On Gratefulness

October is far and above my favourite month. The jacarandas are ablaze, lining the streets and cliffs in purple fires. The star jasmine is flowering too, staining the evening air as I walk to my boyfriend’s after French classes. There’s the joy of pulling on a summer frock and feeling it ripple against my bare calves, and of wrapping myself in a cashmere cardigan on still-chilly mornings.

And now there’s one more reason: after five years of unremitting hard work, of research in Australia and overseas, of writing and publishing, travelling to and presenting at conferences, and making applications (9 of them to 7 institutions in that time), I finally won a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, one of 200 offered to scholars across Australia who have finished their PhD within the last five years. I’ll be based at the University of Queensland and I’ll be writing an ecobiography on 19th century botanist Georgiana Molloy. A biography is a work about a person, but an ecobiography is about a person and their environment – you can’t narrate the life of one without considering the other.

The relief that comes from the promise of financial stability is unparalleled. For five years I’ve survived on a part-time wage, supplemented with Australia Council grants and assistance from my parents. I’ve written one book and the drafts for two more (and a third will be done by Xmas), and I’ve worked so hard that I’ve relapsed repeatedly and tediously into illness.

‘Listen to your body,’ the psychologist said to me two years ago when I dipped down into depression. I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t always heeded her advice, but I am at least aware of driving myself to exhaustion. The problem is that there's too much to write and too little time. The problem is also deafness – the concentration fatigue that comes from everyday interactions.

My deafness was responsible for pushing me into writing and research – it was a job that didn’t require too much listening, but which satisfied me immensely. I tried to be a fiction writer when I returned to Australia, but I missed the stimulation and the crisp exchange of ideas that comes with academia, and knew I had to find a way back into it. However, deafness and the strain of listening left me too depleted after teaching to be able to write, and so I resolved to find a postdoc. It’s been an arduous process, but the set backs that come with being a writer prepared me for that. A knock down is irrelevant - you just keep on going. I’m hoping that now, with a new role, I’ll have a better work-life balance.

I’ve just finished importing all of the blog posts I’ve ever written into my new(ish) website. I started them in 2006, when blogging was taking off in the UK. I was appalled, as I tidied them up, at how negative I was in London; so ground down by homesickness & the lack of light that I couldn’t appreciate what was before me.

The process of making oneself happy is one of deduction, and I know now that I can never be away from Australia for long, but it also takes resolve. A friend of mine, whom I took from her calm demeanour to be a naturally buoyant person, once corrected me, ‘No, I make a conscious effort every day to be positive.’ I wish I had known that while I was overseas, but perhaps we never understand how unhappy we are until we have climbed out of it.

There is so much to be grateful for: the scholars at the university who helped me pull my application into shape; Queensland’s abundant, glorious sunshine; my family, who have supported and protected me but still allowed me forge my stubborn, difficult way ahead; my smart and funny boyfriend, with whom I am never bored; and the smell of jasmine that wends through the window on these still, spring nights.

H is for Hawk, Perception and Disability

When I was young we had a ginger cat named Vincent to whom I was passionately attached. His mother had bred with one of the feral cats on the farm and he was a muscular and unlikeable creature. I spent hours trying to understand him and win him over. For the most part that was fruitless, but sometimes he’d deign to sleep in the curve of my back as I lay on my tummy on my bed.

I can’t remember if my interest in animals started with Vincent, or if it was because I grew up on a farm and, while my father and uncles worked, I watched the way sheep bustled in a herd; how hipbones jerked beneath the skin of our cows as, in the evening, they were jostled to the milking shed; or the large, liquid eyes of my aunts’ horses.

When I began researching the history of the deaf, I found, people with disabilities have long been regarded as closer to animals than humans. Deaf people, for example, were seen as subhuman because they could not hear the word of God and because they couldn’t speak clearly.

Which is why I loved reading Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, her memoir about training a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Aside from the originality of the subject matter and the poetry of her writing, it brought up many interesting questions about the relationship between animals and humans, between wildness and domestication, and where the line between the animal and human really lies.

Hunting with her hawk, McDonald writes, ‘took me to the edge of being human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to black out anything like the past or the future, so that the only things that mattered were the next thirty seconds … I crept and walked and ran. I crouched. I looked. I saw more than I’d ever seen. The world gathered around me. It made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill’ (195).

I paused after reading this passage, considering it with some suspicion, as humans are animals, and the division between us largely — I think — comes down to culture. In 1747, Carl Linneaus, who developed a system for classifying plants and animals (still in use today), defended his decision to separate apes from humans as thus: ‘if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as naturalist I ought to have done so.’

Nor does heightened perception make one more animal that human. People with disabilities have extraordinarily developed senses – a person who is blind, for example, will be remarkably attuned to sound and touch. To see like a hawk does not necessarily mean that one is becoming like a hawk; it means that a human is developing their sense, rather like becoming better at the piano through practice. I think we need to widen our understanding of what it is to be human, to include those who have what seem to be extraordinary abilities. One might think that I’m writing of savants, but really, it’s anyone who operates in a way that’s different from the norm. If ‘human’ becomes more inclusive, then we can do away with the category of ‘disability’ and its concomitant inspiration porn, as Stella Young described it.

McDonald continues, ‘every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back into being a human again … hunting makes you an animal, but the death of an animal makes you human’ (196), for she killed the animal to put it from its misery. This was interesting. Again, is it culture that makes McDonald act this way? Can it be said that it’s grace that makes us distinct from animals? Or do other animals behave this way as well?

While these passages made me question things, there were other parts of McDonald’s work that were gorgeous – her nature descriptions, her magical thinking, her tentative but developing relationship with Mabel, the hawk. And this passage:

‘I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of stranger urges confession, urges confidence, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken with us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holidays … I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. It’s desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.’

McDonald and Mabel are a paean to difference, to flight, to the permeable boundaries between ourselves and other creatures.

Submission to Inquiry into Arts Budget Cuts

RE: Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget decisions on the Arts

Dear Madam/Sir,

My name is Jessica White and I’m a writer and researcher based in Brisbane. As of next year, I will have been writing for twenty years. My first novel, A Curious Intimacy, was published by Penguin in 2007 and won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie award for debut women writers and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. My second novel, Entitlement, appeared in 2012, also published by Penguin. My short fiction has been published in a range of literary journals, including Southerly, Island, Overland and the Review of Australian Fiction. I was recently shortlisted for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize which attracted nearly 4000 entries from around the world.

I am also a researcher and non-fiction writer. My PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, was funded by a scholarship from the University of Melbourne. I have been shortlisted for the Calibre essay prize and Peter Blazey Prize for life writing, and my essays have been published in Griffith Review, Southerly, Island and Cordite as well as national and international academic journals.

I have been deaf since I was four, when I lost most of my hearing to meningitis. My disability was responsible for my decision to become a writer and it has also strongly influenced my subject matter and style. I am passionate about giving space to voices which have been overlooked, including those of people with disability.

In 2013 I was the recipient of my first ever grant, $5000 from Arts Queensland, to further my research on 19th century Queensland novelist Rosa Praed. In the course of that research, I located new archival material in England relating to her daughter Maud, who was deaf. This included a 17 page letter Maud wrote to her doctor and, given the history of the suppression of the voices of the deaf, this find was of immense significance. My research on Maud has been woven into a memoir which will help general audiences understand the history and impact of deafness, which is surprisingly little known.

This grant gave me much-needed recognition, particularly in Queensland where I was a relative newcomer. In 2014 I received my first grant from the Australia Council for the Arts ($9,820) from their Artists with Disability programme to write a novel, The Sea Creatures, which is almost completed. In June 2015, I was fortunate to receive a New Work grant from the Australia Council ($15,750) to write a young adult novel, When the World Shivered. Both of these books are about disability, and once they are published I will take them into schools and use them to prompt discussions about disability, and to show that the lives of people with disability are of worth. I am not using these grants to write esoteric pieces of art, but to help knit together our social fabric.

I have been applying to the Australia Coucil for funding since 2008 and these grants were from my 11th and 13th applications respectively. Although they are not large grants, their impact on my life cannot be understated. They have given me the time to write and mean that I do not have to take on additional teaching work to survive (something that, because of my disability, makes me too exhausted to write). They have given me financial stability, which means that I can think about having a family before it’s too late (something I’ve put off because the life of an artist, let alone one with a disability, is precarious at the best of times). They have also allowed me to become financially independent of my parents, who supported me repeatedly while I found my feet as a writer and learned to manage with a disability.

My tenacity in applying for these funds came from desperation: without that money, I would not have been able to write. I have heard many artists say that they have been put off by the competitiveness of the Australia Council’s application process for funding, and I don’t blame them; it is no easy thing to be rejected year after year. Yet I often wonder about these people, and the books they would have written or the art they would have created. How much more culturally enriched would Australia be if the Australia Council had the money to fund these artists?

You can see, then, that George Brandis’s cut of $104.8 million from the already-tight budget of the Australia Council will have huge ramifications, not least by limiting the voices of emerging writers and those with disability. The arts in Australia are in threat of becoming homogenised.

In addition, the new funding mechanism, the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA), does not have the same arms-length peer review process as the Australia Council and decisions will be up to the Minister. These undemocratic overtones are alarming, but not unsurprising from a government whose language ever more closely resembles the doublespeak of George Orwell’s dystopian novel about totalitarianism, 1984. In 2014, for example, there was a budget crisis, but in 2015 the Arts Minister thinks it fit to waste money but duplicating administrative processes through the NPEA.

In 2012, Anna Funder won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for All That I Am, a novel about the insidious creep of Nazism in the 1930s. In her acceptance speech, she criticised the then Queensland Premier Campbell Newman who had just binned the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards (one of his first acts of parliament). ‘I have spent my professional life studying totalitarian regimes and the brave people who speak out against them,’ Funder said, ‘And the first thing that someone with dictatorial inclinations does is to silence the writers and the journalists.’ It is telling that there is no mention of literature or writing in the NPEA guidelines.

I have been deaf for as long as I can remember and I know what silence and silencing can mean. Artists reflect the culture that is around them. A government that hobbles the creativity of artists by cutting off funding is a government that does not want to listen to what is said of the society it moulds.

After World War Two, my relative Patrick White returned to Australia from England. In 1958 he published an essay, ‘The Prodigal Son’, in which he wrote of his experiences of returning. He commented, ‘In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.’ Given the attenuation of the Australia Council through budget cuts, and the meagre amounts offered to artists in general, we are at risk of returning to the culture of which Patrick White wrote. Furthermore, what chance does Australia have of finding a new Nobel Prize for Literature winner when the NPEA guidelines make no mention of literature or writing? How will we find the emerging voices of Indigenous people, migrants, people with disability, or queer/gay writers when many of these minorities, as you can see from my own experience, are just struggling to get by, let alone make their art? Is the voice of Australia to become one that, as Patrick White was panicked to find, merely exalts the ‘average’?

As an emerging author with a disability, the Australia Council has irrevocably changed my life. It distresses me deeply that so many other artists may not have the funding they need to practice their craft or acquire recognition. I urge you to reverse the cuts to the Australia Council – it is so little money, and yet to Australia’s artists and Australian culture, its worth is inestimable.

On Exhaustion

People never ask me what it's like to be deaf, or what I find hard about it. As I lost most of my hearing when I was four and had some speech therapy, my speech is fine, and people don't realise I have a disability until I tell them. Even then, they don't realise how bad it is, because I seem to listen so well. And because I am polite, and hate people making a fuss, I rarely remind them to speak clearly.

It's not the isolation that's difficult – I’ve found ways around that through writing, reading and a small circle of close friends, though it took me a good twenty years to learn the social skills I needed to make friends, and those twenty years were excruciating. Nor is it the inconsideration of people who assume that you’re rude or simple because you haven’t heard them; I accept that I don’t have a visible disability and that, for the most part, people aren’t deliberately unkind. Nor is it the cultural apartheid of cinemas and performance venues that don’t care enough about their deaf patrons to ensure working loop systems, or even to install such systems at all, such as the Cineplex cinemas in Brisbane. On asking the manager at Hawthorne why they didn’t have a hearing system, I was told that the movies they showed were blockbusters, which were so loud that deaf people can hear them. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry; it’s quality of sound, not loudness, that makes the difference. Meanwhile, the headphones at Palace Centro are patched up with duct tape, and those at Palace Barracks were broken for months. When I complained about the latter and pointed out that it was discriminatory, I was told that I was being ridiculous. I never went back. I have taken my money elsewhere and I watch films at home, or only go to screenings with subtitles, or watch dance performances that don’t require listening to words.

These are irritations and, like cuts and scratches, they always heal and fade. But the one thing I can never get over is the perpetual exhaustion. I have 25% of an average person’s hearing, and I rely on this bit of hearing and lipreading to get by. I can’t hear with loud background noise, nor in a group larger than three, and even then that’s hard. And as I’ve lost one sense, I’m constantly alert to compensate for it – to check someone’s face in case they’re speaking to me, to strain to hear the words in a sentence and match them with body language, to read lips and put the words into context, to work out how to get some information at a train or bus station when I can’t hear the overhead speakers. The energy necessary to maintain this level of vigilance is enormous.

These past few months I’ve been teaching creative writing one day a week at the University of Queensland. The classes were small enough for me to hear without passing round the transmitter of my FM system (which is like a small walkie talkie for deaf people), though I asked students to use it when they were reading because their heads dipped down to their papers and I couldn’t read their lips. I had to be completely alert so that I could hear their contributions and respond to them. It made the discussions a bit stilted as I could only hear one person talking at a time, but I figured they were adult enough to deal with that.

I loved my students. They tried hard, they listened to the lectures and my tutorials, and they improved in a very short time. Teaching creative writing also helped me to remember my own knowledge about writing, and to refocus on the nuts and bolts of my craft. However, I was so tired by the semester’s end, and so frustrated that I hadn’t had any energy to write, that I resolved to stick to my other, two-days-a-week admin job and write, even if that meant living on baked beans for six months.

Then I was insanely lucky enough to get funding from the Australia Council to work on my young adult novel, When the World Shivered, and the future isn’t looking quite so grim - a huge and unutterable relief. I've only had a handful of days off since February, and this means that I can have evenings and weekends off.

This novel will be based on my short story of the same name, which was published in the Review of Australian Fiction. The novel about the relationships between children with disabilities and their animals. I started thinking about it when I went to the Artists with Disabilities conference in Sydney last year, and watched people with their carers. The carers were people who wanted to be there and who were paid for it, but what would happen, I wondered, if a person with a disability was matched with someone who wasn’t temperamentally suited to caring? I was lucky as I grew up because my brother has a generous disposition and likes an audience, so he was happy to relay information to me that I missed (albeit often elaborated upon; the Whites are nothing if not performers). But what if I hadn’t had that kind of sibling, if my sibling was someone who just wanted to be left alone and not have to look after someone else?

I started thinking about companion animals, and dogs, and how we have domesticated them, which can also be seen as a way of keeping them close to us without their will. Do dogs really want to be dependent on us? Do horses want to carry people around? These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be exploring in the novel. I’ll also be reading books about animals and humans (if you have any recommendations, leave them in the box below!), and I’m about to write a post on Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk. With luck, given my tortured schedule, I should have it up later this week.

I’ve also finally got back on the bandwagon with my author newsletters. If you’d like to be on the mailing list for these, you can sign up here.

Review of The Art of Being Deaf

Earlier this year in April, on a balmy autumnal Brisbane evening (is there any other kind?), I put on one of my Leona Edmiston frocks and caught the bus to my beloved Avid Reader bookshop in West End.  This time the occasion was the launch of Donna McDonald’s memoir The Art of Being Deaf. 

When I moved to Brisbane from London and found a job, my boss urged me to get in touch with Donna, with whom she’d once worked. Donna had been deaf from birth, but her lipreading skills, my boss said, were incredible. In 2010 I met Donna over coffee at the University of Queensland, where she was writing her PhD. Although I had been reading about the history of deafness and the education of deaf people for my PhD, that coffee with Donna was responsible for the intensification of my interest in how writers represented deafness, and my own identity as a deaf writer. I read a version of her exegesis and creative piece, which later found publication through Gallaudet University Press and thus was being launched at Avid.

This launch was quite different to others I’d attended, although perhaps it shouldn’t have been. There were two interpreters – one who translated the signing of Bretty Casey (Deaf Services Queensland CEO), into speech (and the translator didn’t just speak, but captured the cadences and nuances of his expression), and one who translated speech into sign language. Krissy, the events coordinater, joked that she wanted a sign language interpreter for the launch of her next erotic novel (let’s hope that comes to pass!) The work was then introduced by the ever-lovely Kris Olsson, and it was beautiful to see Donna’s friends, whom she mentions in her work, sitting in the front row.

The prologue of The Art of Being Deaf opens with the three-year old Donna removing her new hearing aid with a particularly BrisVegas flourish on the William Jolley Bridge, leaving ‘white clouds of softness falling into my ears’ (x). This gesture acts as a motif for the rest of the book, in which Donna explores and resists the efforts of others to have her conform to their vision of what a deaf person should be like. Which, in essence, is like a hearing person.

The prologue also introduces the reader to Donna’s mother, a strong-willed woman who was determined that her daughter would succeed at all costs. Rather than having Donna learn sign language (which is easier and more natural for deaf people than speech), she sent her daughter, age 3, to a school which taught her lipreading and how to speak. Five years later, Donna was transferred to a private girls’ school. She went on to a successful career in the public sector in England and Australia, worked as a freelance policy analyst, and now teaches at a university. Donna’s and her mother’s perseverance certainly paid off, but it wasn’t without cost. 

Donna’s exploration of the impact of deafness upon her identity was prompted by a visit to a psychologist who stated, with a question, ‘Your hearing loss must have had a big impact on you?’ She didn’t respond to the question at the time, but as she began to think about her past, she wondered about the impact of her removal from the deaf school. Her mother, she writes, ‘had been vigilant and successful in her determination to raise me as a full-fledged hearing person’, a vigilance in ‘keeping me apart from the deaf world [that] had bordered on inflexible’ (62). Yet Donna was deaf, and a part of her history was missing. She began to get in touch with her friends from the deaf school and, her antennae now up, she also realised ‘how rarely I had met deaf characters in novels’ (63). She set about finding some more literary people by trawling the stacks at the university library.

Her reading was a depressing exercise, as she explains: ‘The publishers’ blurbs and abstracts revealed a tendency by most “expert” writers to portray deafness as a melancholy condition, or as a subject of caricature, or as a problem to be understood, overcome, or resolved … The language used in so many titles of books, essays, videos, and other documents on deafness emphasised an “otherness” experienced by deaf people that is apparently bleak, hopeless, and lonely’ (64). She switched genres, hoping for a better response from memoirists, but this was no better. Their rendition of deafness as something traumatic was completely alien to her own experiences. Eventually, she began reading novels about deaf characters, and was heartened, although the pickings were slim and the authors themselves were not always deaf. Neither Vikram Seth, (An Equal Music), Frances Itani (Deafening) and T. Coraghessan Boyle (Talk Talk) were deaf, but ‘they were able to imagine their way, with reasonable credibility, into deaf experiences’ (68).

It’s significant that Donna’s journey was conducted through literature. In a paper given at a conference, she said, ‘Stories of deafness have to travel out beyond disability and medicine into the world of novels and films. We learn about who we are as much by what we read and see about ourselves, as by what we are told and by what we experience’ (102). Until deaf people can view or read positive representations of themselves, deafness will often be considered to be a curse rather than a unique experience. The same holds for many other minorities, including Indigenous people. 

Donna mentioned this finding to me during our coffee at the university, and it compelled me to begin actively writing about the positive aspects of deafness. Although at the time I told her (and she recounts this conversation in her book) that I felt as though I would be cheating if I wrote about deafness (largely because I couldn’t see how it would challenge me as a writer), I’ve since realised how important it is to tell good stories about deaf people. I’ve since published an essay on the creativity inherent in my experience of deafness, and used the ambiguity of hearing in a short story published in the Review of Australian Fiction.

The act of writing, and particularly the act of writing memoir, is a way of creating a map of one’s life, but Donna was specific about what kind of map she created. This was no narrative about ‘triumph over adversity’, for her deafness had not caused her any great adversity. Nor was it an account in which she wanted to dwell in misery (or ‘inspiration porn’, as the late Stella Young termed it). Rather, she drew her own, original map of the contours of her experiences of deafness, creating a land into which other people could travel and learn of its customs. 

At the book launch, Kris handed over to another wonderful Queensland writer, Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko. In many ways, I’ve found through my reading, the experiences of deaf people who have been forced to speak are akin to those of Indigenous or any people who are colonised, for they have been removed from their own culture and assimilated into the dominant culture, and forced to speak its language. Melissa talked about the importance of elders in Aboriginal culture for educating children and showing them a way forward. Donna, she said, had not had any such elders in her deaf community, and had needed to work things out on her own. Unfortunately by this stage I was starting to mist up, for I recognised the loneliness she was talking about, and I missed the rest of her talk because I couldn’t lipread it. 

One of the important aspects of first hand accounts is that they demonstrate the diversity of the experiences of being deaf. The amount of hearing someone has, when they became deaf, and whether they were raised to speak or to sign all have an impact on how they interact with and respond to the world. This is why Donna’s memoir is so significant – it is another contribution to literature on deafness and, most importantly, it indicates that deafness is not, as David Lodge, author of Deaf Sentence, might have some believe, a death sentence. Unsurprisingly, every copy of her book sold at the launch at Avid that night.

It might seem incredible, but after some thirty years on this earth, Donna was the first deaf person with whom I had ever interacted at length. Until that coffee, I had felt myself to be an aberration, but when I met her then, and every other time we catch up, I am completely at ease in my own skin.  This is one of the best books I read in 2014. I hope you pick it up over the holidays and enjoy it as much as I have. Copies can be purchased here.

Book details: McDonald, Donna. The Art of Being Deaf: a Memoir. Gallaudet University Press, 2014.

Purchased from Avid Reader.

This is my 7th review for the 2014 Australian Women Writers Challenge.  

On Stops and Starts

Life seems to have been frustratingly disparate lately, at least for a girl who likes focus, direction and deadlines.  There have been galling stops and starts, weeks interrupted by socialising and faulty hearing aids, bicycles and laptops, and battles with endless procrastination as I push myself to write. On the day we held the funeral service for my grandmother, I was made an offer for my second novel, Entitlement, but I was too depressed to even open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.  I’m still waiting for the contract and the go-ahead, which is painful because until then I have no direction on the novel, and not being able to work on it makes me feel a little unwell.  Unlike with A Curious Intimacy, which I was sick of by the time it even made it to the publishers, and which I had to edit in the middle of writing a PhD, I’m desperate to be in the midst of this one.  It feels like it will be a more successful work: the characters are more real, the plot is tighter and more dramatic, and it has more relevance to contemporary politics.  I am already in love with it in a way I never was with ACI, which was a largely academic, feminist exercise, although the emotional aspects of it were drawn from experience.

In the interim I’ve been working on short stories, some of which have lain in my drawers for more than a decade.  Again, because of the nature of the work, this means more stopping and starting.  The worlds I’m writing about are smaller, the action briefer, and as it’s harder to get into the swing of it, I am easily distracted.  I’ve also dug out my thesis to rewrite it for publication, as once I begin work on Entitlement again it will take over my life and I won’t be able to concentrate on anything else.  However I’m struggling with one of the links between the chapters and so I keep walking away from it.  Things just don’t seem to be resolving themselves.

After the funeral I stayed at Parental Unit’s for a week, during which time their 7 month old whippet chewed up my hearing aid.  I had stupidly left it on the couch, having taken it out because the television was so loud (Parental Unit are also going deaf) and the subtitles were on.  When I saw the little bits of hearing aid scattered at my feet, my heart fell through the floor.  I extracted a final piece of the casing from the dog’s mouth and added it to the sorry collection of wire and microchip.  It’s still too horrifying to be funny yet, as the new hearing aid cost more than two grand, a rather expensive learning curve.

Then both my computer and bicycle decided to die on me, the former needing a new hard drive which, due to a total lack of communication by the IT nerds who replaced it (never use The Mac Doctors, people), wiped out my operating system and my applications.  It takes a lot to make me cry, but when I couldn’t get my laptop to go after several trips to Annerley, I burst into tears.  Not in front of said nerds, unfortunately, which might have helped them to register their incompetence and lack of clarity.  Meanwhile my bicycle, being an English brand little known in Australia, needs a new hub, which will be expensive.  However, as with my very pretty but largely uncomfortable and unwalkable shoes, I will endure whatever pain it takes to be able to keep on using it.

Despite all these literary and technological frustrations, summer is slowly creeping into being.  I have put away my boots and taken out my stiletto sandals; the flowering jacarandas make for a gorgeous ferry ride to the uni; H is coming home for good in two months and there is beach and holiday action scheduled for January.  And this weekend, the guilt and procrastination paid off as I belted out a wonderful and peculiar short story in two days, inspired by P1 and his mention of the aquatic ape theory.  When a story comes together this quickly, you know it’s working.  If only the rest of my life could do that.

On Being Militant

One of the drawbacks of being a fairly articulate deaf person is that you have a duty to speak (or complain, as more often is the case) on behalf of other deaf people.  Once, I told my audiologist that when I encountered broken loop systems or other malfunctioning hearing equipment, that I just couldn’t be bothered mentioning it because they were never going to work anyway, and she pointed out that if I did ask for them to be repaired, it would benefit the next deaf person who came along. A loop system is a piece of wiring that is put inside the walls of cinemas, or inside telephones or FM hearing systems.  When I put my hearing on a ‘T’ switch it picks up the sound, makes it clearer, and cuts out background noise.  Alternatively there are headphones you can wear which have this signal built into them.  In the entire 28 years of my deafness I have found about two loop systems in cinemas that work – at Roseville and at Fox Studios.  At a Shakespearean play at the Sydney Opera House the system they gave me created so much static I couldn’t hear a thing, and when I complained to the woman at the desk she didn’t appear to believe it could possibly be faulty (despite the fact that it literally looked ten years old).  After much arguing she let me see the play again, but when I went back the magic was gone because I had already seen it (I certainly don’t know how she expected me to hear it again).  At Belvoir Street Theatre the loop system failed time and time again and eventually the manager said they literally couldn’t afford to fix it.   She did however give me a free drink and that made me feel much better (naturally), which is an awful lot more than most other people have ever done.

In London, although theatre and cinema organisers were much more aware of disability legislation and of ensuring that deaf people can hear, the loop systems generally didn’t work.  Two startling exceptions were at the Museum of London at an exhibition of the Great Fire, where a small room showing a documentary had a loop system installed that was incredibly clear, and at an exhibition at the National Portrait Galley.

These were unusual, however.  When H and I went to ‘Enduring Love’ at the Trocadero, the system didn’t work after the previews, as anticipated, and H had to rush back to the ticket desk, whereupon he found that the bimbo hadn’t put in any batteries.  He then missed the beginning of the film, which was the most dramatic part.  At the local cinema in Stepney I complained three times about the loop system and they never fixed it.  Eventually I only went to films that were blockbusters and didn’t require hearing because I could work out what was going on from the pictures, or to foreign films with subtitles.  For the rest I had to wait until they came out on DVD.  I was also so tired and stressed with writing my thesis that I gave up on complaining; I simply didn’t have the energy for it.

However, on returning home and having had more sunlight and rest, I have found myself feeling much more militant about these things than previously.  And thus it was that in cinema at Bulimba I found myself raising my voice at the manager because the staff had given me a set of headphones that, once again, delivered nothing but static.  Another problem with being faulty equipment in cinemas (apart from the obvious fact that it’s supposed to be working in the first place) is that you never know if it’s going to work until the film starts; for some reason the ads don’t come through the same sound system.   This means that you only have a few previews to get up and go and collect another piece of equipment, or to move around trying to find another seat which picks up the sound better.  I have always refused to do this due to public embarrassment, and, as I pointed out to the manager, it isn’t my job to make sure the equipment is working.

In the whole of this time I have never been offered a refund for the inconvenience of faulty equipment.  As I said to the manager, who was no longer making eye contact by this stage, if you offer a service, you make sure it’s working.  It’s basic customer service.  However, I now have a new tactic.  I’m ringing in advance and letting them know I’m coming so that they have an opportunity to test the equipment.  If it doesn’t work, I will get angry and demand a refund.

Meanwhile, I am wishing that magpies would give me such a warning.  It’s spring, and they are aggro and broody.  As I was walking my bicycle across the road the other day (I dismount because I can’t hear the cars coming very well and I’m not an aggressive cyclist), I inadvertently entered their territory and there was much batting of wings about my helmet and squawking, and I jumped back on my bike and peddled furiously.  I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do about militant magpies.  My boss told me she’s seen cyclists’ helmets with spokes on them like they have in the stations in London to keep away pigeons, but I’m not sure that would be such a good look, while my sister said to put my sunglasses on backwards to confuse them, or I could whip out my bicycle pump and beat them off.   On looking on the internet for remedies I found a bloke who suggested an orange flag, but again this fashionista can’t cope with that.  I also found reports of magpies in specific Bris Vegas areas which had attacked, and they made for amusing reading:

Auchenflower

Particularly vicious magpie, swoops between cnr Mackintosh Street and Torwood Street, Auchenflower, all the way down Torwood, across Milton Road, down Eagle Terrace, round to Camford Street even under the railway bridge.  Seems to give up by the time you get out the other side of the railway bridge. Attacks riders going in both directions. Is relentless, drawn blood, on two separate occasions. (reported 21 Sept 06)

Camira

Old Logan Rd, 100m before the Caltex Servo coming from Springfield. The bird has been recently harassed by Council works on the foot path and has changed its behaviour. It used to give a simple tap on the helmet once or twice, now it hovers by the side of your head and continually bashes the helmet. Attacks the ears and eyes if you don't wear sunnies or spectacles. (reported 22 Sept 06)

South Brisbane

Magpie in the poincianas on the South Bank side of the Goodwill Bridge and attacks about Sidon St near Memorial Park between Grey St and the Goodwill Bridge. The bird has drawn blood. (reported 14 Sept 05)

And here are a few more from Melbourne:

1.11.02 Harp Rd Kew along bike path / walking path - might be called Valerie Rd in this section. A well known hot spot for vicious magpies for many years.  I think 'son of magpie' is possibly even more vicious.  Have been known to peck face.  Avoid by going down side street if possible.  Seem to be bad around path leading up to hill.  Once half way down hill to chandler hwy you have made it!

1.11.02 Byron St Canterbury (this is the continuation of Maling Rd). Particularly terrifying as tries to peck through helmet holes.  Placed sticky tape over holes and stuck on eyes as suggested.  Still terrifies me when it swoops.

11.10.02 High Street Extension after Stud Road on the way to the Burwood Hwy intersection just after the school crossing. This magpie is a real Stuka but without the dive bomber siren!

7.10.02 Maroondah HWY and Deep Creek Roads. As most cyclists are aware, most swoop, but this one "connects".  The best it has achieved off me is rip a chunk out of my Limar F107 helmet and removed the "L" as well.  Bloody Pies....

7.9.02 Frankston-Dandenong Road near the Springvale freeway overpass. Got bitten on the nose and then repeatedly swooped by the most savage magpie ever seen. Only my bike pump saved me!

It’s like something out of du Maurier’s The Birds.  Ah. ya gotta love Austraya.

Part the XIV: In Which the Deaf Girl Resolves to Find a Bloke

Given that the most risqué my life gets these days is going to bed smelling of Agent Provocateur Sauce, and that the most romance I can muster is singing along to the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge whilst eating peanut butter out of the jar with a knife, I figured it was about time I tried to find myself a bloke.

As you may have noticed, men and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on many things. I’m a feminist and I make no apologies for it. This doesn’t mean that I hate all men – far from it – it just means that I refuse to compromise my beliefs for a more just society. H once had a go at me for being so dogmatic and I replied, well, if it hadn’t been for Emmeline Pankhurst and her hunger strikes in prison and her protests, English women wouldn’t have got the vote. Unless people make a noise about inequality, it will be conveniently ignored.

Added to this is the problem of having grown up with a sensitive, generous, humorous gay brother (aside from outbursts like the above, which are rare), which means that I expect every man I come across also to be sensitive, generous and humorous, and simply can’t fathom it when they aren’t. Clearly, there is something wrong with them all.

Then there is the problem of being an opinionated, outspoken, highly intelligent, attractive and articulate young lady, which many men, particularly reserved English men, find confronting. And finally, of course, there is the major problem of having a disability.

My friends just don’t understand why I can’t go up to a man in a bar and start chatting to him. ‘It doesn’t matter that you can’t hear, it’s so noisy that we can’t either.’ That isn’t the point. What is the point is that for nearly 30 years (having got meningitis when I was 3 and a half), I have been conditioned to try and fit in, to hide my deafness and to appear as ‘normal’ as possible, and that, therefore, the disclosure of a disability is something to be avoided at all costs. Even I can see how patently ridiculous this thinking is, and yet I can’t do anything about it – it’s become instinctive – I’ve become colonised and appropriated into the world of the hearing. It isn’t my parents’ fault either – we lived in a remote part of the country where they had little access to resources that explained how to bring up a deaf child, I was sent to a hearing school as otherwise I would have had to go to a boarding school for deaf children in Sydney, 7 hours’ drive away, and my mother could only rely upon her wits, which dictated that I should be just like everyone else. And this is one of the reasons why I pay so much attention to my appearance (aside from a incurable weakness for stilettos, handbags, cardies and lingerie): a girl that pretty couldn’t possibly have a problem, could she?

So why am I even bothering? Aside from the fact that I’m a healthy young girl who likes her Agent Provocateur, I’m conscious of becoming too selfish and too staid by spending so much time on my own. And then, of course, I’m an incurable romantic, in the tradition of Byron and Heathcliff, rather than namby hearts and roses, and I want someone to write poetry for. So I’ve decided that, rather than climbing up on my white stallion all a-clankin’ in my armour, I shall divest myself of my metal, sign up to an internet dating website and try walking, unarmed, with the hopefuls.

Sweeney Todd with Subtitles and other Ephemera

The week before last I asked H what he was doing on Tuesday night.
‘Going to the gym.’
‘Do you want to go to the movies?’
‘Yeah. What’s on?’
‘The barber of Saville Road.’
‘What?’
‘Sweeney Todd!’
He began laughing. ‘It’s the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. There’s the Barber of Seville, and the tailors of Saville Road, but not a barber.’
‘Oh. Well it’s got subtitles, and I want to go.’

It was the first time I’d been to an English film with subtitles, and I sought it out because I knew I’d never be able to understand what was going on without the words. We went to the Vue in Islington, which I don’t like much, not least because the last time we went there and tried to get a hearing device we were told that they only had them for one cinema, which was showing some thuggish film of the calibre of Die Hard. What, they think deaf people don’t have intellect? Anyway, we got a refund (which didn’t compensate for a ruined evening) and the manager mumbled something about getting films with subtitles.

Evidently they can keep their word, because they showed Sweeney Todd with subtitles. P went in first while H waited for me to get there from work (I had to catch the vile 73 with someone breathing garlic down my neck) so I wasn’t in a what one would call state of grace when I arrived. H bought me ice cream, but knocked it from the cone onto the counter as he leant over to pay. You’d think the girl would have offered a new scoop of ice cream, but no, so I was left to thwack it back into the cone, now replete with salmonella bugs. Luckily I was brought up on a farm and have a tough stomach from drinking rain water into which birds and insects had fallen. P had texted H to say there were only 2 people inside (‘No wonder the ticket cost £10,’ P said), but when we went in this number had increased to 10. ‘Are all these people deaf?’ I whispered excitedly. You can tell I don’t get out much.

It was a dark film – visually and thematically - but the projection of the subtitles meant that there was an enormous, pale square in the middle of the blackness, with the words down the bottom. H, infuriated, complained to the doorman. The doorman consulted the projectionist and they wriggled the words around. The words disappeared and I missed some lines. The words came back, and the pale square stayed for the rest of the film. I ought to have expected no better.

M- told me I could sue places like cinemas if they don’t get their act together, and these days I’m sorely tempted to. If you advertise a product – any product, not just one with the hard of hearing symbol - you make sure it works, and having a frigging square in the middle of a movie just isn’t good enough. At least it was better than the time we went to the Trocadero to see Enduring Love. Naturally the hearing equipment didn’t work, so H took the back of it off and discovered there were no batteries inside. The poor boy went out and retrieved them from the bimbo at the counter, by which time he’d missed the crucial beginning. This is why I become so apathetic about complaining – you have to wait until the movie starts before realising the piece of shit they’ve given you isn’t going to work.

Anyway, it was a rare outing for me, as most of the time these days I remain chained to my desk, staring glumly out the window while trying to get some words onto the page, so that was something. I liked Johnny Depp, but Helena Bonham Carter, although she did a good 19th century Amy Winehouse, was far too simplistic. And there was too much blood. I didn’t like that.

Seeing as I lead a cloistered life, H provides most of my entertainment, and some of his stories are worth repeating, esp as he’ll never get around to putting them into his own blog, not least because they don’t involve willies. He went to Columbia Road last weekend and asked his favourite man (on account of his humour and cheap flowers, not his appendage or appearance) what he could do to stop his lupins dying, because last year they hadn’t come up.
‘What do you mean you killed your lupins?’ the man said. ‘Lupins are impossible to kill.’
H must have looked dejected, for the man softened and told him to put them in the soil as soon as he got home. Yes, it is a bit obvious, isn’t it ... but I digress. H had been walking behind a lady in a black burqua, as she had a pram and was clearing a convenient path through all the people. Then she stopped before the lupins man, who had his back to her. He turned around, took a backwards step, threw his hands in the air and cried, ‘Aw my gawd, I thought it was a stickup!’
The Eastenders tittered around him. God only knows what the woman was thinking.

And the other day H came home with a gem from the office – you can describe someone who is ugly, he says, as having ‘a face like a sackful of smashed crabs.’ I laughed and laughed.

The rest of my entertainment comes from reading fiction. I read Toni Morrison’s Sula, then The Bluest Eye, both of which were so engrossing that I didn’t even panic when the Tube stopped in a tunnel on the way to work. I found the former a little plodding, but its beginning and ending illustrate why Morrison is so good at her craft.

It opens thus: ‘In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighbourhood.’ From that sentence you know the book is going to be about uprooting, and the loss of a natural environment, which mirrors the loss of childhood. A good writer, for me, is someone who can encapsulate an entire novel in their first line like this. The closing sentence is also poignant: ‘It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.’ It’s a very feminine image, being circular, which hearkens back to Nel’s friendship with Sula. It also mirrors the rings on a surface of water which has been disturbed, and the continuity of the rings suggest the pain can never end.

The Virtues of Deafness

It has now been a month since our sojourn to Thailand (the annals of which shall be written up if I ever find time). Positive effects of said holiday lasted one week, which was quite good I thought, considering that it pissed with rain for 6 out of 7 days, I was jetlagged and didn’t get enough sleep and was slotted immediately onto on my treadmill of library-thesis-research. Then the seasonal affective disorder returned and I went back to being my usual gloomy self.

Not a great deal has been happening, and not a great deal shall happen, for the next five months, whereupon I shall hand my thesis in. However, the thesis is going well at last, if nothing else is. I have also been cheered by the appearance of blossoms, daffodils and the absurdly sunny days. Elliot maintained that April was the cruellest month, but I always thought February was. This year it looks like neither of us it right.

I was ruffled however, by an incident at the corner store, when I finally had to explain to the pint-sized old Hindu lady, from whom I have been buying milk from for a year, that I was deaf. I wanted to buy a packet of Pringles, having one of my 6-monthly cravings for chips, but I couldn’t hear what the price was as she never speaks loudly. Eventually she rolled her eyes, and (on the verge of tears) I said that I was deaf and wearing a hearing aid.

‘Oh, you’re like that, are you? I never knew.’ she said. Ten out of ten for tact, wouldn’t you say? And of course you didn’t know you stupid cow, but that doesn’t mean you can treat your customers badly. So she can take her Pringles and her milk and shove it; I’m going to the Muslim guys whose shop is in the other direction.

I’ve been reading on the theory of disability for my thesis, so I’ve been thinking about these things more than usual. In a book titled Enforcing Normalcy, published in 1995, I came upon the following: ‘until now, American Sign Language was listed in the data base [of libraries] as an “invented language” along with the language of the Klingons of Star Trek’ (4). My oh my, haven’t we come such a long way.

Meanwhile, I loathe the word ‘disability’ and think it should be taken out of the English lexicon. Look at it – it contains the word ‘dis’ and is inherently negative. No person is disabled, they just have a different way of operating in the world. Yet a lot of the books I’ve read about deafness and disability have been quite negative. Sure, it sucks to be deaf, but there isn’t much point on dwelling on the bad things if there’s nothing you can do about it. And there are indeed positive aspects, such as not being able to hear your flatmate bonking in the room above you (which is occurring as I write, hence I have my hearing aid turned very firmly off).