‘Truly the deaf need protection from their friends’ (71) is the acid observation of one writer featured in the pages of The Deaf Advocate, the magazine once published by the former New South Wales Association of Deaf and Dumb Citizens. This deaf advocacy organization’s short history is one of those recounted in Managing Their Own Affairs: The Australian Deaf Community in the 1920s and 1930s by noted deaf studies scholar Breda Carty. This book’s manifold purpose includes presenting a lovingly detailed narrative of the ‘small land wars at the margins of society’ (3) that are said to make up deaf history; illuminating how a charity model of disability recurs in the lives of deaf people and the organizations professing to serve them; and stimulating reflection about whose history remains dominant, and why.
The first chapter introduces the book’s main subject, the Australian deaf community’s ‘attempts to challenge the established deaf welfare organizations … during the late 1920s and 30s’ (1), and situates this history in the context of British settler colonialism. These settlers imported British Sign Language varieties (which became Australian Sign Language, or Auslan). The settlers also imported models of charitable organizations that centered around ‘missioners,’ the usually hearing but sometimes deaf leaders of these organizations that acted to govern the lives of deaf people while facilitating access to religion, employment, and community activities. While this chapter provides an appreciated overview of the establishment of deaf schools in Australian states and the subsequent founding of missions, or Deaf Societies, for deaf adults, I found myself missing a map to remind me of Australia’s geography and provide a visual guide to locate the different schools and Societies.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduce central figures in Australian deaf history, including Ernest Abraham, an English missioner and megalomaniac who led the Adult Deaf and Dumb Society of Victoria in addition to playing a national role, and who would manipulate his way into directing part of the course of this history. Perhaps because Abraham remains known to Australian deaf communities today, Carty does not initially signpost that he was hearing; but since such identities are important to a deaf reader, these types of omission occasionally impelled me to re-read parts of the book. Chapter 2 also introduces John Patrick Bourke, a deafened former teacher who chafed against social constraints placed on him when he lost his hearing and who channeled his rancor into a prodigious written output. The enmity between Abraham and Bourke is mirrored by other conflicts described in Chapter 3, which in addition to outlining events leading up to the formation of the New South Wales Association and founding of The Deaf Advocate, identifies paradoxes at the core of the charity model. For example, while the paternalistic overseers of Deaf Societies did not believe deaf people were capable of managing their own affairs by way of having a voice in or knowledge of the activities of the Societies’ boards of management, these board members also feared the collective agency of deaf communities. While professing to serve the welfare of deaf individuals, the hearing businessmen who made up the boards did not themselves employ deaf people, and deaf people were excluded from attending fundraising events hosted by the Societies.
The New South Wales Association that broke away from the Society of Victoria, like the Queensland Deaf and Dumb Citizens Reformed Association that later seceded from the Queensland Mission, was founded on a citizenship model where ‘deaf people declared that they had the same rights as everyone else’ (68) to education and fair wages, and to contribute to society. While the casting of deaf and disabled people as citizens provides a valuable counter-narrative to the charity model, I would have liked more consideration of how white deaf people’s claims to citizenship – like the suffragette movement – may have served to shore up, rather than challenge, existing social orders, even if these people remained on society’s margins. For example, the history of white deaf people’s relationships with deaf Indigenous Australians is virtually absent from this book.
Chapter 4 describes the events and key figures behind the Queensland Association that broke away from the Queensland Mission. This mission’s Management Committee included ‘an unusually high number of teachers of the deaf’ who ‘brought an unfortunate tendency to persist in seeing deaf people as children’ (90). As with Herbert Hersee’s role in forming the New South Wales Association, the formation of the Queensland Association was catalyzed by the leadership of John Paul, who like Hersee was a hearing British missioner and the son of deaf parents, and who opposed Abraham’s influence on the Deaf Societies. Both men had been ousted by their respective missions prior to the formation of the Associations. This chapter also introduces Martha Overend Wilson, a deaf woman who worked alongside Paul and took on a key leadership role in the Queensland Association, although ‘her name is little known in the modern Australian Deaf community’ (187).
Chapter 5 recounts Abraham’s ‘many tactics’ (109) in quelling a similar rebellion in Victoria and in undermining the political will of deaf communities. As Carty relates, throughout his career Abraham used his facility in sign language and knowledge of deaf people to sow division, bending deaf people to his will by means of exclusion, sexual abuse and ostracization. Deaf people’s appeals to governments and media, spurred by the repressive Societies, were defeated by what one writer to the Advocate termed ‘the deep-seated “astigmatism” in the way hearing people viewed them’ (133). Chapters 6 and 7 recount the decline of a short-lived national-level Association and the state Associations, spurred by Society tactics and new government legislation regarding charities. As Chapter 8 relates, when the Australian Association of the Deaf (now Deaf Australia) was established in 1986, ‘most members … believed that it was Australia’s first ever national organization of deaf people’ (198).
Carty’s book is both a testament to the political will and collective agency of earlier generations of deaf people and a reminder of how a charity model recurs today in the lives of deaf people and some organizations professing to serve them.
School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
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