EDITORIAL

My mother and her father are smiling in this photo. They are standing on a dirt road not far from the house my mother would stay in when she visited her father. To me, this is the Dreamtime.

Earlier this year, I wrote about my mother in Honi:

"She is fair-skinned, enough to pass for white — her mother was white and her father a Wailwan man. But I was always aware that we were marked by something more than skin colour. I could see it in my mother as she tenses up just at the sight of a police car. She has done nothing wrong. But when she is pulled over for something as routine as a random breath test, her heart begins to race and she fumbles her keys."

I have written also about my grandfather:

"When I was a baby, my grandfather held me in his arms. He was the son of a man born onto the frontier of a newly-federated Australia. A frontier marked with violence, disease and death. He had experienced more of the darkness of Australia than I will ever know. From to grandfather to his father: that’s how close it

Benjamin McGrory Cammeraygal

Alexander Poirier Canadian Métis

Cianna Walker Yuin/Gumbaynggirr

This edition of Indigenous Honi the first since 2019 is published in honour of my mother, and the powerful Blak matriarchy that stands behind her

It is also published in honour of my grandfather, who wore our history on his skin. Our resistance is etched in the scars on his back and the lines on his face

Indigenous Honi exists as a constant and eternal challenge to whiteness. In publishing this autonomous edition, we create a new Dreamtime of our very own