Sam Watson: Socialist Alliance Senate candidate in Queensland

Issue 

Sam Watson is a well known Aboriginal leader and community activist based in Brisbane. Sam first became politically active as a high school student during the late 1960s, when radical students from across Brisbane used to gather outside the post office to hear speakers denouncing injustice. "It was there that I heard Communist Party [of Australia] speakers talk about the White Australia policy from a worker's perspective." Sam helped gather signatures to demand a referendum on including Aboriginal people in the census. When Sam enrolled at the University of Queensland he was the only Aboriginal student on campus.

His student activism spanned the burning issues of the day, from support for the landmark Gurindji strike of Aboriginal workers in the Northern Territory to the famous "freedom bus rides" and the campaign to establish a network of Aboriginal legal aid and housing organisations in Queensland during the early 1970s. Influenced by the radical leadership of the movement to end Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, Sam became a socialist. "I realised that the struggle of my people was not a race struggle, but one facet of a broader class struggle".

As the deputy director of the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Study Centre at UQ, Sam lectures in Indigenous Australian literature. His loving partner of many years, their two adult children and eight grandchildren are part of an extended family with blood ties to two Aboriginal nations and the Torres Straight Islander people. Sam was the lead Senate candidate for the Socialist Alliance in Queensland in the 2001 federal election and will front the alliance's Senate team in the 2004 election.

From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
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