AustLit

'I'm a storyteller — nothing more. Rather than break stories, I've been broken by them. I've never won a Walkley, or even been nominated for one. But then, I decided to spend nearly three decades of my life in a highly competitive industry driven by ego and the cult of personality, fortified by whiteness and normativity. A place where I have never really belonged, patrolled by those with an inborn unquestioned objectivity — the heritable right of whiteness. The Iie of that objectivity, that anyone can pretend they are without biases or that they can be excised from their work, has been exposed. In the global reckoning with power spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement, the crisis of objectivity in journalism (at least in the English-speaking world) has been experienced as something of a delayed reaction. Perhaps that's because the profession is so blindingly white. In 2023, we have reached critical mass globally in terms of black and non-white journalists, who are largely responsible for the yielding we see in many newsrooms and media organisations. Now, my embedded blackfella subjectivity and my closeness to the subject of my journalistic enquiry — other blackfellas — is considered to be an asset rather than a liability.' 

(Introduction)