Introduction

This collection brings together the voices and artwork of diverse Bla(c)k writers, artists, poets, and scholars in Australia. We use the particular spelling of Bla(c)k to be inclusive of the distinct experiences and histories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and Afro-descendant peoples. During a period of heightened political struggle in the 1960's and 1970's, Aboriginal people of Australia began to refer to themselves as Black. Other groups in Australia have also identified as Black, including African-Australians, African migrants and refugees, South Sea Islanders, Pacific Islanders, and many Afro-diasporic groups. Since the early 1990's, the alternative term Blak has been used by Aboriginal people to claim their own unique histories and identities independent of limiting phenotypical and romanticized conceptions of Blackness. In gathering these voices, we hope to show the expansiveness of what it means to be Bla(c)k, but to also highlight the complexity of projects of Bla(c)k solidarity in this settler colonial nation.

Since the moment of colonization in 1788, personhood and property have been defined by what the scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to as "the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty" through the theft of Aboriginal lands, the bestowing of property rights on whites, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, and the White Australia policy that restricted non-white immigrants from entering the country. In the present moment, it is also visible in the exclusion of refugees and border protection policies, as described in the piece by Omid Tofighian on Black bodies and political profit.

The logic of patriarchal white sovereignty is enacted through violence. In Victoria Grieves' piece, reggae artist Willie Brim refers to his grandfather as living "at gunpoint" in the tablelands of North Queensland, subject to massacres by white settlers as recently as one hundred years ago. This violence is echoed in the stories and poems by the Sudanese and Somalian refugees incarcerated by the Australian government on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, which they refer to as the "island of death."

Michael Cook, Civilised #13, 2012.

Inkjet print, 160 x 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery.

This dossier also considers Bla(c)kness as a political and cultural project. Bla(c)k people in Australia have been part of a global diasporic imaginary that includes musical forms such as reggae and hip hop; sports such as boxing, as with the legendary Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose described in the short story by Tony Birch; and social movements from the Black Power days of the 1960's and 1970's to the more contemporary #BlackLivesMatter. In the face of what Brim sees as a "violent and deep desire to destroy Aboriginal people and culture," global diasporic cultures have been a way to preserve and recreate traditions. The global #BlackLivesMatter movement has been a means to amplify protest against the murder of Aboriginal people and bring light to their distinct struggles, as Yadira Perez Hazel describes in "Black Lives Matter in Australia." At the same time, as Kaiya Aboagye reminds us, Bla(c)k people in Australia have not only been influenced by global Black culture and resistance, but they have also contributed to it.

We must be mindful of the complexities of Bla(c)k identity in Australia, how it is defined, who uses it, and the often fraught encounters between non-Aboriginal Black Australians and Blak Australians and how these histories have been represented. Aboagye and Alison Whittaker challenge the whiteness of Australian foundation narratives by pointing to the Black people—ex-slaves, Black settlers, sailors, and convicts, and African servants—who arrived on the First Fleet. Aboagye shows how in the anti-black, settler colonial imagination, Afro-Indigenous encounters are misconstrued to reinforce hierarchies between these two groups. She gives the example of the revered Aboriginal resistance warrior Pemulwuy who fought the "troublesome" African convict John Black Caesar.

Whittaker's poem "Ships in the Night" grapples with the...