Celebration Event: Essays That Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to Today

The event will celebrate the recent release of "Essays that Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to Today." This curated collection includes powerful essays that have significantly influenced Australia’s culture and society. Among the 20 selected works published by Meanjin Quarterly since 1940 are essays by Indigenous Australian academics Gaja Kerry Charlton, Professor Chelsea Watego and Dr Amy McQuire.

Professor Chelsea Watego - Essay ‘Always bet on Black (power)’ from Meanjin 80.3 Spring 2021

Professor Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. She is the Executive Director of QUT’s Carumba Institute, and her scholarship has drawn attention to the role of race in the production of health inequalities. Her current ARC Discovery Grant seeks to build an Indigenist Health Humanities as a new field of research; one that is committed to the survival of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, foregrounding Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and leading to the formation of an Indigenous critical race theory. She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, having written for Indigenous X, NITV, The Guardian, and The Conversation. She is a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, a director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, but most importantly, she is also a proud mum to five beautiful children. Her debut book: Another Day in the Colony, published by UQ Press, was released in November 2021 and met with critical acclaim.

Dr Amy McQuire - Essay ‘The act of disappearing’ from Meanjin 81.4 Summer 2022

Dr Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman from Rockhampton, Central Queensland. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at QUT Carumba Institute. She received her PhD from the University of Queensland. Amy's research interest is in race and representation, focusing specifically on the crisis of disappeared Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls, as well as the violence of the justice system. Her background is in journalism, where she has over two decades of experience working in independent and Aboriginal media. She has previously been the editor of two national Indigenous publications (National Indigenous Times and Tracker Magazine), and has been a correspondent for NITV National News, BuzzFeed News Australia and New Matilda. Her writing has been featured widely, and she has co-hosted the investigative podcast Curtain the Podcast for the past eight years.In 2021, she published her first children's book 'Day Break' and in 2024, she published her first non-fiction work 'Black Witness: the Power of Indigenous Media.'

Please Register by Tuesday 26 November 2024 for Catering purposes.