The Stella Interview: Amy McQuire
In this interview, we chat with Amy McQuire about her new book, Black Witness, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize.
You have been writing on Indigenous Affairs since you were 17 years old. How has your relationship with the media evolved overtime, and how has that shaped your perspective on the issues you write about?
I think one of the main things that has changed, even over the past year and a half, is of the necessity to continue solidifying our own forms of media as a resistance to imperial media. Over the past decade or so, the answer has always been about ‘diversifying’ the media in a similar way that there are calls to diversify the police. It never works because the structures that continue to oppress our people remain unaffected. What I’ve come to realise is just how essential the imperial media has been to entrenching acts of racist violence against blackfellas in this country, and that stretches back even to the frontier days.
In your writing you have exposed the misrepresentations and violence within mainstream media coverage. Has the response to your books and essays been unexpected in any way, and has it strengthened your decision to continue revealing these truths?
It’s been totally unsurprising that Black Witness has been ignored by imperial media in this country. The only reviews have been in Indigenous media or in The Conversation. I think this is really telling – but it fits with a pattern that I see in the ways imperial media covers black issues. One of the main themes of the book is how mainstream journalists take on the role as ‘War Correspondents’, in reporting on our people, because they can frame themselves as objective or impartial observers, or even bystanders, who can write on ‘black on black’ violence in ways that denies their own complicity, and the complicity of their employers. Ultimately it becomes about denying and making unspeakable what is the central issue: Indigenous sovereignty.
What has been unexpected, and what I’m incredibly grateful for, is how it has been received by blackfellas. That is the most important thing. I get feedback from Indigenous people from around the country – who are working in different industries and areas – on how it has vindicated them or how they are able to use the book in some way.
The title Black Witness suggests a strong focus on witnessing and testimony. Can you elaborate on what it means to be a “witness” in the context of Indigenous communities, and how does this theme play out in the book?
I use the term Black Witness to speak about the ways the lived experience and testimonies of Indigenous people are disregarded, denied, made to seem unreliable and illegitimate, or silenced unless legitimised by the White Witness. It is about centring the evidence provided by the Black Witness particularly in accounts of state racist violence.
“The main lesson is really simple and something I hope non-Indigenous readers will pick up. It’s also not a new suggestion: it’s simply to centre the testimony of the Black Witness and to recognise the power of the Black Witness.”
Writing Black Witness involved confronting sensitive and painful topics. What were some of the challenges you encountered while addressing these issues, and how did you navigate the responsibility of telling such difficult and important stories?
Black Witness is largely a culmination of 20 years of trying to understand how to report and write about racist violence without further wounding those who have already been victimised. It is centred around fighting violence perpetrated against Indigenous women. I was doing a lot of stories on black deaths in custody and on cases in which Indigenous women had been disappeared or murdered and there was no justice. I wanted to find ways to write these stories without re-tracing wounds, and foregrounding instead the resistance of the women in life and the fights of their families for justice. Even ‘justice’ became an undefinable word, because justice is only ever defined through carceral logics, and the carceral system continues to victimise and enact violence as well as reproduce violence upon our women.
What emerged from this process was a methodology of Presencing, a term first developed by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Presencing is an act of resistance to the representational violence of dehumanisation. I do not state ‘humanisation’, because humanisation often involves a sanitising process in which Indigenous women are made to fit in what non-Indigenous people consider a ‘grievable life’ – and this often means making invisible their Aboriginality, and in turn, their resistances, and this in turn again makes invisible the perpetrator which largely is the state. Rather than humanisation, Presencing is a process of relationality with not just the families of those who are no longer here, but also the women and who they were in life, illuminating the active resistances they deployed against multiple waves of state and interpersonal violence. Presencing is how I write these stories.
At its heart, the power of Black Media is really in these acts of relationality; which I think is largely counterintuitive for many in imperial media.
How do you hope non-Indigenous readers engage with Black Witness? Are there specific lessons or perspectives you hope they take away from your work?
The main lesson is really simple and something I hope non-Indigenous readers will pick up. It’s also not a new suggestion: it’s simply to centre the testimony of the Black Witness and to recognise the power of the Black Witness.
I would also suggest it is so important to know the history of the ground you walk on – and not just the white history in the library; but by seeking out black histories.
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