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 Sukhmani Khorana
When Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently declared that Indigenous people living in remote communities were making a ‘lifestyle choice’, he was rightly rebuked by both sides of politics for undermining Aboriginal sovereignty and spiritual connection to land. What was seldom brought up, however, was how his curious phrasing assumed that there is a norm that the ‘choice’ was deviating from. This led me to wonder about a hypothetical scenario where all of the nation’s Indigenous citizens walked the white-laced path – mortgaging an over-priced suburban house, working a 9 to 5 job in the big smoke, commuting to workplaces and shopping centres. Would that help us ‘bridge the gap’? Would that also be the end of race-based prejudice? Chances are they could still encounter casual racism and institutional stasis.