Jinghua Qian and Maddee Clark use a visit to the Footscray Coles ‘ethnic food aisle’ to discuss how ethnicity is imagined, managed and remade in Australia.

At a recent rally to shut down Melbourne, held by Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance in solidarity with Western Australian Aboriginal communities under threat of closure, a non-Indigenous member of the crowd suddenly took to the stage and spoke passionately about the need for white people to ‘do something’ about ‘the situation’ of Aboriginal people in Australia. The atmosphere became uncomfortable. It looked like the speaker had taken the stage without asking. Standing between them and the line of police backing onto Spring Street, a lot of us were exchanging nervous glances.

In fact, looking around Australia today, it’s hard not to see how little has changed. Even as Faith Bandler is being remembered with a state funeral, the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy is being threatened with removal – again! – so that housing developments can commence on the Block.

The now-viral video of a woman being catcalled and harassed as she walks through Manhattan was created by Hollaback (a global movement, started by two NYU graduates, to end street harassment) and Rob Bliss Creative as a statement about harassment and violence against women.

As a queer Indigenous person, I watched the debate around his comment with a lot of discomfort. Non-indigenous people love to watch Mundine mess up. But even more they love watching Indigenous people fight each other publicly, especially if the topic is culture. The thing that struck me the most in the fallout was how Mundine’s framing reversed my own understanding and experiences: my Indigenous community has always loved and nurtured me as a queer and gender-diverse member, but the queer community has always found it hard to let in Aboriginal voices. The same can be said for queer history and queer theory, both of which struggle to recognise the violent colonial epistemology from which they emerged.