Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko’s (2013) award-winning essay on doing it tough in the ‘Black Belt’ is notable not only for its searing and explicit account of life in poverty, told from the perspective of an insider. It also stands out as one of the few pieces of non-fiction in which Indigenous and minority ethnic experiences are woven seamlessly into the story of getting by on welfare. The ‘Black Belt’ is how Aboriginal people refer to the ‘geographical-cum-cultural entity’ stretching across greater Brisbane, where ‘the Aboriginal underclass has historically concentrated’ and live alongside poor whites in clusters of public housing. Lucashenko brings to life the quiet hope that sustains people amid grinding hardship and severe violence rooted in trauma and racism. Selma, a refugee from Yugoslavia and mother to four Aboriginal boys, is one of the three women whose story she tells. As Lucashenko describes it, when Selma spoke of her dreams for the future, ‘her voice lacked certainty, and was almost wistful, in sharp contrast to when she speaks of what she has survived’. More tangible for Selma was going hungry so her boys would not, and the strength she drew from mothering them.

Anglo-settler, Indigenous and minority ethnic stories of life on welfare are not often brought together and told side by side. More often, ‘ethnic’ and Indigenous experiences of welfare are separated or sidelined from the ‘mainstream’ accounts. There is, of course, good reason to single out the specificities of Indigenous and minority ethnic experiences of welfare given the histories and structures of exclusion and intervention that have characterised efforts to deal with difference in the welfare state. However, the result can be an inadvertent whitewashing of academic accounts of lived experiences of welfare.

This book contributes to welfare research by showing how the diverse range of people I encountered shared common practical challenges and indignities despite differences of culture or ethnicity. At the same time, looking closely at the details of individual lives has also afforded insight into the more subtle shades of experience shaped by distinct ways of making sense of and relating to family, community and the nation-state.