by force. In Wagan Watson's poetry, roads and road vehicles are used to symbolise the impact on Aboriginal culture by colonisation, and the deep and lasting trauma suffered by the Aboriginal people as a result of this dispossession.

For example, in "last exit to brisbane", Wagan Watson uses personification and zoomorphism to depict the road and the earth as living things, the road being a "forged black scratch" and a "vein ... with a tail" - a vicious wound inflicting parasite - to graphically convey the damage caused to Aboriginal culture and the pain and trauma suffered by Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation. Watson goes on to use the daily passage of cars at "rush hour" over the "tar" of the road, keeping the "scar alive and the dead languages buried" as a metaphor for the ongoing suppression of Aboriginal culture by modern Australian society, keeping alive a scar which festers to this day.

The reference to the street name "Boundary St" - a real street, look it up! - is a reference to the historic politics of segregation and forced assimilation, but also to the fact that Aboriginal people continue to suffer discrimination and disadvantage in modern Australia, as the ''boundary continues to stay true to its makers" preventing "access to Easy St", another street name used as a metaphor for the advantages and opportunities freely available to non-Aboriginal Australians.

In "ghosts of boundary st", the protagonist mockingly describes his experience of "trekking down Boundary St" in the quiet heat of a New Year's morning, the only moment of the "Australian social calendar when every citizen is almost equal", united in being "hungover", when "a lone shark hooked the rise" in front of him, "tearing through the glutinous skin of the Dreamtime and Earth". This representation of a car as a predatory and destructive animal, tearing out of control down a suburban street, carrying "faceless" passengers, which the protagonist does not bother to acknowledge, is a metaphor for the mindless destruction of Aboriginal culture by colonisation and highlights the failure by the colonists to recognise a pre-existing culture, tens of thousands of years old, with a spiritual connection to the land and is also symbolic of a society which continues to keep this culture suppressed beneath the "bitumen". 

The road itself is represented as being littered with coffee cups blowing across the gutters and a puddle "decorated" by a "petrol-based rainbow". This pollution of the environment is symbolic of the long-term damagee caused by colonisation to Aboriginal culture and is also a criticism of the modern Australian way of life. As the protagonist notes "oil takes longer to evaporate" and in the same way, the pain and trauma suffered by Aboriginal people will take centuries or generations to eradicate.

The idea of nature and Aboriginal culture being mindlessly destroyed by colonisation is further explored in "we're not trucking around". In this poem, Wagan Watson criticises the "Invader's" arrogance in thinking they could "simply mimic creation and plough through this land" - 

- instead in their ignorance, and without "license" they "drove right through the bora-ring and knocked our phone off the hook forever", driving home the point (pun intended!) that colonisation not only destroyed centuries of Aboriginal culture including ceremonial sacred sites, but that by doing so, cut off Aboriginal people's traditional connection to the land, their spiritual source of life and culture. As a result, Aboriginal people have been forced to "stand out on the shoulder of te road looking for a lift" - 

- or in other words, dispossessed and marginalised, not wishing to live this "18-wheeler" alien way of life, but forced to de so on the fringes of modern Australian society. Despite this, this poem does not end definitively on a tone of anger or bitterness. The protagonist notes that his people are used to "feeling kinship with the discarded" and would now rather choose to "watch and observe" from the shoulders of the road how the "lead-foots", or invaders, fend for themselves in 

"the encroaching Absalom before us all - an electonic highway"

A cryptic warning perhaps? That modern Australia is heading for disaster in our relentless pursuit for technological progress at the expense of nature and spirituality?! 

I leave that for you to decide!

Thanks for joining me, and until next week - drive safe!!

(Word count 1075)

Eirwyn Siford