AustLit

Akhurst reads a poem inspired by Sam Watson's novel The Kadaitcha Sung and explains its genesis and the importance of the book to his own writing.

'Sam Watson is a well-known activist, lecturer, poet, novelist, playwright and film producer from the Birri-Gubba and Munaldjali nations. He belongs to the generation of Aboriginal activists and spokespeople who paved the way for future generations, with his active engagement in 1960s political activism against the White Australia Policy, the 1967 Referendum, the Gurindji land rights struggle, and more recently, advancing Aboriginal access to legal, medical and housing services. Amidst these political and cultural engagements, Watson wrote The Kadaitcha Sung . The novel was published in 1990 and generated a cornucopia of responses. As a “pre Master-of-the- Ghost-Dreaming ” novel, The Kadaitcha Sung was an Aboriginal literary novum, as there was nothing to prepare the reader for such a hybridity of genres used to speak bluntly about colonisation. Even when Mudrooroo’s Master appeared a year later, in 1991, the magical realist work was an easy read compared to Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung . This contributed to one of the novel’s distinctive aspects: even though it has long since been out of print, it is still being discussed by new generations of scholars. No other pre twenty-first-century Aboriginal novel has attracted attention for so long.'

'In the opening pages of The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), Todorov evokes the image of a tiger to draw a parallel between changes in the biological and literary “species”:

Being familiar with the species tiger, we can deduce from it the properties of each individual tiger; the birth of a new tiger does not modify the species in its definition. […] The same is not the case in the realm of art or of science. Here evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm: every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species. (6)'  (Introduction)