Rupturing Concepts of Disability and Inclusion

THE QUILTER’S JOURNAL
The hospital setting and workplace culture made no allowances for challenge.
Use of personal initiative was interpreted as a threat to overarching control;
surveillance extended beyond the public work space to private bedrooms in nursing
quarters; and any personal hardship or illness suffered by nurses was treated as
inadequacy of commitment or dishonesty to the required loyalty. Humour, suspicion,
frustration and bitterness became co-inhabitors of my vocational survival kit which
I made, very early in my training, from a fabric of contempt. Living the paradox of
an environment, supposedly designed as an institution of care, but hypocritically
flaunting and sustaining oppression, became, for me, untenable. From my background,
this seemed nothing short of moral antithesis. Therefore, becoming involved with
the Christian church during this time served, somewhat, as an antidote.
After having resigned from the hospital in the late 1970s, I successfully applied
for a position as a supervisor in a sheltered workshop. This workshop was run by
Special Caring Services Division, a section of the newly-formed Uniting Church in
Australia, of which I was a member. It was a workshop for people with intellectual
disability, and was founded on notions of Christian service easily identifiable with
the Methodist tradition brought to church union. Like other people there, I became
proficient in rubber doormat making, the main activity of the workshop. As well, I
learnt to spoke bicycle wheels very sloppily.
This was an interesting era in disability work, for the ideas of normalisation
principles, espoused by such people as Nirje in Europe and Wolfensberger in North
America, had begun to infiltrate practice in Australia. A predominant outcome
was a shift to deinstitutionalisation. In Queensland, the director of Special Caring
Services, the Reverend Wal Gregory, was approached by the Queensland
Government to work collaboratively to move people with intellectual disability
from state-controlled institutions to community/church-based agencies to provide
community care and employment. Thus, these adults working in the sheltered
workshop came from diverse backgrounds - some who had lived with their families
since birth, and others who had only recently entered ‘community’ life, having
been incarcerated, in most situations, since their birth. This latter group were now
being housed in hostels in suburban settings. Diversity included differences of
educational and recreational opportunities; but most obviously, differences in
familial experiences. Such were the differences in histories that the easiest options
for work culture seemed to be to treat everyone in the present tense.
By not attending to people’s histories, and by ignoring the invisibilities as such,
a yearning was created within me to become more actively involved in the
deinstitutionalisation process. I was struggling to understand how groups of people
could have been locked away from society, when my background had constantly
informed me that such people could not only live in communities, but be liked and
accepted. As this struggle was agitating and desire was stirring, Wal Gregory
approached me to ask if my husband, Bob, and I had ever given consideration to
becoming house parents in one of the church family group homes established in a
joint project with government. These homes housed 4 to 6 young people with
intellectual disability, and both partners were employed full time, 24 hours a day.
After much deliberation, we decided to undertake this move. Interestingly, our
friends and families not involved in the church applauded our intentions and read
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