Anne McDonald
Anne McDonald is an Australian author and an activist for the rights of people with communication disability.
Anne McDonald was born in Seymour, a small Australian town, in 1961. As a result of a birth injury she developed severe athetoid cerebral palsy. She was diagnosed as having severe intellectual disability and at the age of three was placed by her parents in St. Nicholas Hospital, Melbourne, a Health Commission (government) institution for people with severe disability, and lived there without education or therapy for eleven years. In 1977, when Anne was 16, Rosemary Crossley was able to establish communication with her through a method known as facilitated communication training.
Once Anne was able to make her wishes known she sought her discharge from St. Nicholas. Her parents and the hospital authorities denied her request on the grounds that the reality of her communication had not been established. In 1979, when Anne turned eighteen, she commenced a habeas corpus action in the Supreme Court of Victoria against the Health Commission in order to win the right to leave the institution. The court accepted that Anne McDonald’s communication was her own and allowed her to leave the hospital and live with Rosemary Crossley. More Supreme Court proceedings and further tests were required to win the right to manage her own financial affairs.
Anne wrote her story in Annie’s Coming Out, a book she co-authored with Rosemary Crossley in 1980 (the film Annie’s Coming Out based on the book won several Australian Film Institute awards and was released in the U.S. under the title Test of Love). The book has been translated into German and recorded on tape. It won the inaugural Allen Lane Award for the best book of the year dealing with disability.
After leaving the institution Anne got her HSC (University entrance) qualification at night school and went on to take a humanities degree at Deakin University, completed in 1993. She has written a number of articles and papers on disability, has spoken at a number of conferences, and has been active in the disability rights movement, with special emphasis on the right to communicate.
Bibliography
- Annie's Coming Out (Penguin Books, 1980) ISBN 0140056882
References
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