Finding Australia’s Disabled Writers

Building an inclusive community to uncover, honour, and amplify the historical contributions of Australia’s disabled writers.

Introduction to the Project

Not much is known about the contributions Australia’s disabled authors have made to our literary culture. This project aims to change that.

Finding an Author

Disabled authors tend to be missing from conversations about Australian literature, so we are creating a searchable page to help you learn more about them. Through this page you can find out who these authors are, how they have forged their careers, and how their disability shapes their creative writing practice.

Featured Author

Barcroft Boake

Boake’s poetry was celebrated for its exceptionally vivid sense-images rather than word-images, perhaps a tell-tale sign that he was keenly attuned to the sensory experience of being in the world as some Autistic people are.

Guy Boothby

Two characteristics in Boothby’s writing that might denote an Autistic style are the focus on sensory experiences; and Wittgensteinian language games in which every word may be used as a tool for play.

Dorothy Cottrell

‘The day on which I burned the last overpriced crutch and brace and sat down marked the real beginning of my recovery. Not of recovery from my disability – that has become neither better nor worse than it was the day the first specialist reviewed my case – but of recovery as an individual, as the builder of a life.’

Patricia Carlon

As communicating with the hearing world is difficult, deaf writers often turn inwards, contemplating their rich interior lives. Rather than being ‘trapped’ … Carlon’s deafness was immensely generative.

Judith Wright

Deafness was Wright’s ‘dark source’, as she writes in her poem ‘Silence’. It was a condition which occasionally hindered her, but which also enabled her creativity and writing.