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BY CHLOE JAENICKE (NE MEDIA)
Dawn Mauldon explored how language and social history can greatly inform who we are in her recently published book ‘Unheard Voices’. The book was released on August 1 and explored her life growing up with deaf parents as well as delving into her family history through comparing her own childhood to her mother’s.
“I really just wanted to show the contrast in language and belonging between the first six years of my mother’s life and the first six years of my life,” she said. “I also wanted to explore how in the first six years of my mother’s life what a nurturing and loving and tactile mothering instinct she always had.”
Ms Mauldon’s book has strong historical connections to the North East through exploring her mother’s childhood.
“My grandfather and my great grandfather were some of the first settlers with the farmers out in Bobinawarrah,” she said. “They had the farms there, in Bobinawarrah and Wangaratta, like the Lloyd family farm where my mother grew up.”
Ms Mauldon said the stories and anecdotes to write the book had always been there, and it was more of a matter of figuring out how to tell the story in a way that did it justice. “The book idea was always in the background of my teaching life, it waited patiently for me to have enough distance and opportunity to approach writing it, I just didn’t quite know how I’d go about that,” she said.
How difference in language both when her mother is a child and now was heavily explored throughout the book, including how it was perceived both within the family and from the outside world. Through her mother’s childhood, Ms Mauldon wanted to explore what it was like for families and communities to have a child of difference in their midst who they didn’t share a language with.
“Particularly I wanted to explore how a mother is impacted when she is has no informational time to process the situation and how the guilt of sending the child away from Wangaratta to an institution never goes away from her and the loss for the child and their family,” she said. “This is contrasted through the lens of her own upbringing where Ms Mauldon showed how sign language was her first language and she shared that with her parents, and that has impacted who she is today.”
As well as this, she sought to show her audience that despite her parents being deaf, it wasn’t a hindrance to either herself or their parenting.
“Growing up people would say to me and my four siblings how lucky we were that we could hear, but in fact we were lucky that we had parents who were gentle, kind, funny, loving, brave, creative and open minded but they just happened to be deaf,” she said. “It gave me a strong sense of responsibility, creativity, adventure, storytelling and a fierce independence and often vulnerability as well.”
In the book she also made comparisons between the deaf and hearing world in how they cope with communicating with people who they don’t share a language with.
“I would like the readers to see how the deaf world had such a strong sense of belonging and that it was a very inclusive world it was the hearing world questioning and coming to terms with difference,” she said.
Ms Mauldon hoped that the book can resonate with a wide audience through exploring universal topics such as language, social history and expression.
“I suspect we’re all looking for our own words and voices and full expression and that is often found by reconnecting on how our past impacted our lives today and also people who are interested in social history of particular places and people,” she said.
Ms Mauldon aimed for her perspective in the book to give a new point of view on the deaf world.
“This book also offers an insight into deaf lives from my point of view and how it felt to cross between those worlds because there’s never been an intention to speak for the deaf but only as a lived experience,” she said.
Ms Mauldon will have local book launches at Wangaratta Library on October 12 and at Milawa Hall on October 14.