Dolly

‘I took a flight [between cities] and they left me on the plane … They actually only discovered I was on the plane because the cleaners got on and wanted to clean the flight for the next sector.’

Dolly is in her 40s, has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair.

‘I have learnt to accept it, and this has come a lot from my partner,’ Dolly told the Royal Commission. ‘When I met him I hated myself, I hated my life, I hated my disability … If someone picked on me I’d just take it … I wouldn’t tell people to eff off when necessary. Without him I wouldn’t be the person I am now.’

Dolly’s partner died several years ago.

‘I miss him every day.’

When she was a child, Dolly’s mother insisted she attend a mainstream school.

‘She had piles and piles of letters between her and the education department fighting to get me into a proper school as opposed to a school for handicapped children … She fought tooth and nail.’

Dolly said a lot of kids bullied her.

‘Practically every day I either had my equipment taken away from me because kids thought it was funny or I was left out of activities because teachers didn’t know how to handle me. I was just picked on constantly.’

Dolly later, as an adult, contacted some of the people she went to school with.

‘A lot of them have apologised and realised that they were totally stupid at the time and, you know, that’s fine. I mean it’s water under the bridge and so that’s okay, but at the time it was dreadful.’

Dolly now works in administration, where she said her main hurdle is the job interview.

‘I’ll turn up for the interview and all they do is look at the chair. They don’t look at me. And they either see me as a burden because they’ll have to make access changes to the workplace, or they see me as a cash cow because they get money from the government to have me as an employee. But either way I don’t get the job.’

Recently, however, she had a promising interview for a customer service job.

‘I mean it’s obvious that I’m in the chair and they’re curious about how it affected my daily life, [but] they didn’t make a big fuss of it. And they were more interested in me and my experiences, my qualifications, what I could do for them, what I could bring to the job … I just came out of there having one of these experiences where I just knew it was good.’

Dolly is supported by the NDIS. She managed her own plan for the first year, but said a plan manager took over the next year, against her wishes.

‘I’ve vehemently tried to get myself back to self-managed. They won’t do it … it’s a great struggle, you know? They don’t listen. I don’t feel that they do what I want. I don’t feel that my needs are taken into consideration.’

Dolly also told the Royal Commission that while the community is becoming more accessible to people with wheelchairs, ‘the world has a long way to go’.

For example, there’s a shortage of wheelchair-accessible taxis and disability-trained taxi drivers.

‘I have been thrown out of my chair so many times by inept drivers and have to ask for assistance from passing footpath people because the drivers have no idea. And they drive off,’ Dolly told the Royal Commission.

‘[But] I had a very lovely experience last week. I was in a cafe and a lady was sitting across from me with a toddler, would have been two, three maybe and a lovely looking little girl. And she kept staring at me and I’m thinking, okay. And then she suddenly said, “Mummy, she’s got red hair.” And so, of course, she had to toddle over to me and investigate my red hair … I mean, they have to learn somehow.’