A Short Note to Readers

On Re-Launching as 'Black Witness', a newsletter devoted to independent Indigenous journalism.

I vividly remember when I began this Substack. I was sitting at a table in Toowoomba, Queensland, during the height of COVID-19 restrictions, reading the news on the historic, worldwide protests following the murder of African American man George Floyd.

Amidst the sea of Australian coverage, a short wire report was published in The West Australian newspaper. The cop who had shot Aboriginal woman Ms JC on the streets of Geraldton, WA, was being charged with her murder. We know now that Ms. JC and her community did not receive justice and that the cop walked free; another miscarriage of justice. Unlike the protests in America, I did not see any public outrage over her death outside of her community and Indigenous communities across the country.

I immediately opened a Substack account and, in an hour, wrote my first post about Australia’s silence on black deaths on our own shores. Since then, I’ve updated this newsletter occasionally, but never regularly, and despite this, over the past six years, many of you have stuck around, as well as many new readers. My email list has grown to over 7000 subscribers and I take this as a sign that there is a need for independent Indigenous journalism that centres on justice as blackfellas define it.

That’s why, in 2026, I’m relaunching this Substack as ‘Black Witness’, with a clear agenda to champion independent black journalism, with a focus on continuing and building an ethical Indigenist journalistic practice.

This is a journalistic practice that does not operate by the same ethical principles as imperial media, but instead is Indigenist. It is centred on blackfellas as ‘primary informants’, as Professor Lester Irabanna-Rigney says, or Black Witnesses; and is centred on resistance, and as writing, or testimony, or witnessing as forms of resistance. Those two pillars mean that it is already opposed to the western tradition of journalistic ethics (and we have seen that the Australian media rarely abides by it in practice anyway).

Black Witness is also centred on stories. All of us are continually engaged in storytelling in different ways, and Black Witness tells stories through the process of an ethical Indigenist journalistic practice. Black Witnesses is about honouring the lived resistance of blackfellas towards interlapping forms of violence, and in building a journalistic practice that is centred on relationality and the ongoing relationships we have with each other that every structure of settler society attempts to destroy.

I hope you will all stick around. As always, all posts will be free and will not be behind a paywall.

Correspondence can be sent to amy@blackwitness.com. You can also follow me on Instagram and Facebook.

In solidarity,

Amy