At this moment, Blackfullas are being routinely punished, in their personal and professional lives, for daring to speak freely about a referendum that will supposedly change our lives forever. Munanjahli and South Sea Island woman and Associate Professor Chelsea Watego shares why mob are staying silent when asked about the Voice to Parliament.

The real shock for many was witnessing a Black man stand up in defence of the Black woman he loves. It really was shocking for some, that a Black woman would be deemed deserving of being defended, and we saw that in responses that questioned the legitimacy and significance of her disability as well as her moral character in relationship to that entanglement saga.

Dr Chelsea Watego celebrates the genius of Steven Oliver and the themes he addresses in 'Bigger and Blacker.'

The sovereign Black women insists on not forgetting the lies of this place, and in particular the lies of white men. And it is not because her memory is longer, but it is because her body knows too well the violence they have inflicted.

As the oldest living culture on the planet, both First Nations and first-raced, we have a distinct articulation of the global Black Lives Matter movement, one which was best captured at the rally convened by the Brisbane Blacks (Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance and Stop Black Deaths in Custody Committee) on Friday 4th July 2020 in Meanjin.

You may have heard of the Bechdel test, which is a measure of the active representation of women in fiction and film. Well just in time for the Lowijta International Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Conference we bring you “The Blackfulla test”; a test that measures the active representation of Blackfullas in Indigenous health research.

If you have worked in Indigenous health you would be all too familiar with the discourses of ‘Closing the Gap’ and ‘compliance’ which remind us that the Black body is to be regulated and remedied by the health system.

Love, protection, beauty, royalty are all things that have all too readily been denied to Black women. Instead our expected role has been one of servitude, sexually, domestically, and politically, for White men and White women, and even Black men.

I was the first in my family to attend University and I remember my father being less than impressed at my decision to study rather than do real work. “Places like that weren’t meant for people like us”, he stated.

The problem for Blackfullas is that news and current affairs is not ‘for our viewing pleasure’ nor is it just information or entertainment. It is an apparatus of colonial control that makes the brutality of colonisation seem perfectly rational and acceptable.

"But the angry black woman is not just a dehumanising caricature; actual angry black women are a real threat to the colony. And when we get angry, right on cue the Native Police arrive to quell the troublemakers, each and every time"

As a health researcher I am troubled by the predatory possibilities of “the Aboriginal problem”. Many a mortgage has been paid off the back of knowing “the Aboriginal problem” or claiming to solve “the Aboriginal problem” as advancing new knowledge. Within Indigenous health research, people (and by people, I mean predominantly white people) make money from knowing “the Aboriginal problem” under the premise that a deeper understanding of “the Aboriginal problem” will somehow fix it.

‘Indigenous despair is not a matter of good fortune or bad; it is an enabling apparatus to the colonial project, cleverly disguised behind an agenda of benevolence and good intentions.’

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, in a sunset ceremony in central Australia, approximately 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates from across Australia delivered the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Convened by the Referendum Council, the statement put forth an Indigenous Australian position on proposed constitutional reform, rejecting constitutional recognition in favour of a treaty.