Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Disability

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The gifts of our limitations

    • Stephanie Kate Judd
    • 05 October 2021
    6 Comments

    When I was a teenager, something glitched in my brain and central nervous system and my hand stopped working. Over the course of a year, I went from playing in orchestras to being unable to hold a pencil; from being in the top team of every sport I played to being unable to throw a ball. I’d baffled the world’s top neurologists and exhausted every avenue of medical testing. 

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Zoomkwondo and other lessons from the pandemic

    • Cristy Clark
    • 17 June 2021
    2 Comments

    About 1 in 6 Australians (18 per cent) live with disability, and many of these 4.4 million people face daily barriers to their full inclusion in education, work, services, activities, etc, not because of their disability, but because access has been structured around the needs, capacities and preferences of people who do not live with disability. Exclusion has always been a choice, but the pandemic has laid this reality bare.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Locked in and locked out

    • Zaki Haidari
    • 23 March 2021
    9 Comments

    I am a refugee from Afghanistan, and I belong a minority ethnic group, the Hazaras. We have been persecuted for a long time because of our ethnicity, religion and values. In 2012, I was forced to leave Afghanistan. I was 17. Back home, my father was a medical doctor. The Taliban accused him of working with international armed forces in the country at the time. One day the Taliban took him away, and nobody has seen him since.  

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The fight for the future of the NDIS

    • El Gibbs
    • 18 March 2021
    5 Comments

    Right now, there is a fight on for the future of the NDIS. On one side is the Federal Government, determined to have total control over the Scheme, and to change its very fundamentals. On the other side are disabled people across Australia, disability advocacy organisations, allied health workers and disability service providers, urgently telling them to stop.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Disability RC hears how criminal justice system fails people with disabilities

    • Justin Glyn
    • 02 March 2021

    Hearing 11 of the Commission has looked at how Australia’s justice system treats people with disabilities. The intersection between disability and the criminal justice system is, unfortunately, not a happy one.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    St Francis Xavier, disability, and examining our limits

    • Justin Glyn
    • 02 December 2020
    10 Comments

    3 December has a couple of interesting resonances for this blind Jesuit. It is the feast day of St Francis Xavier — Jesuit missionary extraordinaire. It is also the International Day of Persons with a Disability. It seems to me that the two anniversaries have more than a little in common — both in what they tell us about the limits and the promise of human life in the image of God.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Actually, my illness does define me

    • Tim Hutton
    • 01 October 2020
    9 Comments

    For many people, illness has a narrative: a clear beginning, middle and end. If we’re lucky, the ending is actually a fresh start where the illness is gone and our hero is returned to normal life, changed but stronger because of their ordeals. In the lives of those with chronic illness, however, those lines are blurred; our descent into illness may have been gradual and there might be no end in sight.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Discussions about euthanasia

    • Justin Glyn
    • 10 September 2020
    9 Comments

    While the legislation was proposed as something of a measure of last resort, the numbers already tell a different story. Unfortunately, many of us with a disability look at these figures (and at the proposed legalisation of euthanasia in New Zealand, which will be voted on later this year) with a weary mix of familiarity and horror.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    COVID-19 shining a light on ableism

    • Justin Glyn
    • 25 August 2020
    7 Comments

    The pandemic has lit up the areas in which our neoliberal economies are basically unfit for the purpose of providing healthy and safe environments — whether it be privatised aged care homes and quarantine services or ‘the gig economy’, which forces sick people to ‘soldier on’ infecting people as they go. One area that has been rather less considered, however, is disability.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Autistic representation and Love on the Spectrum

    • Alex Creece
    • 11 August 2020
    7 Comments

    With all its good intentions and charming participants, Love on the Spectrum is for the neurotypical eye. Just like The Undateables, a similar show from the UK, it takes the inner machinations of disabled lives and creates entertainment for non-disabled viewers. Autistic representation on television is rare, which makes it all the more alienating when these few depictions exist purely for everyone else’s warm-n-fuzzies.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Disability RC reveals important medical history

    • El Gibbs
    • 02 March 2020
    2 Comments

    Disabled people, and those that love them, have told the latest hearing of the Disability Royal Commission about their experiences in the health system. Neglect, abuse, violence all featured, with medical people and systems often talked about, not as caring health professionals, but as callous and cruel.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The anatomy of hope

    • Fiona Murphy
    • 18 February 2020
    5 Comments

    Over a decade ago, when applying to study physiotherapy, I carefully read through the application form. It contained a brief but troubling caveat: all students must be physically able to participate in the coursework. I felt nervous, even scared. The answer seemed clear cut to me, but would the university agree?

    READ MORE