History of Disability in South Australia

I am a person with a physical disability who has seen 4 decades of change in disability services and feel compelled to tell others the many stories I have gathered through the years.

My stories of going to a special school, then moving into the Home for Incurables at fourteen, the amazing people, many who have passed away, I have known along my journey.

About the changes in attitude towards us, and the emergence as a culture of our own through a core group of us who grew up together and we are now a family of activists.

I have stories about being there when winds of change were happening when I heard Wolfensberger talking about Normalization challenging large congregate care facilities. And because I spoke up and said I hated living in a place where 600 others were, and wanted to live in a house like everybody else, my wish was granted.

All stories which need to be told.

I have taken the liberty of including a couple of excerpts of what I have managed to remember from my story, which I have been writing.

SOMERTON SCHOOL
Somerton Crippled Children’s Home was a boarding school as well as a nursing home. Originally this beautiful blue stone seaside mansion was owned by an old Adelaide family called the Bickfords. The building was converted to a school and nursing home in 1939 for children who contracted Polio and was eventually used for children with other physical disabilities.

My first day at Somerton and the first person I met was Matron Hacket in her office next to the beautiful old staircase. Matron Hacket was a military nurse during World War 1 who made nursing her lifelong career. She kept the running of the place ship shape. She was a tiny woman with a kindly face and a lovely set of perfect white false teeth. I was one of her favorite children. She however had a tough time handling the teenage boys who, like me, had Muscular Dystrophy but Duchene, which is a severe type.

There were quite a few of these boys going to school at Somerton and generally their deterioration was so quick that they would die from respiratory failure between fifteen and twenty two years old. It was something no one ever dealt with or talked about and I wonder to this day how much those boys must have suffered inside because they knew what awaited them.
They showed behavior such as anger, swearing, and when electric wheelchairs became more common, bashing their chairs against the walls in frustration which was, I justified, but Matron Hackett didn’t understand these things, and I thought took their abuse to heart.

I was scared of one particular boy who had a particularly sharp tongue, but became good friends with him when I lived on the same ward at The Home for Incurables, a few years later. Watching each of the boys disappear one by one was something one of my tender age would never normally have had to endure, and I sometimes think of them and how lucky I was to have known them.

Somerton was a sight to behold during lunch hour. Children with missing limbs, often caused by Thalidomide, a drug prescribed to mothers during pregnancy for morning sickness that caused deformities in unborn babies. One child lost his legs because his mother accidentally put him in a hot bath.

The boys played cricket in what appeared to be slow motion on uneven concrete, others played on swings. We all managed to adapt to whatever our disabilities happened to be. The children without arms would use their mouths or feet to write or draw pictures, or those of us who could walk waddled along wearing calipers clumsily racing each other from the staircase to the reception desk..

In the classrooms our teachers would ask where various children were, and one of us would reply, “… at the limb factory”, or “at physio”.

In hindsight we children didn’t view our situations as being anything out of the ordinary, and would laugh at the funny old women who would click their tongues in pity as we passed them when going on our Sunday sojourns to the local shop to buy ice creams and lollies.

1966 is a year which sticks in my memory. It was the year my brothers Stephen and Tony went to Italy with my Dad to seek treatment for our muscular dystrophy and the year my nephew was born. My sister and her husband and father in law were sharing our house and I was so excited about having a baby in the house that I couldn’t wait to get home from school.

Every year November 5th everyone would buy crackers and fireworks. This was an old English custom celebrating the execution of Guy Fawkes who In the 1600s tried to blow up British parliament house. That year the teachers and us children, using old stockings, made a life-sized dummy representing Guy Fawkes, which was won by whichever child’s name would be pulled out of a hat. I was thrilled that I won him and so, Mr. Guy Fawkes’ sat beside me during my journey home in the taxi. Jack, the taxi driver, decided to play a practical joke by propping the dummy against the door and when my sister Antonia answered the door she sure enough got a big shock!
She later that night lit the dummy in our back yard and made a bonfire out of Mr. Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes Night was later banned due to the accidents, plus to avoid bush fires.

I hope this snippet about my childhood will encourage others to tell their stories so future people with disabilities will know the struggles and triumphs we have had in the past.

Cathy Nirta.

It was with great sadness we heard of Cathy’s passing on 3rd October 2008. Cathy was an important disability activist in South Australia, and made a significant impact on all who knew her. Cathy was a long-term volunteer at DIRC and she will be missed greatly by DIRC and by the wider community