Interviewer Renette Townsend (Indigenous Engagement and Quality Teaching).
Interviewer: Hello Samuel. Thank you for sharing your time and experience with us. I'm a Wiradjuri woman from western New South Wales.
Could you tell us where you come from?
Samuel Wagan Watson: Well, I'm a Brisbane boy. I have Birri Gubba and Mununjali blood and also my mother's people are German. So yeah I have a
mixture of cultures, which I use very well to bring out several different influences in my writing.
Interviewer: So Samuel how does one become a poet?
Samuel: By accident really. I set out to be a film maker, worked in the industry for years in Queensland: Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
I wanted to write screenplays, but it was my poetry that was really picked up and yeah, it's been a ten year period now on
solely working on poetry.
Interviewer: Did you start writing poems as a student?
Samuel: No, it was very limiting in Queensland what we were taught in schools about literature, especially writing. What we were taught
about poetry in Queensland was that poetry had to rhyme. It had to be in classical form-like stanzas. I prefer to write prose,
prose poetry that doesn't rhyme. It's more concentrating on telling a story and delivering a textual postcard to the reader.
Interviewer: Samuel, you've enjoyed a vast array of experiences in your life. How have they influenced your writing of your poems?
Samuel: Basically I think a good writer is one that has life experience. It's very hard I think to write in an academic kind of space,
so yeah, most of my writing comes from life experience, the various jobs. I've been, I've done things from fraud investigator
to steel fixer, security guard - all sorts of things. My poetry comes from little incidences I've either been in, or things
I've witnessed. Growing up in a household of storytellers, journalists and writers it was something that just came natural.
Interviewer: Samuel, your father is a well known political activist. What role did he play in your writing?
Samuel: When I was a kid, especially, I became very politically aware. As a child, Saturday afternoons were a special time in our
house. People from the labour movement in Queensland, people from the unions, black fellas and activists from the community
would come over for these wonderful Saturday afternoon barbies. You'd sort of hear Joe Cocker and that playing in the background,
Janis Joplin. And in the background were these really heavy political raps, and jokes, wonderful jokes. My dad and his mates,
they were really good with timing. They'd deliver their punch lines so well. I just used to sit there like a fly on the wall
and catch onto these conversations. I had a really healthy regime of Cheech and Chong albums when I was a kid and the simplicity
of Cheech and Chong and Bill Cosby. Those comedians themselves came from similar urban backgrounds to my own. Their jokes
revolved around communities like my own, that were not so much ghetto-ised but very much working class and I related to that
really well. I surprise university lecturers quite often when I'm pulled into a university and they ask me - they expect my
influences to be maybe, you know, Shakespeare or the great writers. But I'm like, 'No. It's Cheech and Chong and ACDC', that
kind of, working class spokesperson.
