Amy McQuire, Black Witness
From one of this country’s leading Indigenous journalists comes a collection of fierce and powerful essays proving why the media needs to believe Black Witnesses.
Black Witness showcases how journalism can be used to hold the powerful to account and make the world a more equitable place. This is the essential collection that we need right now – and always have.
Amy McQuire has been writing on Indigenous affairs since she was 17 years old. Over the past two decades, she has reported on most of the key events involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including numerous deaths in custody, the Palm Island uprising, the Bowraville murders and the Northern Territory Intervention. She has also exposed the misrepresentations and violence of the mainstream media’s reports, as well as their omissions and silences altogether in regards to Indigenous matters.
Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman from Rockhampton, Central Queensland. She is a prolific Aboriginal affairs journalist, academic, writer and commentator who has been published in Guardian Australia, the National Indigenous Times, The Saturday Paper, BuzzFeed News Australia, New Matilda, Vogue Australia, Marie Claire, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. She currently co-hosts Curtain The Podcast, which was named one of the top 25 true crime podcasts by New York’s Vulture magazine. In 2019 she won a Clarion Award and was nominated for a Walkley Award for her essay on the wrongful conviction of Aboriginal man Kevin Henry, and in 2023 she won Meanjin’s Hilary McPhee Award for brave essay writing for her piece on the disappearing of Aboriginal women. She is an Indigenous postdoctoral fellow at the Queensland University of Technology.
