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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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Nicole K: On Finding a Voice – The Tapestry Project
Nicole K is a Singaporean writer and the founder of The Tapestry Project, a mental-health advocacy organisation. She was one of a handful of students from an arts college in Singapore who came to Perth for the AAWP conference. There were five or six concurrent sessions, and I chose the Singaporean writers one because I wanted to know what sort of writing was coming out of the former British colony; one where the Chinese settlers are the main ethnic group and English remains the official language. I really related to the stories written by her peers —a mix of cosmopolitan locals and expat writers— about mistaken identities in the post-colonial…
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Nadia Rhook – Poet, Teacher and Historian
Nadia Rhook is a poet, historian, and university lecturer, and has a book coming out soon about the language-scape of colonial Victoria (Duke University Press). I first met Nadia last year at an AASRN lunch not long after she moved to Perth. I didn’t really speak to her at that lunch but a few months later, saw her walking hurriedly out of the state library. I wasn’t sure if she recognised me and was worried about waving down the wrong person. (I’ve once befriended someone thinking she was someone else and only realising two years later when I saw the first person again, that I’d befriended two different people). That…
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Hoa Pham – Author, Playwright, Pioneer
Hoa Pham is an author, playwright and psychologist. Her novella, Wave (2015), was translated into Vietnamese by Phương Nam, a Vietnamese publishing house. The Other Shore (2014) won the Vive La Novella Prize. The Lady of the Realm (2017) is her latest novel and is a historical fiction set in Vietnam from the 1950s to the present day. Hoa is also the founder of Peril, an online Asian-Australian arts and culture magazine. I met Hoa when a mutual friend, also a writer, arranged for us to meet over lunch at a café so hip there were no hipsters. I had many great experiences in Melbourne and my afternoon with Hoa was in the top three; great…
