A review of Andrew Kwong’s One Bright Moon
By Devika Brendon
Andrew Kwong’s voice in One Bright Moon, is both rational and compassionate, and the fusion of the two enables and generates restorative harmony. Reading this memoir is a healing experience. I’m sure that writing it must have been cathartic for the writer, but rarely have I read a life story that has given me not only admiration for the author but hope for myself, as a fellow human being, as his reader.
By Maria Elena Indelicato
Australia has been at the forefront of international education. It is at her shores that internationalisation as a fully-fledged policy was first introduced in the global reality of higher education in 1992. Significantly, the then Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Kim Beazley, launched the policy to counter the overseas criticism that Australia’s approach to international education ‘was too narrowly commercial.’ The birth of internationalisation is in fact tied to the commercialisation of higher education in the late 1980s, when Australian universities and colleges were allowed to provide full-cost courses designed for international students. Since then, academic and grey policy-oriented studies which try to determine international students’ market choices and needs have proliferated, leaving very little room to discuss issues surrounding the presence of international students in Australia otherwise. Discourses of economic necessity have thus overdetermined the ways in which we think of, talk about and, ultimately, relate to international students at academic and policy levels.
By Sukhmani Khorana
Born in Jammu, the winter capital of the northernmost state of India, I felt rather like the character of Lenny in Deepa Mehta’s film, Earth. For those who may not be familiar with the text, Lenny is a Parsi girl living in Pakistan at the time of partition whose life is thrown asunder as she plays neutral witness to the growing feuds among her erstwhile neighbourly Hindu, Muslim and Sikh friends and carers.