We do not know how many Aboriginal women have gone ‘missing’ in this country. The archives are filled with the ‘missing’: the Aboriginal women who are no longer here to speak; the Aboriginal women who do not have names; the Aboriginal women who do not have graves or places where their families can remember them. There is a comfort that comes with the word ‘missing’, because to be ‘missing’ implies that perhaps they have left on their own accord; that there are no perpetrators or violence enacted against them…

Meanjin is proud to announce Amy McQuire as winner of the 2022 Hilary McPhee Award for her essay ‘The Act of Disappearing: On the silences that shroud the disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls’, published in Meanjin 81.4 Summer 2022.