Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Reconciliation) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to record the passing of Mr Sam Watson, an Aboriginal man from Brisbane of the Munnenjari and Biri Gubba Juru nations. He died in a Brisbane hospital last Wednesday after a short illness. He was just 67 and I extend my deepest sympathy to his family and to his relations.

Mr Watson was a rebel with many causes, proud to call himself an activist. He was a leader who never shrank from confrontation. He stood passionately for justice, especially for the rights of First Nations people. For many decades he was on the frontline of protests for Aboriginal rights, and not just in his home state of Queensland. He grew up in the era of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his zealous bureaucrat, Mr Killoran, who were both determined to subjugate First Nations people in Queensland and to choke any drift towards self-determination.

Even as a schoolboy, Mr Watson was ever ready to call out discrimination. As a student at Mount Gravatt State High School, he railed against the White Australia policy and fought, literally, those who were baiting Asian students. He signed up to campaigns against the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa. In 1971, with the late Dennis Walker, he founded the Australian Black Panthers party. Together, they declared the party to be, 'the vanguard for all depressed people.' In Australia they said, 'The Aboriginals are the most depressed of all.'

Inspired by the American Black Panthers, they made demands for equality of treatment in education, health and legal representation; the abolishing of discriminatory legislation; an end to police harassment; and the simple right to live without racism. Just as the American Black Panthers were monitored by the FBI, the activities of the Australian chapter were closely tracked by ASIO and by the infamous Special Branch of the Queensland Police Service—back then, a deeply corrupt organisation, rotten from the top down. In 1972, aged 19, Mr Watson was down here in Canberra, lending his weight to the protest at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in the grounds of Old Parliament House. He worked as a full-time staffer at the embassy.

Throughout his life he was a staunch defender of the legal rights of First Nations people. He was an important player in the establishment of Aboriginal legal services in his home state and beyond. He worked at the Brisbane Aboriginal Legal Service in the early 1990s, campaigning to implement the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. And he took to the streets to demand justice when Mr Doomadgee died in police custody on Palm Island in 2004.

Politics always held an attraction for Mr Watson. He was a co-founder of the first Aboriginal and Islander political party—the Australian Indigenous People's Party—and contested both state and federal elections. Later, he was a founding member of the Socialist Alliance party, for which he contested Senate elections in Queensland.

But Mr Watson was much more than a committed protester and activist; he was a man of letters and a man of the arts. He won the National Indigenous Writer of the Year Award in 1991 for his novel The Kadaitcha Sung and was short-listed for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. He was in demand at writers festivals, and, as Deputy Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland, he taught courses in black Australian literature. He was a filmmaker and he wrote for the stage. In 1994 he wrote and co-produced his first film, Black Man Down. It was included in the award-winning From Sand to Celluloid collection of Indigenous short films and screened to audiences across the globe. The lives of First Nations peoples in Queensland—(Time expired)