Madeleine Watts
Leave No Trace
In this 2019 essay, the author of The Inland Sea (2020) reflects on stories about missing white women and what role these stories play in Australian society. Equating fear with responsible self-preservation, such cautionary tales teach white women to assume the burden of their own safety. This in turn masks an unsettling fact:
‘The reassuring assumption that it was white women who were helpless and vulnerable, who were the real victims of Australia’s weird melancholy, concealed the fact that white women were not only complicit in the systemic violence perpetrated against Indigenous people, but often its beneficiaries as well.’