From short-statured Rocca in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Haxby’s Circus to autistic Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s Rosie series, Australian literature frequently relies on representations of disabled people for narrative intrigue. Yet, regardless of how nuanced such representations may be, they cannot substitute for the experiences of Australian disabled authors who, in contrast, are often marginalised or erased. Through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, these authors continue to demonstrate the complex reality of impairment and of being disabled in Australia.
The Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors Symposium explored these complexities via keynotes and presentations from 25th – 27th September 2025. Click on the links below to listen to the presentations, which have captions enabled.
With thanks to Evan Jarrett for captioning.
To learn more about Australian disabled authors and how their impairments have shaped their lives as writers and their craft, visit our database of writers and read our case studies.
Over the next two years we will focus on historical writers, then we will concentrate on contemporary writers. Through this approach, we aim to highlight a lineage of disabled writers which has long been overlooked in Australian literature.