Publishers note: Today’s piece builds on yesterday’s “It’s Julia Season.  It takes a look at discrimination in the sixties and seventies and the gratuity, banality and disrespect of discourse now.  The language is of the nineteen-sixties.

Spastic Boots

He had calipers on both legs, kind of made him walk funny.  Don’t even know if he had a real name.  To us he was just ‘Spastic Boots’.

Occasionally the ‘Special Bus’ would drive by.  We’d take it in turns to stand by the waist high pipe and mesh fence and do spastic impersonations, the ‘spazzo walk’, and do a fairly convincing impersonation, arms splayed, faces contorted, shuffling steps, ‘spastic- like’.  There were a couple of kids with ‘spazzo’ siblings, (I felt sincerely sorry for them) they lived a childhood of excruciating embarrassment.  We realised though that “Spastic Boots” wasn’t ‘spazzo’ enough to be “on the bus”, he just had calipers.

‘Could’ve been polio or something’ my mate Neil Coleman told me.  Polio was a ‘disease’ you could get, we read about it in Alan Marshall’s “I can jump puddles”.

‘On the bus’ was part of our code vocabulary to designate the afflicted.  To walk funny was referred to as ‘the Spazzo Walk’.  To get angry and lose control of oneself was referred to variously as “Having a Spaz’ or a ‘Spaz Attack’.  To be in the process of ‘Going Spaz’, and to lose oneself completely was referred to as ‘Chucking a Spaz’.  (After ‘enlightenment” this became ‘chucking a wobbly’.)

One day dad invited some colleagues over with a severely disabled child, he had massive glasses, communicated in an improvised language of sub-sentences and grunts, and had difficulty walking.  We pretended as our parents hoped we would to be friendly and civil, but the unwritten rule ensured that we regarded him as sub-human.  It confirmed our belief that the ‘Spazzos’ belonged together, invariably in a place designated with apt aboriginal names;  ‘Monkami’ and ‘Yooralla’.

By the early 70’s the local greengrocers, the Italians ( who lived two doors up the road), had prospered.  I remember Dad saying, “I am going up the street to introduce myself to them and congratulate them on their success”.  We thought this was curious.  The old man inadvertently doing the “Migrant hostess”, the Barry Humphries number set in Moonee Ponds.  I can imagine the awkwardness of the encounter, the local GP, (there was a class system of sorts) sanctifying the newcomers.  No one bothered when they were newly arrived un-proven fruiterers.  Now they’d earned some respect.

He returned half an hour later, chastened by language difficulties, and the impression that his acknowledgement had been politely accepted as some sort of condescending insult.  I suppose he tried, but he hadn’t thought it through.  You see, like ‘Spastic Boots’, these people were regarded as “hidden” , peripheral to the mainstream.

Nationally, we indulge in some puerile debate about gay marriage.  And there’s an unresolved debate on sexism.  Australians still have a big problem with “difference”.  I think it runs at the core of being “suburban”.  Though the culture debate may have matured it remains unresolved as a struggle for meaningful identity.  And the culture itself? Homogenised by soulless shopping malls, an indulged materialism and insecurity.

What’s the big ideology debate at the core of this election?  Think shopping mall and ‘Spastic Boots’.  No-one dares to be different.

Poor Julia.

(Thank you to those who have lead the Integration push, have initiated the recently legislated and universally supported National Disability Insurance Scheme.  For background and a great read we commend Rhonda Galbally’s “Just Passions” Pluto Press, 2004, 2012)