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Cars and roads traverse the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson, a self-identified Aboriginal man of Bundjalung, Birri Gubba, German and Irish ancestry.1 The narrator/s of the poems in Smoke Encrypted Whispers are repeatedly on the road or beside it, and driving is employed as a metaphor for everything from addiction2 and memory3 to the search for love.4 Road kill litters the poems,5 while roads come to life,6 cars become men,7 and men have 'gas tanks that can't see empty'.8 Watson's poetry has received significant critical attention and acclaim: his 'haunting, uncanny, layered poetics of history' and depiction of 'colonial degradation' have been explored, and his poems-including those featuring cars and roads-have been analysed in relation to such themes as the sacred,9 locatedness,10 and creative processes.11 Given the extent to which cars and roads dominate Watson's poetry, it is notable, however, that his use of both to explore and resist 'colonial degradation' has not received sustained attention. This neglect is even more apparent in light of the critical focus on the use of cars and roads to represent-or deny-colonialism and its aftermath in broader Australian cultural discourse, especially film. Roads were fundamental to the colonisation of Australia, and the inscription of European ownership of that space,12 and, in some remote parts of the country, 'European incursions...were experienced almost simultaneously with cars and trucks'.13 As a number of critics have discussed, this historical relationship of cars, roads and colonialism is deployed extensively in Australian films to allegorise and enable colonialism, as in the Mad Max trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985),14 and more recently, Japanese Story (2003). 15 In contrast, films and television series such as Backroads (1977), Wrong Side of the Road (1983), Bush Mechanics (2001), Confessions of a Headhunter (2000), Beneath Clouds (2002) and Lucky Miles (2007) are seen to use cars and roads to represent and critique colonialism and to assert Aboriginal identity and culture.16 Watson's poems clearly belong in this second category of representing and resisting rather than denying or celebrating colonialism. This article explores the specific and complex ways in which he employs roads and cars in Smoke Encrypted Whispers. Watson clearly identifies these technologies with the settler/invader, and his descriptions of the damage wrought by cars and roads signify the devastating and ongoing effects of colonialism on Aboriginal people and culture. At the same time, his poems almost always hold out possibilities for resistance to colonialism and hope for the future. The important thing about these possibilities, however, is that they cannot be separated from the technologies of colonialism. Rather than distancing his Aboriginal narrators from cars and roads - a fantasy of a return to pre-colonial times that would, in effect, contain and constrain Aboriginal subjectivity in the past - Watson depicts them in various relationships with and critical attitudes towards these technologies. Thus, waiting by the side of the road, or moving onto or along it, expresses possibilities for Aboriginal subjectivity. One thing these poems do reject, however, is the ideological version of history implied by the linear road trip. For Watson, just as contemporary Aboriginal subjectivity cannot be separated from modern technology (or from colonialism), nor can it be severed from the past. Refusing or fearing the past, in these poems, divorces Aboriginal people from the land and their culture. Instead, Watson insists on an Aboriginal subjectivity that is deeply connected to the past, present and future, and which gains its potency and political power precisely through these multiple connections. Throughout Smoke Encrypted Whispers, Watson employs roads to symboUse colonialism and to explore its effects on Aboriginal people and culture. In 'last exit to brisbane...',17 the road - 'Boundary St/that forged black scratch' - inscribes colonial definitions and inequaUties on the land. …

‘we’re not truckin’ around’: On and off-road in Samuel Wagan Watson’s Smoke Encrypted Whispers