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174 10 DEAF AUSTRALIANS AND THE COCHLEAR IMPLANT: REPORTING FROM GROUND LEVEL Karen Lloyd and Michael Uniacke The English poet David Wright was one of an exceedingly rare species—a deaf person who has had published an account of what it is like to be deaf. In the quote above, Wright was explaining his choice to write about deafness before starting to read about it. He wrote those words during the 1960s, well before the cochlear implant or digital technology was to make its impact. The world has changed a great deal since then, but not everything has changed. We know very well Wright’s feeling from the “non-deaf specialists.” We would say the “condescension of attitude and tone” is worse—much worse now than in the 1960s—and it is largely because of the cochlear implant debate. The combined experience of this chapter’s authors, that of mixing with the Deaf community and with other deaf and hard of hearing people in Australia, in all their shapes and colors, totals more than sixty years. As Deaf people, we have participated in paid and in voluntary capacities as writers, as researchers, and as contributors in other roles. Our involvement includes participation in state and national organizations of Deaf people, welfare organizations, self-help groups, and hard of hearing groups. We have associated with parents, with teachers, with welfare workers, and with interpreters. We knew the Deaf community before the cochlear implant was well known, and we have observed and written about the community’s early responses to it. We have observed the way in which the cochlear implant debate threatened to become a major battleground between Deaf and hearing people. We have watched the twists and turns in the debate as the early anger from Deaf people diluted into an easy acceptance of those Deaf people with cochlear implants who began to surface within this community. What did remain consistent were the occasional spikes of arrogance from medical specialists against Deaf people, to an extent that would make David Wright blush. Yet Deaf Australians have done what they usually have done. They simply get on with living, which is, we think, the best possible response they could have given. In this chapter, we report on the cochlear implant debate in its Australian context (Australia was the country where the multichannel cochlear implant was developed and made commercially available through the work of Professor Graeme Clark at the University of Melbourne). Our report comes from our I read a great many of the books on deafness and the deaf—all of them by non-deaf specialists—and ended up feeling considerably deafer than when I started. A minimal but frequent condescension of attitude and tone left me with a slightly depressed ego. —David Wright (1969, 201) DEAF AUSTRALIANS AND THE COCHLEAR IMPLANT 175 decades of combined experiences, from the personal, from the political, and from being part of the community of Deaf people in Australia. WHERE DID IT START? We do not know where the debate about the cochlear implant started. We had always known there was research into cures for deafness. We hoped it would help those deaf people who wanted a cure. Karen:1 My mother, years ago, persuaded me to go talk to an audiologist about the possibility of a cochlear implant, before it became well known. I fought her on it but eventually gave in to her. The audiologist agreed that, for me, it would be a waste of time, effort, and money. * * * Michael: My first indication of the debate came from fundraising appeals on television during the 1970s. They were called telethons and were conducted for sixteen- and seventeen-hour stretches. They were designed to raise funds for research into nerve deafness. I remembered feeling very uneasy about these telethons. I was discovering deafness, and deaf people, and these telethons amounted to very considerable publicity. I was part of a group of deaf people. We had something to say about being deaf, and the telethons might have been a good way for us to tell the world. But the hearing people who controlled it were profoundly uninterested in us and in anything we might have wanted to say. As the cochlear implant became better known, the Deaf community was aghast. Hearing people stirred up a great deal of “fear and loathing” within the Deaf community. They made statements about how the cochlear implant was going to eradicate the Deaf community. The media was reporting this...

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