Tag Archives: Deaf community

Oh Andy!

14 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Culture and deaf

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KL hands 1

I don’t watch Channel 9’s ‘The Voice’. I’m deaf and it has no interest for me. But last Sunday night I watched it because in the past few weeks there’s been so much controversy in the deaf community about Andy Dexterity’s plan to perform using Auslan. I wanted to see for myself what all the fuss is about.

I knew nothing much about Andy Dexterity. I had no idea what he even looked like until I watched ‘The Voice’. Having watched him, it was easy to decide he isn’t someone I have any interest in. But equally, I don’t wish him any ill.

Andy obviously isn’t a natural or proficient signer and he isn’t deaf. So the question is, why is he performing on national television using Auslan, and why is he claiming to give a voice to deaf people?

Auslan has a high profile at the moment. It’s a good time to be cashing in on it. The summer bushfires and COVID, with all their televised press conferences where Auslan interpreters stood beside the Prime Minister, Premiers and experts, brought it into everyone’s lounge room. People have been grateful, they’ve cheered, been curious, expressed a desire to learn it, made fun of it, dismissed it, but whatever their reaction, they’ve noticed it.

For deaf people, Auslan is vital, it’s at the core of our community, it is cherished by those of us who use it in our everyday lives. For a long time it was an underground language, forbidden, hidden. It wasn’t called Auslan until the 1980s when Trevor Johnston, a CODA (hearing Child of Deaf Adults), fluent Auslan user and linguist formally studied it for his PhD, named it, compiled a dictionary of it and proved it is a bona fide language. His work has been liberating for deaf people.

Since then, Auslan has come steadily into the light and many hearing people have learned it. Most only learn it for fun, but some go on to fluency and become interpreters or allies for the deaf community. Whether they are born into the deaf community and acquire Auslan as their first language or whether they learn it and join the deaf community later, hearing people who use Auslan in a respectful way are highly valued in the deaf community.

But there are cowboys: hearing people who learn some Auslan, see its potential, and appropriate it for themselves and their own benefit, while claiming to be helping deaf people. This is cultural appropriation. Andy Dexterity is one of those. There are many others, and from time to time, in Australia and overseas, they come under scrutiny, but at the moment it’s Andy in the spotlight. And many people in the deaf community are furious.

Social media has been awash with attacks on him, to the point of vilification. It seems Andy first came to the deaf community’s notice in 2017. He does have some friends in the deaf community, and he did initially try to learn from deaf people and improve his signing. Deaf Australia saw potential in him and because of his high profile in the mainstream invited him to be an Ambassador for Deaf Australia, raising awareness about Auslan and the deaf community. But a lot of deaf people didn’t like him and he was roundly criticised. Some deaf people have continued to work with him, but it seems that the criticism of him over the past few years has been so ferocious he has stopped listening to it. Many deaf people are now frustrated that he won’t talk to them or listen to them.

They are angry because we are fiercely protective of Auslan. It is the language of our community, the language most accessible to deaf people. It opens up our life, gives us access to pretty much everything. Generations of deaf children have suffered because we were forbidden to use it. Even today, hearing ‘experts’, usually doctors, audiologists and speech pathologists, routinely discourage parents of deaf children from using Auslan. Among the many falsehoods parents are told is that signing will interfere with learning speech. The advice from most deaf people is: give them both Auslan and speech from the beginning.

They are angry because Auslan is a beautiful language and an incompetent Auslan user is mangling it in public. It’s painful for fluent Auslan users to watch this. Now that Auslan is coming out into the light, we want hearing people to learn it but we want them to use it respectfully. It’s painful when hearing people treat it as some cute plaything, change it to suit themselves, butcher it and make it ugly or silly. It’s one thing for deaf people to teach a hearing person to use Auslan; we will be patient and tolerant of mangled signs. But if that person then goes out and purports to be an accomplished Auslan user before they are, and an authority on deaf people without first establishing their credibility, it’s infuriating and insulting.

They are angry because Andy is sign singing and he’s doing it badly. On his first appearance on ‘The Voice’, he signed the first verse of ‘Imagine’, but many of his signs were incomprehensible or strange. In the second verse he sang in English and signed some words in Auslan at the same time. English and Auslan are two different languages. Trying to use them both at the same time doesn’t work, and it’s always Auslan that suffers. When it’s done well, sign singing can be very beautiful. We have plenty of talented deaf people who can sign sing beautifully. We don’t need incompetent Auslan users to sign sing. We especially don’t need them to do it on national television.

They are angry because Andy is claiming to speak for us, to give us a voice. I have a voice, and so do other deaf people, we use speech and we use Auslan and interpreters. We don’t need Andy, or anyone else, to be our voice. We especially don’t need a hearing person, who knows little about us, to spread misinformation about us on national television, to patronise us, talk about us as if we are ‘poor little deaf people who don’t have a voice’.

Deaf people are marginalised and we do need allies. But Andy is not behaving like an ally. An ally is a person who understands us, shows respect, and walks beside us, helps us to make our voices heard. An ally does not take all the attention for themselves and claim to be our voice, an ally brings us into the spotlight with them.

In a way, Andy has tried. And some deaf people have tried to help him do better. For ‘The Voice’ he had a deaf Auslan consultant, Sue, who helped him with his signing. She was seen backstage on Sunday night. I didn’t see Andy acknowledge or introduce her, but we don’t know everything he did or said – TV programs never broadcast everything that’s filmed so we only saw what ‘The Voice’ chose to broadcast.

There is no black and white way to interpret English into Auslan. Songs in particular can be, and are, interpreted in many different ways by different people. And we don’t know how much of Andy’s signing was edited out and what impact this had on what we saw on TV. Film/video editors who aren’t themselves fluent in Auslan can easily mangle it. This is why credible Auslan video producers who aren’t fluent in Auslan use Auslan consultants for both filming and editing. We don’t know if ‘The Voice’ did this, we only know a deaf Auslan consultant worked with Andy on his signing.

And we don’t know if Andy gets any better as ‘The Voice’ progresses. He isn’t finished on ‘The Voice’ yet. All the criticism and anger on social media, and now being picked up by the mainstream media, is actually achieving more attention for ‘The Voice’ and Andy. It is making Andy more famous!

Sue appears to have tried to do the right thing and support Andy to be better at Auslan. All the criticism of him must be devastating for her because it can be seen as criticism of her as well. Sue has also been an Auslan consultant with Emma Watkins (Emma Wiggles) but the deaf community seems to like Emma’s use of Auslan.

There’s another aspect too that I think we need to consider. When people have complained that Andy won’t talk to or work with the deaf community, are they saying that Sue isn’t a member of the deaf community? How hurtful that must be for her and others who have tried to help Andy! What do they mean by ‘the deaf community’? Do they mean themselves? But it’s not just the most publicly vocal or the most Auslan-fluent of us who are ‘the deaf community’. Surely all of us who sign, respect Auslan and identify with the deaf community are ‘the deaf community’. But no one does or even can consult with everyone, or even the majority, in the deaf community.

How do we decide who should be consulted in these situations? There are guidelines on how to identify who is an ‘acceptable’ Auslan consultant, contained in the English to Auslan Video Production guidelines developed by Melbourne Polytechnic and Macquarie University in 2015 (1). The first requirement is ‘a proficient Auslan signer’. But there is no definition of what ‘proficient’ means.

Andy does need to try harder, do better. If he truly wants to be an ally for deaf people, rather than indulging in cultural appropriation and keeping the attention and the benefit for himself, he would do better to work side by side with one of our many accomplished Auslan performers, himself singing in English and his deaf performance partner signing in Auslan. And rather than talking for deaf people, he would do well to show respect and defer to his deaf performance partner to discuss Auslan and deaf people. But again, we don’t know how much of what Andy has done on ‘The Voice’ has been edited out. We don’t know if he wanted to have a deaf Auslan performer with him and ‘The Voice’ wouldn’t allow it.

We in the deaf community also need to think about and discuss some things among ourselves and we need to do some things better.

How effective is it to constantly criticise? What do we do when people continually criticise us? We turn away from them. If Andy ever wanted to be an ally – and it’s possible that in the beginning, he did – he has been criticised so relentlessly and so publicly he turned away from most of us some time ago. Is that really surprising?

Andy is one person. One cowboy. There are plenty of others. There are plenty of videos out there of incompetent signers sign singing badly, ‘teaching’ Auslan and other sign languages badly. Why are we giving so much attention to Andy? There are so many other important issues that need our attention. Why are we expending so much time and energy on just one person?

I do think that Deaf Australia made a mistake asking Andy, back in 2014, to be an Ambassador for them. I expect they had faith in his ability and passion to raise awareness of the organisation and Auslan, and in a way he is doing that: hearing people who aren’t familiar with Auslan don’t know he’s mangling it. If some of them then go and learn Auslan they will find out, but would they have bothered to learn if Andy hadn’t exposed them to it? Deaf Australia couldn’t have known he would go rogue. But now that he has, and even though, since December 2019, he is no longer a Deaf Australia Ambassador, I think they do need to do more to distance themselves from him.

I was actively involved with Deaf Australia for 25 years until I retired in 2014, I still help out sometimes behind the scenes, and I’m very loyal to Deaf Australia, I believe we need this organisation. But Deaf Australia, and people involved in it, do make mistakes sometimes. We all do.

Admitting our mistakes, cutting our losses and moving on is important for all of us. So is forgiveness. The deaf community can be very unforgiving. Not just to outsiders but to our own. Someone makes a mistake and some people hate them forever, for them it wipes out all the good things this someone does. Is this reasonable? Does it really help us?

Deaf Australia and many of our leaders suffer because of this. It probably scares off potentially great leaders. This inability to forgive makes it so much harder for leaders and organisations like Deaf Australia to cut through when people in the community won’t listen to what they say or do, with an open and objective mind and work with them to make things better. So we all suffer collectively from a lack of support for our leaders and organisations. There are many layers to this. Some of them, for example, our history and experiences that make us angry, are easy to understand; some we need to explore further.

We need to think about this situation with Andy from many different perspectives. There is our own, the anger and disappointment. There are others. What is all this anger doing to the people who do want to be allies? Is it scaring them off? Does it make them afraid to get involved with us because we might criticise them too, refuse to forgive when they make mistakes? Are we scaring away hearing parents who are thinking about learning Auslan and letting their deaf children be part of the deaf community? Will they want their children to be involved in a community that behaves like this? Even I feel a little nervous writing this: will other deaf people attack me for questioning them, for asking them to think about these things?

As Gandhi is supposed to have said (but apparently didn’t): We need to be the change we want to see in the world.

We need to show people what good Auslan looks like, how we want to be portrayed.

We need to support our deaf Auslan performers in any way we can, to get out there and be seen. When we think they could do better, we need to encourage and support instead of criticise.

We need to provide a framework for people who work in the Auslan space. As mentioned, there are guidelines for who is an ‘acceptable’ Auslan consultant. We also need Auslan proficiency testing; and something similar to the interpreters’ NAATI accreditation system so that people not fluent in Auslan will know what is good Auslan and whether they should use particular materials or advisers. And maybe other things. But who should develop these things? The deaf community of course, but who in the deaf community?

In the past, Deaf Australia tried, within its limited resources, to do some of this, with their Auslan Endorsement System and their Deaf Friendly Scheme. But many deaf people didn’t like either of these frameworks so they haven’t taken off. If deaf people don’t like what Deaf Australia has tried to do, what kind of framework do we want to address these issues? And if they don’t want Deaf Australia to do this type of thing, who do we want to do it? How should we decide who should do this?

What’s happening with Andy is not new. It’s happened before with other people who have appropriated Auslan and used it badly and it will happen again unless we decide on a different approach. Anger and criticism, while understandable, hasn’t worked and usually doesn’t with most things. Let’s learn from this experience with Andy and respond to it differently next time.

Let’s all take a deep breath and think about the bigger picture. We are living in a time of transformation. It’s a time to do things differently.

What’s really important? What do we really want? How can we get there? What do we want for our community? What do we want Deaf Australia to be and do? How can we support Deaf Australia to do what we want it to do? Do we want to kill off Deaf Australia and set up a completely different organisation? What kind of organisation? How can we support our leaders and encourage more people to become allies? How can we make them feel welcome and appreciated when they try? How can we encourage and support them to be better? Our leaders, our allies, our organisations, our community are what we make them, what we build them up to be.

We can do this! We need to stop putting so much of our energy into fighting with outsiders and with each other and we need to work better together. We can do it!

Auslan translation by Robert Adam:

Notes:

  1. https://accan.org.au/files/Grants/English-into-AuslanTranslationGuidelines_Web.pdf p9.

Grateful thanks to those deaf people who gave me constructive feedback on early versions of this blogpost, and to Robert Adam, who did the Auslan translation, and Colin Allen for video editing.

 

The best we can with what we know

12 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Deaf community

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Al McEwin

With Alastair McEwin, Breda Carty in background.

Last week Alastair McEwin started his new job. He is Australia’s new Disability Discrimination Commissioner. And he’s deaf. He was born deaf, into a hearing family. He speaks and he uses Auslan, he’s bilingual.

In the past year or two we have seen a number of other deaf people take up high level roles: Dean Barton Smith as CEO of Deaf Children Australia, Leonie Jackson as CEO of the Deaf Society of NSW, Rebecca Adam as interim CEO of the WA Deaf Society. They join Matthew Wright CEO of Australian Federation of Disability Organisations, Kyle Miers CEO of Deaf Australia, Brett Casey CEO of Deaf Services QLD, and Colin Allen volunteer President of the World Federation of the Deaf, who have all been in their positions longer.

Deaf Australia’s CEOs and the WFD’s Presidents have always been deaf people, and AFDO’s CEOs have always been people with a disability, but the other organisations have always had non-deaf CEOs until now. And many in the deaf community have been highly critical of the ongoing failure to appoint deaf people to high level positions, especially in deaf community organisations.

Things are changing now and it’s so exciting.

Of course, many things have been changing for a long time. It’s been slow, but things have changed.

Last year at our annual Christmas-time lunch, my friends Breda and Maree and I were discussing deaf community issues and Breda commented on how much things have changed in the past twenty years.

I said, “Yes, but twenty years is an effing long time!” and for some reason we all found that very funny.

When I went to university in the 1970s I was the only deaf person there, no one had any idea what to do with me and there were no support services. Support services started appearing in universities in the 1980s, an initiative of the late Des Power at Griffith University in Brisbane that was slowly taken up by other universities nationally, and deaf university students now are generally well supported. Of our new high flyers, Alastair, Brett and Rebecca all have law degrees, Leonie has an education degree, Dean has a marketing degree, Kyle has a leadership and development degree and Matthew has an arts and human resources degree.

When I became Executive Officer of Deaf Australia in 2001, following in the footsteps of Brett Casey and Carol-lee Aquiline, there were no deaf CEOs elsewhere in Australia. Hearing people were sceptical of deaf people’s ability to lead and to manage organisations.

One day in 2003, soon after we moved the Deaf Australia Sydney office to the RIDBC campus at North Rocks, a hearing teacher at one of the RIDBC schools wandered in to see what we were all about. I was not in the office and one of my staff, Natalie, talked to her. The teacher asked if Natalie was deaf and when she said, “Yes, we are all deaf,” the teacher seemed amazed. The question was asked a number of times in disbelief. For our part, Natalie and I were shocked that someone who taught deaf children could have such a poor opinion of our abilities.

But deaf people too are not always supportive.

There is a breed of deaf person who looks at deaf achievers and turns up their noses and signs dismissively, “Oh, you’re clever!”

The implication is: “You’re not one of us!”

There is a breed of deaf person who looks at deaf achievers and relentlessly criticises every minor mistake –  real, imagined, misinterpreted or misunderstood.

There is a breed of deaf person who, when a deaf achiever does something this breed doesn’t like, decides never to forgive them. This one thing then cancels out or at least taints every good thing the achiever does.

There is a breed of deaf person who has been indoctrinated to believe, often subconsciously, that hearing is better than deaf and therefore no deaf person can ever really be successful.

And there are people like me and my friend Gaye who, when one of these achievers was appointed, looked at each other and said, “That’s so great! But do you think they are the right person for that job?”

And then we looked at each other again and said, “We’re always saying deaf people should be appointed to these jobs. Now we’ve got one and we’re doubtful! Let’s just shut up and give them a go!”

And this, my friends, is what I sincerely believe we all need to do. Give each other a go!

There is a lot of negativity in the deaf community. And a lot of this negativity is there because it’s what we’ve been taught and how we’ve been treated in a world overwhelmingly designed for and lead by people who hear and know nothing much about deaf people. It’s what we know. 

But there’s also a lot of good people and a lot of positivity in the deaf community. It’s time to build on that.

It’s time to stop cutting down the tall poppies. It’s time to put aside doubts and jealousy and grudges and support each other to do the best we can.

Of course, there are a lot of deaf achievers at all levels and in all walks of life. In education and academia, in the trades, the law, the arts, in sports. But it’s the leaders, the CEOs and the publicly prominent who seem to cop the most flack.

The Australian deaf community started changing rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s. This was the decade when the welfare and interpreting roles were split into two separate professions, when Auslan was recognised as a real language and given a name and a dictionary by Trevor Johnston, when Deaf Australia (then known as Australian Association of the Deaf) was established to lead and represent deaf people and modern deaf advocates began emerging, when TAFE and universities began providing support services, when Deaf Studies was introduced by Breda Carty and we all learned more about ourselves and our community, when Australian Theatre of the Deaf was formed and began bringing Auslan and deaf stories to us and the masses. And so much more. It was a truly vibrant time to be part of the deaf community.

Those of us who were part of that era did what we could with what we had. Many of us didn’t have all the skills and experience we needed for the roles we took on, either voluntarily or paid, but we believed in ourselves, each other and our cause, we learned on the job and acquired skills and qualifications along the way.  The work we did back then paved the way for today’s achievers.

I’m so proud of what we achieved back then and in the years since. And I’m so proud of today’s achievers. They are paving the way for tomorrow’s achievers.

One of my mantras for life is: we all do the best we can with what we know at the time.

What we know changes as we learn and grow. What we did yesterday we might do differently today but it doesn’t mean that what we did yesterday was wrong or not good enough. It was the best we could do with what we knew at the time.

So let’s stand by today’s achievers and support them.

Let’s give them the space and the grace to learn and grow and do the best they can for us with what they know at the time. We will, I am sure, be richly rewarded and our community will also learn and grow and breed new achievers to do even better with what they know.

When we support achievers in our community we all benefit from their achievements.

Writers, artists, rocks and trees

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Travel and deaf

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Sydney Harbour Bridge

John and I leave Armidale early in the morning, heading south. The day before, on our drive through Uralla, Ginny pointed out Moons Bakery, open from 4.00am and a truckies’ favourite. But it’s still too early for us to think about food.

The roads are quiet and we make good time. We pass through Murrurundi and hit racehorse country. The vast Emirates Park, with a picture of a horse and jockey on its stone gateway, has black post and rail fences. I’m surprised. Aren’t these fences usually white? What’s with this rebellious black?

We come into Singleton in the Hunter Valley and see coal trains and power stations. From Singleton we take Putty Road to Windsor, through the mountains and forest, a quiet narrow two-way road with little traffic.

The road seems to go on forever, up and down mountains, winding and straightening out and winding again, with beautiful views over the mountains. We are in the Hawkesbury Valley now. Finally we come into Windsor and stop at nearby Richmond for a break. It was a beautiful drive for me but exhausting for John.

Still, as Breda and I later agree, rather this quiet endless road than the racetrack that is the Pacific motorway into Sydney.

From Richmond to Springwood in the Blue Mountains we take Hawkesbury Road up the mountain on hairpin bends, it’s breathtaking. We pull into a lookout and through the smoke haze see Sydney’s towers in the distance.

I’ve been to Springwood many times. When I worked for Deaf Australia, I often stayed here with Breda and Cameron, getting the 7.30am train to Sydney each day with Breda, but John hasn’t been here before.

We drive around looking for a supermarket, I know there is one on the main street but I can’t seem to see it. Eventually we find one on a back street but the shelves are almost completely bare, as if there is some impending disaster and everyone has raided the shop. We’ve never seen a supermarket like this. What’s going on? Later Cameron tells us he’s surprised the store is still open, it’s been going out of business for months. He also tells us where the other supermarket is and I can’t believe I missed it.

After managing to find some supplies to contribute to the household pantry, we find Cameron, Taffy the dog and Kasha the host student at home. Breda isn’t due home for a few hours and Rowan has just left for work, delivering pizzas in this his gap year.

The back deck is the perfect place for a late afternoon tea. I love this house, it’s very Breda and Cameron and it backs onto the Blue Mountains national park with wonderful peaceful views of mountains, trees and changing light. Today we have a glorious pink sunset.

I’ve previously met Kasha when talking with Breda on Skype, and it’s good to meet him in person. He boards here for school terms but is going home for an extended weekend. Deaf community families often have deaf students boarding with them like this so they can attend a school that best suits them. We chat about school and home, he seems a nice, friendly, confident teenager. It always gives me hope, for deaf people, for the deaf community and the future, when I chat like this in Auslan with young deaf people.

This is a bilingual household where everyone uses both English and Auslan to varying degrees of fluency. Breda, Kasha and I are deaf, Cameron, Rowan and John are hearing. No one gets excluded and conversation is wide-ranging and animated.

Kasha leaves early next morning and Breda, John and I get an early train down to Sydney, leaving Cameron to work at home on his video productions.

We are going to the Sydney Writers’ Festival, a major reason John and I have made this trip.

Breda and I had been so excited to learn the organisers would provide some interpreted sessions. Two keynotes and a couple more, they said. We interpreted this optimistically and pored over the program, sending in our list.

Oh no, came the reply. All sessions in one venue are being live captioned, so they really could only stretch to a total of three interpreted sessions in addition to the two high-profile keynotes.

Over four days!

Most of the festival program is free but the captioned sessions have an entrance fee. We are so disappointed. But still, we are going. But only to the free sessions. Why should we have to pay for access? Other people at the festival don’t have to.

Today’s interpreted session is about history writing. Breda enjoys it. Although history interests me, I struggle to stay awake. John is unimpressed.

Breda goes to work and John and I stroll along the waterfront from Walsh Bay, under the Harbour Bridge towards Circular Quay. There is a cruise ship in port and everything looks so splendid: the sparkling water, the big white ship, the Opera House, Circular Quay with its ferries and background of skyscrapers. We stop at the Rocks for lunch at the Munich Brauhaus before catching a ferry to Watson’s Bay – because it’s the next one leaving and because being on a boat on the harbour is my number one thing to do in Sydney. Some smoke from burnoffs in the mountains hangs over the harbour but it’s a beautiful sunny day and we drink it in, standing in the boat’s prow, the wind in our hair.

In the 1980s I lived for a year at Neutral Bay and worked at the University of NSW, getting a ferry and a bus to work each day. In the winter dark I’d often sit out on the ferry deck on the trip home, rugged up against the cold, looking at the city lights, the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, and the clear night skies and watching the seagulls flying along beside the boat, and I’d fall in love all over again with this glorious harbour.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, anyone tired of Sydney Harbour is tired of life.

We get the 2.48pm train back to Springwood. I want John to see how spectacular the mountains are in the late afternoon light, but he falls asleep!

“It’s just rocks and trees!” he says. “It’s not like it’s Niagara Falls!”

Next morning, while everyone else works, John and I drive to Faulconbridge, the next town up the mountain, and visit the Norman Lindsay Gallery. http://www.normanlindsay.com.au/

Wandering through the gallery, admiring the incredible art, mostly of nudes, John turns to me and says, “This bloke was a sex maniac!” But he’s impressed.

Lindsay’s talent was very broad: drawing, painting watercolours and oils, etching, sculpture, writing and even model ship building.

The gallery is in the house where he lived. It’s a lovely white sandstone house with big rooms and high ceilings, verandas with columns, a grape arbor along one side, and a large detached kitchen connected to the house by an enclosed walkway with sculpture courtyards on either side. In the grounds are sculptures, fountains, a painting studio, an etching studio and a café. This artist was surely not impoverished.

We take the path down to the swimming pool at the edge of the bush. It is empty of water and a little overgrown with grass but it’s easy to imagine how magnificent it was in its heyday. It is enormous, the concrete edge on the opposite side looking out over the mountains like an infinity pool. Beside the steps down to it are curved stone terraces like an ancient amphitheatre.

“Imagine how many people might have sat here watching the goings-on in the pool!” John comments.

We catch an early afternoon train down to Sydney where I meet up with Breda at Walsh Bay for the second interpreted Writers’ Festival session. John goes off to do his own thing for an hour, he’s had enough, he says, of writers pontificating.

Breda and I both enjoy this session, especially Don Watson talking about how management-speak (‘agile’, ‘impact’) is taking over our everyday use of language. We duck out a little early to dash for the train at Circular Quay, via what feels like a million stairs through the Rocks.

At Town Hall we weave our way through the crowds outside, to find our seats to see Gloria Steinem in conversation with Jennifer Byrne. John and several deaf people are already there and Cameron joins us soon after.

We have front row seats, reserved because we need to be able to see the Auslan interpreter. Being deaf does on occasion come with extra benefits – and it doesn’t hurt our hearing partners either!

Sydney Town Hall is magnificent, with soaring organ pipes, a gallery above, leadlight and beautifully ornate embellishments. Tonight it is packed. This event has sold out.

Gloria Steinem is inspiring. Even John is engrossed. She talks about her latest book, My life on the road; her childhood with a father who packed the family into the car each year, moving them to a new place; and her own choice as an adult to spend a lot of time on the road, meeting, listening to and working with people.

Afterwards Breda, Sofya and I buy her book and join a long queue. Ahead of me I see Yvonne, a woman I knew many years ago when I lived in Sydney. I catch her eye, she excuses herself from her friends, and we catch up while the queue slowly moves us towards the marvellous Ms Steinem, who signs my book and smiles when I say and sign ‘thank you’.

Across the road we join the rest of our group at a restaurant in the resplendent Queen Victoria Building. Champagne is poured and we drink in celebration with Alastair McEwin, on his appointment as the new Disability Discrimination Commissioner, which he is due to take up in July. We are all so excited to see one of our own take on this influential role.

But Al is still Al, this guy from Adelaide we’ve known for so many years, still making us laugh. We tell him he’s going to have to watch himself now, people will be watching him.

It’s a deaf community goodnight – the “long goodbye” – and we have to run for the train but we make it home just before midnight.

It’s been a great night. All these people I’ve not seen for a while, Gloria Steinem’s enthusiasm for life at 82 and the promise for the future that Al’s appointment brings, fill me with optimism.

Who’s disabled?

14 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Hearing and deaf

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IMG_3831_Crop

A few years ago, lolling about in Mum and Dad’s pool with one of my sisters, she and I had a conversation about disability politics, during which I referred to myself as disabled.

My sister stopped lolling and stared at me.

“You’re not disabled!” she said, shocked.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “You and I don’t see me as disabled, but society does.”

“I’ve never thought of you as disabled,” she said. “It’s never occurred to me to think of you that way! You’re just you. A bit different. But disabled? No way!”

A few days later, she said, “I can’t get over this idea of you as disabled! I’m so shocked. It’s ridiculous that people see you that way!”

On Monday 13th July, appearing on ABC channel 24 with the other 2015 Australians of the Year, Young Australian of the Year Drisana Levitzke-Gray said: “Deaf people don’t see ourselves as disabled. We see it as deaf gain rather than hearing loss.”

It wasn’t long before someone named Tony commented on Twitter: “You don’t have a sense of hearing. Deaf people are disabled. Deal with it.”

Drisana said many things during this live television broadcast. She talked about being the fifth generation of deaf activists in her family, four of them women, and about deaf people’s human rights, in particular their right to use Auslan. She talked about the need for access.  She talked about the government cutting Deaf Australia’s funding and the impact this has on advocacy for deaf people’s human rights. She talked about how she deals with criticism and people’s expectations of her. But this one small comment about disability was the one thing Tony homed in on.

Who’s this guy Tony? Who cares what he thinks?

But his comment is typical of the social attitude I was referring to in my conversation with my sister.

It is typical of the bigotry exemplified many years ago by a journalist who, when I objected to his use of the term ‘deaf and dumb’, said that it was a perfectly acceptable term to use because all his friends used it.

It is typical of the widespread practice in our society of seeing anyone who is different as ‘other’ and in need of changing to fit whatever is perceived as the ‘norm’.

This question of whether or not deaf people are disabled arises regularly. Deaf people often talk about it. Deaf people and hard of hearing people don’t always agree about it. Non-deaf people are frequently baffled by it.

Hard of hearing people or people who become deaf later in life often do experience their deafness as a loss and see themselves as disabled. Many of these people refer to themselves as hearing-impaired.

For people who are born deaf or become deaf early in their life, being deaf is a normal state of being, we don’t feel we have lost anything, and we dislike the term hearing-impaired: we don’t see ourselves as impaired.

For many of us, being deaf adds a dimension to our life. It brings a different way of experiencing and interacting with the world. When we embrace Auslan and the Deaf community, it brings us a wonderfully rich and expressive language, a unique culture and a world-wide community of friends, understanding, acceptance and belonging that transcends borders, race, religion, gender, politics.

This was what Drisana was talking about when she used the term ‘deaf gain’.

But people like Tony find this hard to understand. Indeed, they often don’t even stop to think about what Drisana might have meant. They see only the absence of hearing and see attempts to explain this different ‘deaf gain’ reality as a denial of reality – their reality.

I was often asked about this issue during the years I was an advocate with Deaf Australia. Many people pointed out that organisations like Deaf Australia received funding from disability programs. How then, they asked, could we say we weren’t disabled?  We had to decide what we were one way or the other, we couldn’t have it both ways.

Ah but we could, I argued. And this is how I explained it:

Disability is relative. If you’re a hearing person and you can’t sign, and you walk into a room full of deaf people communicating in Auslan, who’s disabled?  You or all these deaf people?  Who needs an interpreter?  You or all these deaf people?

By ourselves, and with each other, deafness doesn’t disable us, we just find our own ways of doing things.

It is when we go out into an environment designed by people who hear, for people who hear, that we become disabled. It is not our deafness that disables us, it is the environment, limitations and expectations that are imposed on us by others who are unlike us.

For six years from 2008 to 2013 I was a member of the National People with Disabilities and Carers Council, which provided advice to the Minister and Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities. The Council, a large and wonderfully eclectic group, was handpicked mainly by Bill Shorten and after its first meeting, a group of us sat in the Qantas lounge at Canberra airport, discussing how we’d first met Bill Shorten and how unusual he was for a politician in that he seemed to ‘get it’ about disability.

I related the story of how I’d used the ‘in a room full of deaf people, who’s disabled?’ explanation when I first met Bill. In our group was Milly Parker, who went on to become a well-known disability advocate. Milly, who has a brain injury, runs her own business, making gourmet dog food and selling it internationally.

She listened to my story and said, “That’s right, Karen! In my business and my home everything is set up in a way that works for me and I’m not disabled. I only become disabled when I go out into a different environment and other people put their expectations and limitations on me.”

During many years of working with people with all kinds of ‘disability’ I have learned that deaf people aren’t the only ones who don’t see themselves as disabled. We aren’t the only ones who wish that other people would stop trying to change us and put road blocks in our way.

Elizabeth Hastings, the first Disability Discrimination Commissioner put it this way:

“…disability is part of the human community… Certainly disability is not always convenient, attractive or desirable, but it is an ordinary attribute of being human. Even though my disability is also not especially convenient, attractive or desirable, it is my life and I have absolutely no wish for it to be otherwise. Not everybody will feel the same way about his or her circumstances. However many people with disabilities do think and feel the way I do – that we do not wish to be altered, cured or transformed. We do wish our equipment would work reliably, and that education, transport, shopping and professional and other services, work, entertainment, banking, insurance and information were accessible to us.” 1

When I was Executive Officer at Deaf Australia I often worked with Damian Griffis, Executive Officer at First People’s Disability Network. One of the things that Damian often explained at various meetings was that in traditional language there was no word for the concept of disability. Aboriginal people with disability are supported and accepted as members of their community.

So who’s disabled?

Isn’t everyone, in some way, sometime? At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter.  What is important is how we make the most of what we have, how we live our lives, how we treat other people and how our society supports and accepts us.  As Elizabeth Hastings put it, disability is part of the human condition. It’s normal.

And to people who would like to think it isn’t, I say: deal with it.

  1. Hastings, E. 1997. Keynote address. Presented at the Social Options Conference, November 21, Adelaide, Australia.

Sticks in the forest

05 Thursday Mar 2015

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A teacher takes some students to the forest and asks them to each bring her a stick. When they return, the teacher takes each student’s stick in turn and breaks it. She sends them back into the forest to collect more sticks. Again she takes each stick and breaks it and sends them back to the forest.

The third time the students return, they confer and when the teacher asks for their sticks they give them to her together in one bundle. The teacher cannot break the sticks, the bundle is too thick and strong.

I first saw this story told by Laurene Gallimore, a deaf African-American professor from Gallaudet University, at the World Federation of the Deaf Congress in Brisbane in 1999.

This simple story is a powerful illustration of why it is so important for deaf people to work together in one large group in the best interests of the group as a whole, rather than individually on their own  interests. It is why we need Deaf Australia, which brings us together to advocate for our human rights.

Reminding each other of this story is more important now than ever before because Deaf Australia is experiencing its biggest threat since its establishment 29 years ago.

It is not just that Deaf Australia will lose its government funding at the end of June this year, it’s also that the deaf community has become more complacent and politically apathetic.

When I first got involved with Australian Association of the Deaf (AAD), as Deaf Australia was then known, 26 years ago, it had about $1,000 in the bank. It relied on membership fees and small donations from Deaf Societies. Volunteers did the work, we paid our own costs for attending board meetings, sleeping on each other’s couches, and as Secretary I paid some of the administration costs myself. Meetings and events were well attended and people were very passionate about the issues we worked on.

For several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Colin Allen was President and I was Secretary, we met at his office at least once a week after work to do AAD work. His employer generously allowed us to use their equipment and supplies.

Our funding requests to government were regularly refused on the grounds that a ‘deaf’ organisation, Australian Deafness Council (ADC, the earlier version of Deafness Forum) already received secretariat funding.

Deaf people established Deaf Australia in 1986 as their representative organisation, controlled by deaf people, because the deaf voice had been ignored during many years of trying to work within ADC. Like Deafness Forum, ADC was not controlled by deaf people and the majority of its members were service providers. But government didn’t care.

In those days Deaf Societies hosted an annual national deafness conference. At the 1992 conference in Perth, Brian Corcoran, a bureaucrat in what is now the Department of Social Services, made a presentation. Afterwards, an audience member asked why government wouldn’t fund AAD and when Mr Corcoran trotted  out the usual answer the audience went wild, stomping their feet on the floor and demanding funding for AAD.

Colin and I were working in the conference office at the time and missed the excitement but someone came running to fetch us. Colin introduced himself to Mr Corcoran, expressed his regret that he had been subjected to such an angry outburst, and explained why the community was so angry.

Brian Corcoran was actually a very nice, reasonable man. His department paid the travel costs for Colin, myself and an interpreter to meet with him in Canberra soon afterwards. We were also accompanied by Anne Mac Rae, then CEO of the Deaf Society of NSW.

Anne Mac Rae was a wonderful mentor to us and to AAD. She didn’t do things for us, she taught us how to do them ourselves. Over several years, she taught me how to write funding submissions, coached us in preparation for meetings with government and accompanied us to several meetings where she occasionally contributed to discussions but mostly observed and later gave us constructive feedback on how to do better next time.

Our meeting with Brian Corcoran was a turning point. He genuinely listened to us. He explained that government policy didn’t allow him to give AAD secretariat funding but we could apply for advocacy and information service funding, and he offered his department’s advice on what was needed for a successful application.

So that was how AAD/Deaf Australia became a funded organisation in 1992. It has received funding continuously ever since. In 2001 government decided to recognise AAD/Deaf Australia as the legitimate organisation representing deaf people who use Auslan. Funding was increased and changed to secretariat funding, even though Deafness Forum was already funded.

Much has been achieved in the 23 years that Deaf Australia has had paid staff.

But now, if government can’t be persuaded to reinstate funding and alternative funding can’t be found, at the end of June this year there will be no staff. If Deaf Australia is to continue it will have to become wholly voluntary again.

Will this work? I think so, up to a point. The board will likely take on more work. Some of us will do some work voluntarily again. But new and passionate younger volunteers with new ideas and the vitality of youth are needed.

The community is different now. People are accustomed to taking Deaf Australia for granted and having staff do the work. Over the past few months, a few members have called for deaf people to step up and show their support for Deaf Australia – to become members, make donations and so on – but little has changed.

All deaf people benefit from Deaf Australia’s work, but its membership fluctuates between 300 and 500. Numbers could be much higher.

Over the years I have heard many reasons why people aren’t members: it’s too expensive ($30 per year); they don’t like the President or the CEO or someone else on the board or staff; they don’t like something it did, in particular, the cinema captioning issue and closing the website discussion page 10 years ago; they don’t like politics; they want more immediate benefits and freebies; it doesn’t lobby for something they want – someone once said that even though they use the NRS (National Relay Service), NABS (interpreting service for health appointments) and the EAF (Employment Assistance Fund) these are things that Deaf Australia has already done for them and they want it to work on getting free hearing aids before they will join.

But by far the most common reason is they don’t know about Deaf Australia or understand what it does for them.

Deaf Australia has never been great at beating its own drum. It has never had enough peacocks strutting its stuff.

Many people assume that only service providers and hearing people do the things for them that Deaf Australia does. I would be a rich woman if I had a dollar for every time I told a deaf person that Deaf Australia lobbied for the NRS, for NABS, for the EAF, for Auslan in education and early intervention, and so on and was told in reply: “No! ACE did it! Deaf Society did it! DCA did it!”

It can be hard to convince deaf people that the big picture is more important than any one single issue or personal dislikes and grudges, and that politics matters to all of us, especially because we are a minority group.

For years I tried to persuade my friend Kevin Lyons to become a member. He was happy for his wife Gaye to be a member, but sport was his thing and he wasn’t interested in politics.

Then Gaye started working with me at Deaf Australia and going home with stories of issues we were working on, how hard we had to work to win small steps forward. Now Kevin is a committed member and he worries about the future: what will happen to deaf people’s rights if Deaf Australia has no money or staff and even worse, has to close?

We need Deaf Australia. It is the only national organisation that is wholly controlled and run by deaf people themselves. It is the only national organisation that has no driving interests other than the rights of deaf people, that lives and breathes “nothing about us without us”.

But right now, Deaf Australia needs us.

Now is not the time to be dragging out personal dislikes, ancient grudges, criticisms and personal agendas.

Now is the time for the big picture, for all of us to talk to each other about what Deaf Australia achieves for us and why we need it and how each of us can support it. It’s not hard: become a member; make a donation; get involved in campaigns; and encourage your family and friends to do the same.

We need to make the bundle of sticks that is Deaf Australia thicker and stronger. Otherwise we will all be just individual sticks in the forest.

Deaf clubs – Part 3: A new deaf community meeting place

15 Sunday Feb 2015

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For some time, many of us in the deaf community have been saying we need a modern version of the deaf club. We loved our deaf clubs but the old format will no longer work. The world has changed. The community has changed.

Deaf Societies are still very important organisations but they are now only one of a number of organisations providing services for deaf and hard of hearing people.

There are still sections of the deaf community who are either dependent on Deaf Societies for welfare-type assistance or who have a long association with them and are unready or unwilling to consider other options.

However, many deaf people are now quite independent of the Deaf Societies. Many people rarely visit or contact their Deaf Society, even if they use their interpreting service – interpreting bookings are made by the person who pays, which is not usually the deaf person.

If the NDIS is rolled out according to the model set out by the Productivity Commission, deaf people’s choice in where they go for services should increase as new providers emerge.

Early intervention services that historically focussed only on speech and separated themselves from the deaf community are now being encouraged to be more inclusive and collaborative. (However, I recently heard some information that indicates this change is turning back towards excluding Auslan from early intervention – but that’s the subject of a separate blog post).

As the experiences of deaf communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have shown, a deaf club in a mainstream setting, divorced from deaf community organisations, is a club that lacks a deaf soul.

The world is moving on from the old welfare and paternalistic one-organisation-does-everything-for-you models and it would be anachronistic for the deaf community to return to such a model, but there is still a case for a deaf community centre that provides a mixture of services, social activities, representative and advocacy support and so on in one easily identified location.

But now it needs to be owned and managed not by one all-powerful organisation but perhaps by many. They do it in Finland and they do it in Ireland. We could do it here in Australia.

In Helsinki, The Light House is jointly owned by the Finnish Association of the Deaf, the Finnish Federation of the Hard of Hearing, and Service Foundation for the Deaf. It provides accommodation to other organisations and services for deaf and hard of hearing people, meeting rooms and an auditorium. In the centre is a cafeteria where everyone mingles. At the front door is a general reception desk that directs you to the organisation that fits your need. (http://www.visithelsinki.fi/en/conference-banquet-facilities/light-house)

In Dublin, Deaf Village Ireland brings together 12 deaf organisations and provides a venue in which all of them can operate collaboratively. It is a company set up to manage the village through a central support structure and aims to provide a location where the deaf community can thrive and work together. Both Irish Sign Language and spoken English are used within Deaf Village Ireland.  (www.deafvillageireland.ie)

It would be wonderful to have something similar in Australia.

As an example, in each of our capital cities and major regional centres we could have a small community centre for deaf and hard of hearing people that houses at least some of these organisations:  Deaf Australia, Deaf Youth Australia, Better Hearing Australia, The Auslan Shop, deaf sports and recreation organisations, self-help groups such as Hear for You and Cicada, a deaf church (office/s if not the actual church/es), ASLIA and various service providers – Deaf Societies, interpreting service providers, Australian Communication Exchange,  Deaf Children Australia, assistive hearing technology providers, early intervention services, adult education services and so on. And a café/bar – managed by deaf people who are trained and paid to manage it.

We could perhaps have something like a strata title or leased building where organisations own or lease the portion of the building that they inhabit and contribute to the maintenance of common areas.

We could have small community centres where no one organisation is more important or powerful than any other, where no one organisation has its name in lights as ‘the’ organisation or ‘the’ building owner.

Is this possible?

I think it would be difficult because only service providers have money; community organisations like Deaf Australia (especially now that government has defunded it), sports and self-help groups, would struggle to contribute to ownership or lease costs. But I believe a modified version could be possible.

It would require some major shifts in thinking in our service providers, particularly Deaf Societies. And it would require deaf and hard of hearing people to take the lead in our own community and make it happen.

An alternative might be a version of what is happening in Adelaide. Perhaps several service providers could contribute to funding separate small community centres for community organisations to run as deaf clubs.

Another alternative might be for simple café/bars, with kid’s corners and Auslan-literate staff, which become deaf community meeting places.

Trade Block café, in the grounds of Deaf Children Australia in Melbourne and staffed by Victorian College for the Deaf students is very popular, but it is small and its hours are limited. An expanded version in various locations around Australia, accessible to everyone, deaf, hard of hearing and hearing, could be a hit. Personally I love this idea.

Whatever option we come up with, it’s important that any new meeting place is ‘owned’ by the deaf community, not by any all-powerful service organisation.

Deaf people are fond of saying that we can do anything. We like to demand our rights.  The community has the capability to run its own deaf clubs but few have stepped up and accepted the challenge. Can we continue to claim we can do anything and yet expect others to continue to do things for us?

We can do this. We can create new types of deaf community meeting places that are inclusive and bilingual places where Auslan and English are equally valued and where deaf, hard of hearing and hearing people, parents and service providers feel welcome, equal and at home.

And then let’s see what kind of modern Auslan sign the community develops for ‘deaf club’.

How important is it to have a deaf community meeting place?  How can we make it happen?

Deaf clubs – part 2: A fragmented community today

13 Friday Feb 2015

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Deaf people at a mainstream restaurant

Deaf people at a mainstream restaurant

Until the mid 1990’s, deaf communities in Australia were centred on their deaf clubs, based at the Deaf Societies. It was a well-organised, active, vibrant community. And then everything changed.

Education became increasingly mainstreamed; deaf students now have less contact with each other and the wider deaf community.

Deaf Societies began having serious money problems. Everything became more expensive, the charity dollar more elusive, government regulations and funding accountability requirements more onerous. Institutionalisation was on the way out.

The focus on community fell out of favour with the Deaf Societies and capitalist-style business models became king. The Deaf Society of NSW closed its unprofitable nursing home and hostel, sold its Stanmore site and leased rooms in an office building in Parramatta. It became more ‘professional’, hived off its community centre and deaf club was no more.

For a while, a small group of deaf people tried to establish deaf pub at Lidcombe Bowling Club. But deaf people didn’t feel connected to it. The soul of the deaf community was absent, its spirit crushed.

The Stanmore site is now part of Newington College. The back of the site can still be glimpsed as you trundle past on the train, but instead of the wide gap with a flash of white and a dash of red, the space where the bowling green once basked in the sun is now filled with a dull brown building. Gone is the romance of a more genteel and spacious era.

NSW started a trend. Only Western Australia and South Australia still have deaf clubs.

The WA Deaf Society hosts it in a small hall with a bar in their premises in a block of business suites where you can’t just walk in after hours, someone has to let you in.

South Australia’s deaf community recently experienced traumatic change when the historic Deaf Society building at 262 South Terrace, Adelaide was sold against their wishes. Early in 2014 Townsend House, which now operates the SA Deaf Society under the name DeafCan:Do at Welland, provided the community with separate club premises at Modbury North for a token rent of $100 per year. Whether the community can recreate a vibrant deaf club in their new premises remains to be seen.

Modern Deaf Societies are run as businesses providing services funded by governments, philanthropic grants and, increasingly, fees for service. They still fundraise but it is unclear how they spend these funds.

They claim to put money back into the community. This seems to mostly take the form of the oft-cited free interpreting for funerals and occasionally ‘community development’ activities such as subsidised youth and ‘professional development’ activities.

In the absence of a regular deaf club, deaf seniors still meet at the Deaf Society or in mainstream community halls and young deaf people meet in mainstream pubs and clubs. These two age groups seldom interact.

In the old style deaf clubs, young and old mingled and learned from each other. In my twenties I had a wonderful deaf colleague and mentor in the legendary Dorothy Shaw, then in her sixties.

Today I meet young deaf people who know little about their community’s elders and seem to assume that deaf people at the pub are the deaf community.

These young deaf people miss out on mentoring from the community’s elders and the lessons of history. Older deaf people miss out on the vitality and new ideas of the young.

Like Irish, Greek, Italian people, regardless of how included they are in mainstream society, deaf people would still benefit greatly from the richness and self-expansion that is found in clubs for ‘people like us’.

We still see our deaf friends face to face in our own social groups and at occasional community events, there are still various sports and interest groups and Deaf Australia is still achieving progress for deaf people.

But without a deaf club to provide a focus and a regular meeting place, much of the old cohesiveness has been lost.

Community events are less frequent, less well attended; groups and organisations are harder to locate and less well supported; everyone is too busy living a more mainstream life and, like the mainstream community, is less able or inclined to volunteer.

Today, although there has been progress, most of our advocacy issues remain the same.

When information was shared face to face in Auslan at the deaf club everyone could understand and participate in discussions regardless of their English fluency or education level. Debates and disagreements happened face to face within the deaf community, policies and strategies were nutted out privately and we presented a mostly united face to the world.

In the modern era of mostly English-based social media, disagreements, one-sided ‘debates’ and misinformation have become public for the non-deaf, unaware of the underlying issues and nuances, to scrutinise and misconstrue. Publicly the deaf community now looks less cohesive than privately it is.

Intimidated by modern cyber bullying and disenfranchised by English text-based discussions on social media, the majority of deaf people are less able to have their say than they were twenty years ago when I regularly walked up the street and around the corner to the deaf club on Friday nights.

The Auslan signs for ‘deaf club’ and ‘Deaf Society’ remain the same. Although there are some ‘deaf club’ nights in mainstream pubs, nothing has emerged to replace the old concept of the deaf club.

We need to find a way to create a modern version of the deaf club, without giving up the gains we have made in access and inclusion.  We need to do this in a way that is not dependent on Deaf Societies.

Deaf Societies are still important organisations for the deaf community, but the world has changed. Although some seem to want to hang onto it, the old welfare model, where one organisation did everything for deaf people, has been on the way out since the 1980s. We need new ways of thinking that take lessons from the past and move the community forwards, not back.

How would you describe the deaf community now? How is it different to how it was in the past?

Deaf clubs – Part 1: A vibrant community of old

06 Friday Feb 2015

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The old 262 South Terrace, Adelaide Deaf club

The old 262 South Terrace, Adelaide Deaf club

Since deaf clubs started closing in the 1990s, the need for them has often been discussed. Recently Vicdeaf and Deaf Children Australia established a committee to investigate the issue for Victoria.

This is the first of 3 posts about deaf clubs.

With the progressive closure of deaf clubs, the deaf community has lost much more than historic buildings. The buildings have been important. But even more, our sense of community and belonging to a place and our easy connection with each other have all been diminished.

Since first becoming involved in advocacy organisations some 25 years ago, I have seen many life improvements for deaf people. Twenty-five years ago deaf people were seldom seen or heard outside the deaf community. Today we are more visible, more included in the mainstream community, with more options.

Most of us, I’m sure, would agree that an inclusive society is a good thing. Inclusion and equitable access benefit everyone, society and, long term, the economy.

But inclusion can come at a cost, and for deaf people it already has; we and our community are poorer in new ways.

Twenty five years ago advocacy was a tough gig. Everyone wanted to patronise you, no one wanted to listen and the idea of government paying for an interpreter so you could meet and discuss an issue was unheard of.

Today our advocacy organisations have strong consultative relationships with governments and industry and, usually, a seat at the table when issues affecting deaf people are discussed, with interpreters paid by government or industry. And yet in some ways it is harder now to be an advocate for deaf people than it was 25 years ago.

At least this is the case until end-February 2015 when Deaf Australia’s government funding will end.  The future for advocacy is now uncertain.

The deaf community used to be more insular, tight-knit and cohesive. “A ghetto”, to people who knew nothing about it. An accepting and nurturing place, to those who belonged.

We met regularly at frequent community events and the deaf club on Friday nights where we mingled across age bands and interests, talked politics and news and nonsense, fell in and out of love, gossiped, told jokes – deaf jokes and jokes about hearing people – and generally enjoyed ourselves among our numerous friends. We played sports, volunteered and socialised together within well supported, well organised clubs, interest groups and advocacy organisations. It was an active, vibrant community, and at its centre was the deaf community centre – the ‘deaf club’.

The deaf club provided us with a powerful sense of belonging.

Deaf clubs were originally established in each state in the 19th Century by Deaf Societies at a time when they were paternalistic benevolent charities providing something for everyone – employment, church services, welfare services, sporting facilities, social facilities.

Most Deaf people worked in the mainstream as tradesmen, in factories, in clerical positions and often the Deaf Society helped them find employment. A few worked for the Deaf Societies in low level jobs.

The Deaf Society was essentially the community’s sole support organisation and many Deaf people were heavily dependent upon it.

The, mostly hearing, people who worked there looked after Deaf people, made decisions for them, knew everything about them and their personal lives, kept files on them.

The Auslan signs for ‘deaf club’ and ‘Deaf Society’ were identical.

When I lived in Sydney in the 1980s and early 1990s, the centre of the deaf community was the deaf club at the Deaf Society in Cambridge Street, Stanmore.

The building housed offices, meeting rooms, a community hall with a stage and commercial kitchen, table tennis and snooker tables, a crèche, a squash court and club rooms with a bowling green behind it. It was a lumbering three story building, white with red trim, which loomed over a predominantly residential street a scant ten minute train ride from the city centre. Next door, across a small grassy park was the dark brick Gordon Davis House hostel, and behind that a nursing home. All for deaf people who used Auslan.

For several years in the early 1990s I lived in Cavendish Street, one street from and parallel to Cambridge Street. Many an evening found me at the deaf club volunteering on one or another committee. There I acquired skills that, because of communication barriers, I was unable to learn in the mainstream community. These skills then helped me in my career as a librarian and later an advocate.

On Friday nights I walked up the street and around the corner to deaf club night in the community hall. Deaf club was for everyone, from babies to seniors and I met many wonderful people and enduring friends there.

Deaf pub was held once a month in the bar on the lower ground floor. Deaf pub, managed by a volunteer committee of deaf people, was crowded and raucous and regularly resulted in neighbours making Monday morning complaints to the Deaf Society.

Deaf pub night was also Auslan club night in the community hall. When Auslan club finished many of the hearing people came downstairs to the deaf pub to practice their emerging Auslan.

Privately how we groaned! Daily we endured the trials of communicating with Auslan-illiterate hearing people. Deaf pub was our time to have fun and enjoy relaxed communication. Why couldn’t we just have something that was ours and easy for a change!

But we understood it was to our benefit to encourage and help them learn Auslan, so we smiled and modified our signing to suit their abilities and returned to our conversations when they moved on to practice on someone else.

It was wise to arrive early on pub nights.  The room was small, quickly filling to capacity and as the night progressed a queue would form outside. One memorable night a friend got stuck out there for quite some time, outraged that she and other deaf people could not get into their own club because it was full of hearing people.

Much community business occurred on deaf club and pub nights.

At the time I was secretary of Australian Association of the Deaf (now known as Deaf Australia). The president was Colin Allen, now President of the World Federation of the Deaf. These nights were an opportunity to talk informally with deaf people about the issues of the day, helped us to keep on the pulse of deaf community views and keep deaf people informed about our activities.

And then everything changed.

Did deaf club mean as much to you as it did to me? Tell us what it meant to you.