Posts by Hilary Stace
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Wellington's trains used to end near where Te Papa is now. If it had stayed like that would have been easy to extend to airport. Short sighted solutions from earlier eras.
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What annoys me about this is that Steven Joyce has decided that all students over 55 are a bad risk so can't borrow anymore - which means lots of people being made redundant or mothers who have finally got some time to themselves to go back to study now can't. No one consulted them.
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Up Front: Absence in the Arcades, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Yes great movie. I've seen it twice now. Temple Grandin approves of it, so it must be a pretty accurate portrayal. My favourite scene the one where her mother gets told off by the 'expert' for being a bad mother and blamed for her child's autism.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Apparently there were 800 residents at its height in the early 1970s, so from the 50s-70s was the big growth era. Since then run down as de-inst started, but took another 30 years. I think, like any large organisation, the culture varied with the leadership, and each new new director seemed to want to take it in new directions, probably with the best of progressive intentions. All I know is that Tony Attwood, who spent a short time there as a young psychologist in the early 1980s, did not like what he found, and he didn't stay long.
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Joe, I'm sorry I didn't mean to be patronising. This is still raw history for many and that is one reason why the Donald Beasley study exploring the stories of various players (staff, families, residents) is so fascinating and important. But what I am saying is that the policy makers (and the 1953 Aitken report specifically recommended extending the Levin facility that the earlier Fraser govt had developed on a much more community scale) into the huge institutions it and others became - which was not what many of the families wanted, and it also increased the clinical and societal pressure for parents to send their children there and forget about them.
It has parallels now in the policy recommendations that the Welfare Working Group, for example, proposes and what the disability advocates themselves want - worlds apart, but the more powerful lobby inevitably gets its way.
Of course what humanises any policy is that there are good people in the system who make the best of the situation for the people concerned as much as they can, like your mother. Brian Easton is another who challenges me on my research as his perspective is as the child of a father who was a concerned and caring staff member at Templeton.
My point is that there is much history still to uncover in disability policy generally and it is painful, particular for those with first hand experience. My perspective is from that of parenting a child, who in an earlier era may have had to live away from home in state care and I would have been pressured to do that. I have also been influenced by the stories of those who once lived in such state care and had absolutely no choice in the matter, and they are the most powerful stories.
Gerard Smythe's 'Out of sight out of mind' lets those people tell their own stories. He also found their medical files for them to help them understand (now as old people) why they went to - in this case Templeton - in the first place. One woman arrived with a bus load of 3 year olds and another was a 6 year old who was a bit of a handful. This is the sort of policy stuff that we need to have ongoing vigilance about.Meanwhile families with older disabled children are today looking for part time appropriate residential support and finding very little available - which is another policy challenge.
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Hard News: Walking upright again, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Amazing photos. The last time I was in that hotel was for the Autism NZ conference in 2009 - our Russell was also speaking at it. They had the conference and dinner in that large area near the top of the building. I stayed there for about three nights and remember looking out over Christchurch at night, and in the dawn, from a view similar to that one on the 19th floor.
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Kate Hannah,
Kate - if you email me at hilary.stace@vuw.ac.nz I can give you that listserv and other refs
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Joe, The debate over terminology and support options was as heated then as now with many parents fighting politicians and others. The World Health Organisation was way ahead of our Holland Government which used which used terms 'mental deficiency colonies', 'feeble minded' etc in its 1953 clinician-led Aitken report, in opposition to many of the activist parents and others who opposed such terminology and attitudes. But from talking to parents and siblings from that era there was real shame and guilt in having a disabled child in the family which meant that the mother was somehow at fault and the ofher children would not be able to find partners if the secret of the disabled child was revealed. Hence institutionalisation. I'm really glad that there were nice people like your family in those places. But I can still oppose the policy and language, even considering the historical context, for where history shows it can lead.
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Kate - the black triangle, which was the Nazi disability symbol has been adopted by several disability groups in the UK, who have got very active in response to the current government's attacks on services and support for disabled people. Many have a presence on Facebook.
Joe - 'mental deficiency colonies' was official government language of the 1950s for psychopaedic institutions so I'm pleased to hear those on the ground didn't use that term.
Steven - There are a lot of potentially eugenic public policies and it depends how they are implemented. For example there is that undercurrent for anything about single parents and you always get mentions of 'breeding for a business' which are eugenic dog-whistles. Labour's raising the retirement age apparently has transition arrangements for those who are worn out and also part of a series of policies on health, education etc - so not eugenic, but it all depends on implementation. (Euthanasia and neonatal testing also have eugenic risks).
Sacha - Gerard Smythe's excellent doco on the closure of Templeton played on TV1 on I think Christmas Eve 2004 and was widely viewed and remembered. The preview and interview with Gerard on Media7 last night must lead to pressure to someone screening it (hopefully).
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Speaker: Doing the right thing on retirement, in reply to Kate Hannah,
When I was researching the history of New Zealand eugenics in the 1990s (when that Swedish history first came to light which was genuinely shocking - and also Frieda from Abba was revealed as a child of a eugenic pairing of a Swedish mother and a German father) I came across some wonderful 'positive' eugenic NZ fiction c1920s. Can't remember who it was by but was the era of Ettie Rout and her friends and was all about the wonderful physical specimen of the noble bronzed native.
On the other hand the Public Historian (US) a few years ago (c 2004?) had a whole issue on historical aspects of eugenics including the eugenic basis of oralism for Deaf people, and a report of a museum exhibition of sterilisation policy in California. Should be online?
The disability listserv from Leeds University has a wealth of international contributors and is where I have heard of various artistic tributes to the Nazi 'silent holocaust' - the experimentation on and extermination of possibly hundreds of thousands of disabled people.You could put your request in and people will give you info.
Joe, the language was much worse than that - 'mental defective', 'unfit' (nouns not adjectives) used generally in NZ and elsewhere, and used as synonyms for morally suspect as well - 'useless eaters' was the Nazi description.