Non-Fiction Writing
While working for my local newspaper, the Wangaratta Chronicle, I wrote a wide variety of stories. I wrote stories about community events, many human interest pieces, and some hard-hitting articles. I enjoyed researching the articles and interviewing people for the stories. I even took a few photographs for the articles I wrote. A few of my articles can be viewed online:
From St Josephs, Beechworth to Award-Winning Researcher
Eggs from your backyard instead of the supermarket
Some more of my stories, but far from all, are behind the Chronicle’s paywall.
I wrote over 50 articles for the Divine website, which people with disabilities wrote for people with disabilities. The website stopped accepting new stories in 2016 and was taken offline in 2017, but my stories are still viewable on the Wayback Machine website.
My stories ranged from robots and smart homes for people with disabilities to how science fiction treats disabilities. I wrote reviews of movies and books that had characters with disabilities in them. I interviewed people from all walks of life: authors, television producers, professors, council workers.
The images above are clickable links to my articles stored on the Wayback Machine. For a list of my articles, go to my columnist profile on Divine.
Writing about disabilities
When working at the Chronicle, I wanted to write stories about people with disabilities in Wangaratta. Frustratingly, I could not find many locals who were willing to talk about living with disabilities. People seem eager to speak in social media communities, where they get support from others in the same boat, but they avoid talking to the media. As a result, the general population has less chance of hearing about how disabilities affect locals and how they might help enable people them.
I think part of the problem is that people are wary of the media and the way it has portrayed people with disabilities. For example, this article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph headlined: We’re an army of shirkers in NSW – disability pensions are a losing battle. The article implies that thousands of bludgers are rorting the disability pension. I responded to that article with my article Disability Slacker Pension on the Divine website,
It is such a pity that more stories about people with disabilities are not in the media. I remember the long campaign run by The Age in Victoria about people with disabilities before the NDIS came into being. I think those stories helped increase the pressure on politicians, and the desire of the general population, to do something about the lives of the 20 per cent of Australians with disability.
As it was, two of my better articles for the Wangaratta Chronicle were on disabilities. One story was about Dean Baer whose funding for autism had been cut by the NDIS. The other story was about a mother, Kristy McMahon, and how an organisation she works for, Country Hope, helps her daughter, Ella, who has bone cancer.
Science fiction and disabilities
Is science fiction as progressive as its readers think it is? I ask this question in regard to how people with disabilities are treated in science fiction novels. Are they enabled or disabled by the worlds created by science fiction authors? Does science fiction just think of disabilities as something to be fixed? Does science fiction ignore people with disabilities completely? I wrote an essay, The Future is Disabled, on this subject during my Bachelor of Arts in Internet Communications. The essay concentrates on science fiction novels and, among other novels, references The Ship who Sang.
© Copyright Graham Clements 2024