‘There’s no space for us’: Indigenous-health researcher Chelsea Watego battles racism in Australia
Chelsea Watego and her team called it the bunker — a cramped workspace directly opposite the toilets at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Up to eight members of staff would squeeze into two rooms, rat traps at their feet. A long bench running along the length of the wall provided desk space, and the printer was often jammed. Poorly insulated, the rooms that the university had assigned to them in 2018 were cold in winter and hot in summer.
Then, in 2020, Watego won an even larger ARC grant, worth nearly Aus$1.8 million, to establish a new field — Indigenist health humanities. She and her team moved to an old building that leaked, into an office up three flights of stairs. Her space was still nowhere near the school or the faculty to which she belonged.
Watego’s scholarship on Indigenous health gives language to the “insidious ways in which racism has an impact on our lives”, says Lisa Whop, an epidemiologist and Torres Strait Islander at the Australian National University in Canberra, who is a collaborator on the 2020 ARC grant, and calls Watego a friend and sister. “She is the thought leader of our generation.”
Watego has faced strong resistance, and devising strategies around that is exhausting, she says. She is sometimes seen as a ‘radical’ researcher or a ‘difficult’ and ‘antagonistic’ person, and at the University of Queensland, she says she was excluded from regular staff meetings and Indigenous events, such as sashing ceremonies for graduating students.
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