In her first memoir, Inclusion: Battling for Disability, Australian disability researcher Christine Baxter relays her story from childhood experiences through to her long and varied career within the disability field. While many books have been written on inclusion, very few have captured this theme through personal experiences.
This memoir begins with a short but moving Prologue detailing the many months Baxter spent in an institution in the United Kingdom as a child after she had contracted scarlet fever in 1945. She describes her isolation, her loneliness, her helplessness, her devastation. Unable to touch her mother or father for months, locked away from human contact and having no explanation as to ‘why’, six-year-old Baxter was left with an understanding of the reality of social exclusion. This she carried with her throughout her career, enabling her to uniquely identify with people with disabilities.
Chapter 1 jumps to Baxter’s first job as an 18 year old in the late 1950s. She was a newly arrived immigrant to Australia – teaching children with disabilities during the era of institutions. Baxter describes confronting experiences, from the control of doctors to the portrayal of children with disabilities as objects to be observed, not children to be cherished. Routine practices of this era are exposed, including the lack of activity provided to children with disabilities. This deficit was something Baxter then spent her early career fighting to remedy.
Baxter’s enthusiasm and positive outlook, even through the appalling conditions of the 1950s and 1960s, is striking. Refusing to accept the status quo, Baxter embarked on her first mission – to develop curriculum for children with disabilities. She also took up the role of advocate for parents – struck as she was by their struggles.
The book traces Baxter’s journey from Melbourne, working in the now infamous Kew Cottages, to Adelaide where she taught community skills to children from an institution, then on to Canberra in the 1960s, to work for a kindergarten run by a charity. Later, Baxter returned to Melbourne to work as a training advisor for the Mental Health Authority – a name she abhorred.
This book details her political activism from the nation’s capital, fighting for integration of schools into the Department of Education, to the Premier’s office in Victoria, advocating for disability coursework funding. Baxter then took her advocacy skills overseas, working with UNESCO as a UN consultant in Special Education in the developing nation of Burma. Baxter’s boldness to take on bureaucracy on any level in order to achieve social inclusion for people with disabilities shines through.
Baxter touches on many issues: the magical cures for disability promoted in the 1960s, the beginnings of supported/facilitated communication (including a test case in court), and what Baxter refers to as the mixed picture of inclusion where children were part of the school system but were not fully embraced. Each of these issues remain pertinent today – with cures still being touted, facilitated communication still being controversial and under-utilised, and people with disabilities continuing to live on the margins of society, where they often remain. Indeed, even Baxter’s descriptions of the struggles to close institutions in Victoria remain relevant, with a number of institutions still in existence.
Another constant theme within the book was the need to overcome barriers in society that were more disabling than the disability itself. This is detailed particularly in Chapters 15–18, reflecting on an era when Wolfensberger’s theory of normalisation (later renamed Social Role Valorisation) gained international popularity. Normalisation sparked a revolution in disability services in Australia, with disbanding institutions a top priority. Baxter describes her relief at the shift to community-based services. She continues to recognise, however, that the revolution must continue and not plateau. The continued need to remove barriers to inclusion was emphasised, and the proposed introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme was met with cautious optimism.
Baxter speaks often throughout the book on the struggles of parents to understand their child’s disability. The first two sentences of Chapter 27 are a particularly good summary of her stance: ‘Without families, life as we know if couldn’t happen. If families didn’t care, governments of the world would have an impossibly large number of problems to resolve’. The most potent example of this came from within Baxter’s own family, when her niece, Maya, was diagnosed with autism. Through this powerful example, Baxter portrays how personal experiences can differ from professional ones (see Chapter 22). Denial of problems, and struggles within the family to accept Maya’s difference, are detailed honestly and touchingly.
Baxter ended her career by working as an academic at the Institute for Disability Studies in Melbourne, where she taught and researched for over 20 years. Her academic publications are a highly recommended follow-up to reading this book.
If you are looking for a clear chronology of events, this book will not provide it. Inclusion: Battling for Disability is a personal, sometimes disjoined narrative – moving back and forth through time, particularly in the latter chapters. This memoir was not an academic exercise – it strikes me as a cathartic experience for Baxter, and we are privileged to read her account.
Baxter’s account will strike a chord with the experiences of any practitioner within the disability field who has struggled with the system and at times gets discouraged. Baxter’s honesty and her expressed frustrations will enable the practitioner-reader to easily identify with her.
This easy-to-read book will appeal to a wide-ranging audience. Beyond current practitioners, Inclusion: Battling for Disability should be on required readings lists for every undergraduate student in disability, health and education fields. People with disabilities and their families may find the book encouraging, and the sense of history enlightening.
Independent Researcher & Scholar, Melbourne, Australia
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© 2014, Rachel Carling-Jenkins
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.964506