Chemistry, Skeletons and... Dostoyevsky?!

an elemental analysis of "for the wake and skeleton dance"

"Textual chemist". If you search up Samuel Wagan Watson, these are likely to be some of the first words that come up to describe him. After a few more minutes of reading, you may be pleased – or disappointed, I don’t know – to discover that he does not, in fact, wear safety classes, swirl conical flasks or write dense academic papers. 

Fig. 1: A very 100% genuinely real photo
of today's author, Samuel Wagan Watson.

I’ll let him do the explaining:

"'Textual chemistry' is [...] a theoretical study of how a wordsmith has utilised all of the senses so a reader can relate to that work and interconnect, and for a brief moment be one with the writer."

It’s essentially referring to that moment of closeness between writer and reader where something sticks—sometimes before you even understand why.

That’s how "for the wake and skeleton dance" landed for me. Or more accurately, how it didn’t land—not at first. I remember reading it and feeling completely unmoored. I couldn’t tell where it was going, or even what it wanted from me. The images were sharp and strange, but they moved too quickly for me to make sense of them. I kept trying to bring the poem into focus, to tidy it up in my head. I’d been trained to expect a clear thread, some kind of message I could name and underline. But I didn’t find any. It just sat there, humming with this quiet, uneasy energy.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to crack it open and just let it hang around in my head. And that’s when it started working on me.

So without further ado, I invite you, dear reader, to grab your safety glasses, put on your lab coat, and join me in a journey of feeling this poem.

"the dreamtime Dostoyevskys murmur of a recession in the spirit world"  

There’s something uniquely jarring about Watson’s invocation of these “dreamtime Dostoyevskys”. This is a collision of metaphysical realms and ideological economies – two worlds not often seen in dialogue, yet here eerily coexisting. The Russian chronicler of despair now transposed into Indigenous cosmology, whispering not of nihilistic St Petersburg streets, but of spiritual drought on stolen land. There’s a cruel irony here - Dostoyevsky, a giant of Western literature, becomes the unlikely vessel to articulate the slow suffocation of Indigenous belief systems under Western rationalism. The “recession” here becomes a dirty term. It carries none of the usual lyrical grace we attach to spiritual decline, borrowed from the lexicon of capitalism, signalling a grand metaphysical decline.

 

The stanza continues to gnaw at this metaphor: “night creatures are feeling the pinch.” Watson literalises this to cast spiritual figures as creatures now starving under the weight of disbelief. The once-vibrant Dreaming is reduced to “ectoplasm on the sidewalk,” its sacred symbols mingling with “vomit and swill” outside pubs. The desecration becomes spectacle, ghosts of a cosmology once grand and instrumental are now waiting outside the drinking holes of a disenchanted world. The “black dingoes” that stalk the city are embodiments of a spiritual hunger, desperate for survival in a world that no longer believes in them.

Fig. 2: "dark riders in the sky signalling a movement"

The second stanza of Watson’s poem shifts into a mythic, almost prophetic register, echoing the ancestral weight of the Dreaming. The imagery evokes ancestral figures and apocalyptic omens, suggesting that historical trauma isn’t confined to the past but continuing to reverberate in the present. This is where Watson directly confronts the systemic betrayal Indigenous people have experienced – not only at the hands of colonial authorities, but also through intra-community complicity. Watson’s critique of internalised complicity cuts deep, exposing the uncomfortable reality that institutional power can corrupt even those it once marginalised. The poem grapples here with ideas of cyclical harm, showing how oppression doesn’t vanish, but shifts shape – like smoke, like shadow. The closing image, "no room to move on a dead man’s bed", one of immobility, of being trapped within the consequences of inherited trauma – reinforces the poem’s broader concern: that without meaningful structural change, progress will always come tethered to the memory of loss.

 “the white man didn’t bring all the evil / some of it was here already"

The third stanza takes this "Law of Conservation of Oppression" – the idea that harm merely transforms - one step further, painting a kind of systemic betrayal that somehow existed even before colonisation. Wagan Watson argues that this system - one which sealed the fate of all those who chose submission over preservation - had its roots not just in imperialism, but in some flaw which is not exclusive to colonial history but rooted in the darker recesses of human capability. That colonisation was not the sole parent of evil, but rather a welcome catalyst. Before colonisation this evil was merely "gestating" - a dormant force simmering just beneath the surface. Quiet. 

And it’s the uncertainty of that quiet, the idea that anyone, anytime, could be cultivating similar predispositions to allowing trauma and oppression, that underscores this stanza’s tone of dread.

I remember last year being struck by this line "the white man didn’t bring all the evil". What? This is Indigenous poetry, and this seems almost contradictory – wasn’t the purpose to condemn colonial evils!?

So with four years of high school English under my belt, I proceeded to pry open the text in search of a reading which conformed to my expectations of Australian Literature. 

… a mockery - Watson must be mocking the way in which colonial authorities shift the blame off themselves and onto the very people whom they are subjugating. Just look at this metaphor: "welcoming the tallship leviathans" - the absurdity of the notion of welcoming a sea serpent demon onto your land must serve as irony. 

I still don’t know which interpretation is correct, but maybe - just maybe - that’s the point. To make me, the reader, feel for myself the very real dissonance in feeling a sense of betrayal from your own people, whilst acknowledging the fact that the massive disruptive effect colonisation has on the cohesion of Indigenous communities cannot - neither logically nor morally - be understated.

Fig. 3: Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

To wrap things, up, I'd like to get all meta with you and offer my thoughts on what our exploration of "for the wake and skeleton dance" can say about reading poetry in general. I invite you to consider this quote from our boy Dostoyevsky (pictured above), in his novel Crime and Punishment:

"In order to understand any man one must be deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas, which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards."

Now what happens when we replace the word "man" with "poem"?

On the one hand, we are told over and over again that there is no such thing as a "mistaken idea", and if you examine the syllabus for any longer than five seconds you'll come to realise that the thing about meaning is that it must necessarily be derived from our prior context, experiences and knowledge - meaning is not found in a vacuum.

Okay, so a poem is not the same thing as a "man" - so what?

Well, on the other hand, forcing your expectations onto a poem like a cookie cutter - like I did last year with "for the wake and skeleton dance" - can obscure your ability to see other perspectives, which are necessary to develop deep understanding.

There's a fine line between connecting to a poem and connecting to what you think it should be. The former, and what I've hoped to achieve in this blog post, requires surrender - to our pre-existing expectations of genre, author and context, but also to the poem, allowing it to be read for what it is.