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The Bonesetter's Fee and Other Stories by Rashida Murphy

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The Bonesetter’s Fee and Other Stories by Australian author Rashida Murphy is a collection of short stories that span a childhood in India and adulthood in Australia. The evocative stories in the first half of the book transport the Indian diaspora reader to a distant but still intensely familiar Indian landscape. They capture the unique cadences and life rhythms of a past era in that country. The interiority of homes and domestic landscapes features pre-eminently in the stories. Memory is a powerful trope in her writing. The domestic landscape that emerges through her writing is suffused with the joyous conviviality and haunting hostility of familial figures. The interior world of family lives takes the foreground in her stories while the outside world of the era looms quietly in the background. The characters’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviours form the prism through which the influences of the outside world on the domestic family universe can be observed and understood. The interfac
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The ethics of administering neighbourhood social media pages

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Social media platforms, particularly Facebook, facilitate neighbourhood networking through pages and groups created for discussion about local issues. Around Australia, for example, many suburbs, towns and remote communities have Facebook pages and groups dedicated to neighbourhood networking.  Without exception, all of these have been created by people who've taken the initiative to start these groups where (perhaps) none existed before, and continue to be administered by these people and others who've volunteered to taken on the mantle of triaging requests to join the group and moderating discussions among members.  Effectively, these volunteers, who are performing a community service without receiving any remuneration for their work, become the de facto regulators of neighbourhood public sphere interaction.  Because social media can now be the only space where communities exchange information about local needs, issues, events and happenings (from the mundane to the extraordi
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Economic transparency

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Systems that govern economic transactions can be inherently opaque. While there is an expectation of transparency, the reality can be quite different, and the consequences of a lack of transparency can be significant. There is a cultural tendency to preserve the lack of transparency in economic transactions, and this is something that appears to be an inheritance of the pre-21st century political economy. For example, there is a tendency in the language of contractual laws to allow opportunities for the contravention of transparency obligations. This language is ingrained in the discourse of the professionals who manage these systems. The values attached to secrecy around economic transactions pervade the systems and create a culture where transparency is deemed to be something that needs to be 'managed'. For novices - people who have not properly interacted with these systems before - the sudden realisation that there are so many hitherto unknown nuances to transactions, which
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Value of time

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How does one understand the value of time for someone whose liberty has been curtailed for many years? In thinking about years of life and liberty lost, there are a number of crucial factors to consider for which we have no reliable measure except perhaps what know from our own experience - lost opportunity to grow into the world with your loved ones, develop an identity, nurture friendships, find love, explore the horizons of your world and beyond, learn complex things, experience ageing and physically, emotionally and intellectually changing over time, and so much more. How does one even estimate the value of lost time? It is almost impossible to do this. No belief or knowledge system can help one appreciate the value of lost time. So, given the impossibility of this task, do we have adequate ways of considering the value of lost time in building safeguards against gross errors in processes designed to impose confinement and confiscation of liberty? If so, how do we acknowledge and r
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The morality of innocence

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What does the documentary series The Innocence Files teach us? There is a lot to learn about the challenges and flaws of justice systems and about the humanity and compassion of those who go against the grain to fight for the rights of people whose lives have been wrongly and unfairly destroyed by wrongful prosecution and conviction. There is a lot to learn about the seemingly superhuman capacity for patience and perseverance that some people demonstrate even in the face of the most trying of circumstances, where hope has been completely snatched away from them and even the absolute truth cannot save them. There is a lot to learn about the failings and ill will of people entrusted to protect people's rights and serve justice, and how flawed decision-making or malicious persecution can irreparably destroy innocent people's lives. But there is something that the documentary series cannot teach us at all, because it is impossible to fathom and almost impossible to articulate - tha
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Contentious community: the figure of the insider-outsider in The Permanent Resident by Roanna Gonsalves

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Against a backdrop of increasing migration from Asia to Australia, the experience of Asian visitors and immigrants coming into Australia has changed over time; rather than disorientation, Asian migrants coming to Australia may experience a relatively more comfortable ‘settling in’. Drawing on existing networks and connections with established Australian residents (occasionally facilitated by family networks back home), new visitors and migrants can foster a sense of community fairly quickly and use support networks to gather information, manage the logistics of travel or settlement and participate in social events. The traditional pressures that attend physical relocation may thus feel less urgent and onerous, and the affective impacts of cultural adjustment may be less significant. Communities of settled migrants can provide a potentially helpful safety net or point of reference for newly arrived migrants, making these people feel like a part of an existing community and thus helping
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Normalising new experiences

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It suddenly occurred to me yesterday how normal I find the experience of living among people from so many different cultures and countries. I went to a Greek restaurant and knew exactly what to order and how to pronounce it correctly. I did it almost unconsciously and the transaction was over quite quickly because I was so precise. (I became conscious of this because the customer before me was asking about every item and still trying to figure out what to order.) But later on, I thought to myself, how did I become this person who knows all this information? Because I didn't grow up in this setting. But now the experience is so familiar and so ingrained, I can't imagine life otherwise. The person that I was before would look upon me now and find it odd that I am familiar with the cultures, objects and tastes of so many different ethnicities and nationalities. But to the person that I am now, that is ordinary. There are so many ways in which I and so many others who have experien
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