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REPOST: Moving in from the Margins with Rashida Murphy
My best laid plans to publish a fresh interview before the new year has gone awry so here is a repost of my interview with Rashida Murphy from earlier this year. *** Rashida Murphy is a Perth based writer, poet, mentor, and author of The Historian’s Daughter (2016, UWAP). She has a Masters in English Literature and a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University. Rashida is also known in the local writing community for being a big supporter of emerging writers, especially those of us who are—for lack of a better term— ‘people of colour’, ‘ethnic writers’, ‘non-whites’, ‘third world looking’, ‘multicultural Australians’ [insert a…
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Interview with Deborah Ruiz Wall – Reimagining Australia
Deborah Ruiz Wall (OAM) is a Filipino-Australian born in Manila who I met at Reimagining Australia, her exhibition at the WA Maritime Museum. The exhibition is based on her research on interactions between Filipino and Australia’s First Nations People. Before she migrated to Australia, Deborah worked as a journalist with the Philippine Broadcasting Service in 1970 and as Press Secretary for the Opposition Leader, Matthias Toliman and later for his successor,Tei Abal in the Papua New Guinea House of Assembly in 1973. When she moved to Australia, she taught communication and social sciences TAFE (NSW). She completed oral history projects that included Redfern Oral History and story sharing between Aboriginal and Filipino…
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Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN): Perth Symposium
I had the privilege of presenting Maybe it’s Wanchai? to a group of academics at the “Where’s your Asia?” symposium organised by Nadia Rhook and Denise Woods, the co-conveners of AASRN Perth. The person in the centre image is Denise who shared with us her research on the representations of Asia and Australia in Overwatch, a multiplayer video game. (My son says it a really really popular MMORPG that everyone talks about so I sense that he will be asking Santa for a PS upgrade this Christmas). AASRN was set up by Tseen Khoo over a decade ago and I joined after meeting Tseen through our anonymous blogs — I miss the days of…
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Maybe it’s Wanchai – AASRN
I’ve finalised my presentation for tomorrow’s symposium. I’m really excited about tomorrow and grateful that my proposal was accepted even though I’m no longer tethered to a university. I had a moment last week where I thought perhaps I should make Maybe It’s Wanchai? a PhD project but I’m too far along with the project. So the plan is to just write and hope that my partner does not lose his hours at work. I don’t have a mentor for this project so I will be relying on various friends. Don’t worry friends, I will not make you read entire chapters but I might ask you to read and give me feedback on…
