@readingfeminism21 spent February with the work of Chelsea Watego, a Mununjali Yugambeh, South Sea Islander woman and Professor of Indigenous Health. Specifically, we spent time with Watego’s 2021 book Another Day In the Colony, her article in the Sunday Paper called For the Love of Blackfullas, and her guest lecture at the University of Adelaide, No Room at the Inn, presented for the Fay Gale Centre’s annual lecture and hosted by the Academy of Social Sciences Australia. At the heart of Watego’s work is a fierce and loving dedication to the project of decolonisation, sovereignty, and survival in a place of ongoing colonial violence, silence, and refusal. She asks an important question: How can First Nations peoples survive in socalled Australia, a place where endemic and systemic racism decides the terms of land, knowledge, politics, engagement, health, and living? Watego’s guest lecture, one she describes as a collection of ‘musings on race in this place,’ imagines the ‘Inn’ as the spaces in which the presence and participation of Aboriginal people are structurally and institutionally blocked; spaces like politics, media, and most importantly and specifically in Watego’s work, academia. She boldly encounters the insidious ways that First Nations people are excluded from academia, exploring how conceptualisations of the Academy as a site of ‘neutral’, ‘apolitical’ intellectual life and knowledge making is constructed by and for white subjects, and thus violently excludes Indigenous voices and knowledges while simultaneously telling racist stories under the guise of objective Truth: ‘At University I learnt many interesting and surprising facts about the Aborigines – facts which bore a striking resemblance to the fictions I had
heard about the Aborigines from teachers, strangers and friends in the outer suburbs where I grew up. The only difference was, at University they were articulated in a far more sophisticated way. Here, these claims were not stereotypes and prejudices, these claims were dressed up as knowledge and truth – objective and scientific.’ The university is no longer a place to find validation. Watego speaks of the university becoming merely ‘the place where I go to work, but not where I measure my success.’ In letting go, Watego doesn’t resolve with ignorance, because letting go of the Academy is more of a way to build endurance against the ways the institution fails and disappoints people in marginalised groups. The university has not done much to recognise the reality of being racialised in a white institution: ‘It is the everydayness of race in being part of the air that we breathe that means it is routinely suffocating, particularly for the racialised as Black and Indigenous in a colonial-settler society.’ Another Day in the Colony is a book about the silences, refusals, and violence of White settlers and their institutions. It is about the effects of ongoing violence and displacement bound to these institutions and their norms. This includes the racist discursive production of Indigenous peoples in the health sciences, to the murderous racism of the police and criminal justice, to the racist distributions of material space (in cities, in offices, in universities), to the racism that all First Nations people experience daily from literature to the media to ‘everyday’ life encounters. It is a book about the ways that Colonisers actively and violently decide the terms of health, knowledge, criminality, law, and living. More than any of these things, this is a book about Black survival, Black
Words by Reading Feminism
Chelsea Watego - No Room
at the Inn & Another Day in the Colony.
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