The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir

2. Reunions

13 2 Reunions I found a handful of photos, stored in a plastic envelope sleeve, taken when I was a child at the Deaf School.Those photos now presented themselves as riddles to me. Every now and then I would take them out of the envelope and scatter them across my desk and look down at them, aware of the tug of nostalgia, but aware too of another feeling, a sadness of sorts, which I tried to understand each time I experienced it. I couldn’t remember the little girl that I was when they were taken. I felt confronted by this absence of memory as I scanned the photos,reprising my memory’s gaps across these childhood years. I felt troubled by it; discomfited by my apparent lack of loyalty to my deaf childhood, given that I seemed to remember so little of it. Some of the photos looked as though they were snapped spontaneously; they had the blurred look of a bumped camera or lens not adjusted properly . Others had the formal composition of professional portraits, having been taken for public relations purposes to promote the Deaf School.These were taken at the bungalow-style Oral Deaf Preschool at Yeronga, a riverside suburb in Brisbane. The school pioneered an education curriculum designed to teach deaf children to speak, not through the dance of their hands, but through the effort of explosive vowels forced up through their 14 Part One sparrow-small chests and throats, and puffy, burring, hissing consonants shaped by their tongues and lips. The photos showed teachers at work— there was Miss Clare Minchin whom I remembered as having blue stars for eyes, and there was Miss Maryanne Casey, sweet and gentle, whose wedding we attended. The later photos were taken at the Gladstone Road School for the Deaf, which I attended after the Yeronga Preschool. Standing like a welcoming beacon on the top of a hill in Dutton Park,it was a red-brown brick Tudorstyle building with mullioned windows and many rooms, set in terraced gardens and green lawns with spreading poinciana trees and Moreton Bay figs. On the grounds were swings, monkey bars, a slippery slide, and a carousel roundabout for children. Downstairs was a large area where we had dancing classes, taking our turns to balance on top of Mr. Pritchard’s shiny black shoes, grasping his fingers as he glided across the floor talking to us all the while, trying to infuse in our emerging word-forced voices the motions of swinging and swelling, the tides of sound’s rise and fall. Mr. Pritchard was my last teacher at the Deaf School; he went on to become a religious minister. He sketched in my brand new autograph book, in yellows and blues, the outline of a beach and sky and water and wrote about the grains of sand on the beach. It was an allegory of sorts, about God. I didn’t understand the words but knew that the meaning was designed to be encouraging. Mr. Pritchard was the person who first introduced me to philosophy.He said to me,“It’s what you know about yourself that matters; not what other people think.”He meant that I needed to be guided by my own conscience,my own beliefs.My mother had a similar philosophy,only she called it “running your own race.” My favorite photo was a black and white class photo of the class of ’62. I would have been seven years old by then. I was positioned in the middle of a group of seven children—five girls and two boys. Narelle, John, Sharon, (me, leaning forward), Kay, Colin, and Margaret. Five of us sat on a brick garden wall, our legs swinging above the ground, our hands in our laps uniformly posed, right hand resting on top of the left.The two tallest girls in the class stood sentrylike,clasping their hands,at the opposite ends Reunions 15 of the group. We did not look directly into the camera. Instead, our eyes were turned to something or someone beyond the left border of the picture : what lay outside that left frame? The photo must have been taken in winter, because we all wore pullovers, their dark colors providing the background texture for the long looping cords of our metal-box hearing aids. When I looked at all those photos, I felt a tenderness toward the...