deaf not silent examines seeing as hearing and brings together experiences of deaf and hearing in the CBD.
Become immersed in an alternative perception.
See the parallel worlds and listen.

When you watch these three women, what do you see? Who are they? What are they saying?

Anne, Scarlette and Gabrielle are communicating their experiences and feelings about their city in Auslan (Australian Sign Language).

Anne is a well-known member of the Melbourne Deaf community. Anne is Deaf, an excellent teacher and is quite partial to shopping.

Scarlette is a Hearing signer, but also a member of the Deaf community. Scarlette loves singing as well as signing and she can draw pretty well too.

Gabrielle is a Hearing signer, even though she wears hearing aids. Gabrielle loves reading, but really she prefers the waffles around the corner.

All three have an awareness of sound and silence, an awareness of language as another perception, an awareness shared by people who have knowledge of more than one language.

On any given day in the CBD, thousands of souls exist alone or in company, hearing with their own eyes. You are right now. How does the city make you feel? Do you feel differently about it in different languages? Do you understand what these women are saying?

Sign language is not universal. The signs that Anne, Scarlette and Gabrielle use to express their ideas are not the same as those used by a signer of Langue des Signes Française. Sign languages are not simply mime or gesture; they have evolved naturally within Deaf communities and have the same capacity for expression as spoken languages.

Deafness is not a disability. It is not a handicap, nor is it a pathological condition. Being Deaf is an identity with its own culture and language. In Australia, this language is Auslan.

Auslan was formally recognised by the Australian government in 1984, and there are approximately 6,500 severely and profoundly deaf Auslan signers (Johnston 2007: 11) . Deafness occurs in varying degrees, but the majority of people who lose their hearing as an adult through age or disease generally do not feel the need to learn Auslan, and so Auslan remains a defining characteristic of the Australian Deaf community.

However, only about 5-10% of the Deaf community are native signers who learn Auslan from Deaf parents (Johnston 2007: 29) . Most deaf people are of hearing families and learn to sign at school from children of Deaf families, or as adults who uncover an identity within the Deaf community, and most are Auslan-English bilinguals. Auslan is also widely used by hearing people such as interpreters and friends of the Deaf. As Trevor Johnston, an eminent sign linguist, notes:

The signing population, the signing deaf community and the deaf and hearing-impaired population are not identical. They do not map simply and neatly onto one another because not all deaf people use a signed language, not all users of a signed language are deaf, and not all signers participate in or identify with the Deaf community (Johnston 2007: 29).

While Auslan is the national language of the Australian Deaf community, and is officially the language of Deaf education, there is immense variation across Australia due to factors such as the effects of mainstream schools and oralism, the Catholic sign system, demographic isolation, bilingualism, home sign and English language contact.

The first recorded Deaf person to arrive in Australia from Britain was Betty Steele, a young female convict on board the Lady Julianna in 1790 (Branson 1995), and the first institutions for the education of the Deaf were established in 1860 (Toms-Bernal 1998: 5). Both institutions were the initiatives of two Deaf men, FJ Rose in Melbourne, and Thomas Pattison in Sydney, and both men were both highly educated and fluent signers who employed Deaf teachers at their schools. Sometime later, the Catholic Church also established several schools, based on Irish Sign Language. Despite this, the two-handed alphabet and the British Sign Language-based signs have always formed the basis of sign language in the Australian Deaf Community (Toms-Bernal 1998: 1).

A visual/manual language rather than an oral/aural language like English, Auslan has many features particular to many sign languages, and it is closest to British Sign Language and New Zealand Sign Language (Johnston 2003: 47). It is important to recognise that Auslan is not a manually coded system like Signed English or the Paget-Gorman System, which were artificially developed by Hearing professionals specifically for the use of educating Deaf children (Sutton-Spence 1999: 14).

Units of meaning in Auslan are different to English. Where English has its own individual phonology and syntax, Auslan does too. All Auslan signs have a specific handshape, orientation, location, movement and non-manual feature (Johnston 2007: 82). Non-manual features include facial expression, various body movements, eye gaze, role shift and non-English mouth patterns. The most important non-manual feature is facial expression. Auslan without facial expression is akin to English spoken without intonation. The two-handed alphabet is also important in Auslan. Just as humans, when reading, recognise patterns of letters as words, fluent signers recognise patterns of fingerspelling as units of meaning . Fingerspelling is not only utilised for spelling names and places, it has also evolved into individual vocabulary signs, and compounded with regular signs to create new signs (Toms-Bernal 1998: 28).

Auslan is an innovative, living language of Australia - a culture within a culture.

References:
1. Branson, J, & D.Miller, 1995, The Story of Betty Steele, Deafness Resources Australia Ltd, Petersham, NSW.
2. Johnston, T, 2003, BSL, Auslan and NZSL: Three Signed Languages or One? In A.Baker, B.Van den Bogaerde & O.Crasborn (eds.), 2003, Cross-Linguistic Perspectives in Sign Language Research: Selected Papers from TISLR 2000, Signum Verlag, Germany, pp 47-69.
3. Johnston and Schembri, 2007, Australian Sign Language: An Introduction to Australian Sign Language Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
4. Sutton-Spence, R., & B. Woll, 1999, The Linguistics of British Sign Language: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, UK.
5. Toms-Bernal, J, (1998), Sign Languages and Dictionaries: A Lexical Comparison Between Auslan and British Sign Language (BSL). Thesis submission for part of a Master of Sign Language, Graduate School of Education, Latrobe University, Bundoora.

Scarlette's Translation

There are some areas that I always come back to in the city, so some people may know me, but they don't know me personally. I feel it's important to be independent, strong and confident, but at the same time, it's easy to feel alone, a little bit scared. When I'm in the city, I can be fully independent at the same time as feeling really close to everyone in the crowd. It's comfortable. I can be fully connected to all these strangers whilst not knowing any of them, and still being separate. All these strangers are loud, and I'm quiet. They're all rushed, and I'm slow.

Anne's Translation

As I get closer to the city on the tram, the buildings are so much taller. There are so many shops, and people are buzzing around. Everyone's different - some are slow and a bit droopy, others just zoom around. I'm more of a stroller. I really like walking around all the shops, looking in the windows, taking it all in. When I go through Myer, my hair and skirt is lifted up by the air-conditioning, a little surprise amidst the civilisation. The shop ladies always offer me a spray of the latest perfume, but I politely decline. Still they offer, but still, I decline. When I've had enough of shopping, I'll go to the gardens for a while. The lights come on at nighttime, in all the trees they twinkle. I walk around and see ladies sitting elegantly with a hot drink, everyone is chatting and enjoying themselves. I love it.

Gabrielle's Translation

In the city, down Swanston Street, there's people everywhere. They're crazy busy. Everything is fast. It's loud, too loud, and sometimes when I'm alone I feel a bit worried and frustrated being there. It's like a window has closed on me, I can't make way through all the people. Sometimes I turn my hearing aids off. It's quiet. I feel calmer, the window opens and people move more easily. I move more easily.


Ben and Gab are greatly indebted to Anne Bremner and Scarlette Baccini for their contribution to deaf not silent.