## Introduction  
In this chapter, we discuss the meanings of blackness through the writing of Aboriginal scholars and those from Global Africa who live in Australia. In our survey of the writing, there are various usages of the term "black": social, political, cultural, strategic and existential/phenomenological, and these usages vary over time and place. Although not writing specifically about the Australian context, Michelle Wright's work has been useful for thinking about blackness as socially constructed and phenomenological. As Wright observes in her book Physics of Blackness (2015, p. 3), 'Blackness [...] is largely a matter of perception or [...] made up of moments of performance in which performers understand their bodies as black'. Given this understanding, it is important for us to engage with the contested and changing meanings of blackness through the history, politics and social formation of the Australian context in which the term 'black' has been used as an instrument of coloniality and, at the same time, as a way of resisting and challenging the hegemony of whiteness.  
We argue that 'race' has been central to Australia's formation, from the fiction of terra nullius to the construction of certain groups of migrants as perpetual foreigners to the ongoing emphasis on shutting out 'difference' through border protection policies. We will start by discussing blackness as a racialized identity  
in Australia, then look at blackness as cultural and political in the context of decolonization, and, finally, explore the possibilities for solidarity around blackness. In this chapter, the southern state of Victoria will serve as a case study of the way in which blackness is defined in Australia. Although there is some scholarship from other parts of Australia (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2008; Wynn, 2009; Foley, 2015a), most of the available research has been written by Victoria-based scholars, bloggers and activists.