Breaking Barriers speech

Today I speak on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung lands, in the Eastern Kulin Nations. I pay my respects to First Nations elders, past and present, and I extend my friendship to any First Nations people in the room today. Thank you to Murrundindi for the incredibly beautiful Welcome to Country. 

As a writer and arts worker who is a guest on this land, I want to give shoutouts to disabled First Nations writers and artists – Paola Bella, Renay Barker Mulholland, Josh Pether, and Kitty Obsidian are all Disabled First Nations artists living and working locally. Seek out their work and celebrate them. 

I love Melbourne and it’s so good to be here at a City of Melbourne event. 

Your attendance today is heartening. You are all keen on making your workplaces, venues, restaurants shops and spaces accessible. Thank you. 

Something me and other disabled people notice a lot is that people who run shops, restaurants, arts venues and more say:

“We don’t get many disabled customers coming here.”

To that I say: 

One: disability doesn’t have a specific appearance – how do you know if someone is disabled or not?

And two: perhaps if you made your premises and your attitudes more accessible, you’d get more disabled customers, and employees too. 

Disability is broad. It encompasses physical disability, diverse mental health, sensory impairments like Deafness and blindness, cognitive disability, neurodivergency, chronic illness, and dynamic disability – that is, conditions that change in severity from one day to another. And external barriers including ableism, and sometimes our bodies, are disabling. I’ll talk you through examples of ableism, and ways to be less ableist and more accessible and inclusive in my speech. 

The Australian Trade and Investment Commission (AusTrade) says that:

“The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s People with disability in Australiareport (2024) found:

18% of Australians, or 4.4 million people, have a disability22%, or 5.5 million, have a long-term health condition.

In the June quarter 2023 alone, Tourism Research Australia estimates the total value of domestic travel by people with accessibility needs and people who travelled with them was $6.8 billion. This represents 21% of total domestic tourism spend in that quarter. 

Making products or services more accessible opens new and valuable markets for tourism businesses.”

If you follow me online, you probably know that I love fashion and I do a lot of shopping. I’m regularly in clothing shops and something that annoys me is when new stores (and restaurants )  move in to a premises, and are not accessible – that is, inaccessible doorway, tiny change rooms without support rails, high counters and displays, loud music, bright lights and racks and shelves positioned so that it’s hard to navigate around them. 

The store had an opportunity make the space accessible from the outset and chose not to. This is ableism.

And retailers aren’t much better online, either – they dont provide much detail about the clothes on store websites and social media, so people who are blind or have low vision or have other types of disabilities don’t know what they look like, how they fit. 

There are many resources on making spaces accessible online – the City of Melbourne has a great set of accessibility checklists and guides for businesses on its website.

I’d love to see the City of Melbourne and other councils give incentives for businesses including retailers (and restauranteurs and venue managers etc) to make their new premises accessible, and fines issued to those who dont within a year of moving in. 

Accessibility isn’t only physical. It’s attitudinal too. And a poor attitude towards disability is also ableism. Similar to Elle, I have a huge amount of stories to share, about the ableism and inclusion I’ve encountered. Here’s just one story.

A few years ago, a friend and I saw prominent Australian band, Killing Heidi, at a prestigious melbourne music venue. I’m naming the band but not the venue, because the band responded, and the venue didn’t. My friend and I both have facial differences, and one of our safe spaces is in a music venue, watching our fave bands. Because of my skin condition, Ichthyosis, it can hurt for me to stand for an extended period of time. My friend secured me a chair as I got us a drink. And then we were verbally abused and threatened by drunk concert goers. They said I was too young to need a chair and threatened violence. 

We were shaken and scared and we moved away from these abusive people. We spoke to the venue staff about what happened – they just passed us to other staff, as they didn’t know what to do. In fairness they did walk us out of the venue, to ensure we didn’t encounter the abusive people after the show. 

I tweeted about it, and it made the news in my hometown of Albury Wodonga. 

Killing Heidi reached out and apologised, even though it wasn’t their responsibility, invited us to their next show later in the month, and we hung with the band prior to seeing them play.  

We didn’t hear from the venue staff at all. But six months later I needed to do a talk at the venue, and I had to speak about what happened with management in a public space – where it was moderated. I was polite and professional but frustrated that this was the only opportunity for me to raise this, in front of an audience. 

Here’s what I wanted to happen. 

For there to be a way to report ableism to the venue staff at the time, like a text helpline for reporting unwanted behaviour. And for there to be a way to report this after the concert.

For staff to recognise what ableism looks like. If people don’t know what ableism is, it means they’re not around disabled people enough, seeing the barriers we face. Coming to recognise ableism could happen by staff undertaking accessibility and disability cultural safety training, and following lots of disabled people on social media

For ableist patrons to be removed from the venue in the same way racism and sexist people are.

For venue management to contact me and my friend afterwards, apologise and ensure a safe space so this doesn’t happen again.

Hilariously after the first Killing Heidi show, another drunk person stopped my friend and I in the street to call me a social justice angel, loudly thanking me for my advocacy and requesting a selfie. My friend regularly calls me a social justice angel now. 

A couple of years later, I went to  that same music  venue with  another friend – also disabled – and she was told to stop resting on the stage to ease her chronic pain after the show, after most people had cleared out of the band room because it was an OHS risk. Again, management did not respond when I wrote to them to report what had happened. 

Access and inclusion also extends to workplaces. 

I’m running out of time here but I want to give a shout-out to my part time employer, Melbourne Fringe, who sets a great example of making the workplace accessible – from the outset. Some of my colleagues are here today, including Simon Abrahams, CEO and Creative Director, and Caroline Bowditch, our incredible cultural consultant.

Here’s what we do at Melbourne Fringe:

There are targeted positions for Deaf, Disabled, Neurodivergent and chronically ill people, and of course, disabled people can apply for all roles too. 

We have multiple ways to apply for jobs – written responses online, via video, Auslan video, audio file, or relaying their application to us on the phone if needed. Artists applying for commissions also have these options.

We ask candidates what their access needs are several times in the application process – and many have told me they are thankful for us asking because previous employers haven’t asked. 

And we make sure the workplace is accessible, with flexible work days and hours, work from home options, different leave options, and regular disability cultural competency training and discussions. 

In my seven years of working at Melbourne Fringe, I’ve never had to leave my identity at the door. And last year when I was diagnosed with cancer, which was hard to endure on top of my primary disability, Ichthyosis, I was able to focus on healing while the whole workplace kept up the access and inclusion work for the Festival and wider arts sector. Simon and the team would check in on me regularly, inviting me to lunch and Festival events, with no pressure except to have fun.

Accessibility and inclusion is about making disabled, Deaf, neurodivergent and chronically ill people welcome and showing us that we belong. 

It’s about building trust.

It’s about affording dignity and independence to disabled people. 

It’s about using respectful language and raising your expectations of disabled people.

It’s about ensuring disabled people are in every room, when decisions are made about us. 

We are almost 20 percent of the population, probably more given non disclosure rates. 

It’s good business sense to invite us in. 

Thank you.

Image: Carly, a woman with red skin, wearing a blue jacket over a blue, purple, green and navy floral dress, pink boots. She’s standing near a wooden wall, smiling.

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