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Watching your child perform and be judged is a sure way to make you feel ‘all the feels’. Yet this is what happens every month throughout Australia at feis — Irish dancing competitions. Welcome to the world of competitive Irish dancing, which reaches peak visibility around this time of year because of St Patrick’s Day.
Humans are inherently social creatures with a need to converse, yet we live in isolation and mental distress in greater numbers than ever before. Does the ready desire for argumentation online that some thrive on come from wanting to feel, well, something — anger, certainly — rather than passively watching the world whir by?
We had some books at home so I wasn't wholly deprived but I did have to discover reading without any real parental guidance; English wasn't even our home language. But when I started working at my local public library, it became clear that while I might have been the child of refugees, for many, libraries themselves were a refuge.
Australia's healthcare system reflects some of our best values, which surely demands we think about how we can make it work better. We need to ensure care is extended beyond our immediate communities, because we're all interconnected — including asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru.
As someone who has a language background which will in all likelihood not make it past one more generation in my family here in Australia, I've long understood the way language loss can occur as a result of migration, to say nothing of acts like colonisation. These are great forces that are difficult but, as I've found, not impossible to resist.
On my first day of primary school, I understood very little English and spoke even less. My parents seemed to feel little anxiety and assumed I'd just figure it out at school. Turns out they weren't wrong. However, what they didn't anticipate is what would happen to my Vietnamese.
Sheila Ngoc Pham is a writer, producer and radio maker. She currently teaches public health ethics at Macquarie University and is a PhD candidate at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation. She tweets as @birdpham