Michael Uniacke – September 23 2018

International Week of the Deaf – September 24-30 2018

Mike has worked in writing, editing and publishing and is the founder of one of Australia’s first community newspapers on disability. He holds a Bachelor of Business in Accounting. Mike’s work has appeared in numerous publications and he has written and presented comedy material on disability for the television series ‘No Limits’ on Channel 31. His parallel career sees him working across all three tiers of Australian government in community development, policy work and disability. Born into a family of five children, four of whom were inexplicably born deaf, Mike turned to books rather than television during his school years. Realising that deafness was rarely a subject in print, and then mostly written about by hearing people using bleak and negative language, the topic, particularly deaf history in Europe and Australia, became one of the drivers of his writing life, but he has also written on subjects as diverse as gardening and self-sufficiency, long-distance train commuting, and a blog about a stay in hospital. Mike has written that one dilemma deaf writers face is how to ‘indicate dialogue between characters that had the same function as speech, but was not speech’ in quotation marks on a printed page, and another is how to translate Auslan into written English given that Auslan has a completely different grammatical form and structure to English – English is a linear language whilst Auslan is spatial.

Deafness Gain
TUQ Publications, 2016; ISBN 9780992589943
Deafness Gain? It’s the opposite of hearing loss. Continuing on from Deafness Down, the memoir of his early years, Mike embarks on a career in accountancy and falls in with a crowd of young deaf people. The profound ease of communication transforms him and leads to an exploration of deafness. Being with deaf people, he learns to connect with hearing people and reaches out to a world far wider than the expectations of family and career. With humour and vulnerability, Mike navigates the unexpected twists and chaos of life, and gains increasingly sophisticated insights into deafness. From believing deafness to be a deficiency and a problem to be fixed, Mike realises it could be something else entirely. This memoir ends in a powerful and moving climax. A mere half-dozen words spoken to Mike by a hearing woman reach to the core of personal identity. Deafness Gain is a revelation in the way it presents deafness.

The Quest for Edith Ackers
TUQ Publications, 2014; ISBN 9780992589912
The Quest for Edith Ackers is a slow-burn thriller novella. Who is Edith Ackers? All we know is that she is deaf, and her father, Benjamin, is one of Europe’s most powerful champions of oralism, the belief that deaf people can be taught to speak. Oralism is sweeping through late 19th-century Europe, threatening to overturn the lives of deaf people, and making sign language redundant. David Archer, a young English journalist, is at first convinced that oralism will bring deaf people into the hearing world. But the passion of deaf people and their defence of sign language convinces him otherwise. At a public meeting in London, Benjamin Ackers, a wealthy barrister and member of British Parliament, declares that oralism has restored his daughter to hearing society. However, he keeps her hidden. With the help of some hearing supporters, Archer decides to track her down. But the immovable forces of influence, money and power produce an unexpected result.