Scientists have found genetic markers in a network of genes that allow them to identify up to 85% of one year olds who are predisposed to developing autism. These are GENES, so we’re talking about what these kids were born with. Read the rest of this entry »

Something vaguely resembling Ruth emerged in the doorway as if from nowhere and held out a five dollar note. Her face looked like one of those patchy dogs with shades of grey and brown where the punches had hit. ‘Go down to Mings and get me a packet of Kool, you hear me. Here, take this, now bring me my fags, Kool, a packet of Kool. What’d I say?’. ‘Kool’, I said to myself, fresh is the flavor of Alpine, this is Marlborough Country, Benson and Hedges, when only the best will do, and isn’t that all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

The mashed potato of the school day was over with again as the sensations of the day crashed down on me step by step along the path all the way home. Didn’t need a brain because my feet knew where they were going. Passed by the big expanse of beige. The older kids, big vinyl bags slung over shoulders, interactive sounds of challenge and bravado as they poured out of the technical college a few doors down from my junior school and spewed out into the street, onto my footpath.
I kept walking, shoes off, straps of my sandals in hand, the heat of the path causing a burning sensation as sun kissed the soles of my feet via the footpath. I stepped a while on the sun dried scratchy beige that was meant to be grass but was well over due for a drink and I busted for a Sunny Boy, cold frozen orange ice popping from the top of one of those pyramid shaped packages and turning my mouth orange, not to mention what it probably did to my brain. But I didn’t have one.
Across the tarmac, black sticky goob tar latching onto my eight year old feet like fly paper. My feet quickened across the surface, hopping up onto the semi-grass nature strip, shoes still swinging on fingers, prickly bindis spiking my feet from the dead old grass, sun crisping me, beckoning yet more freckles and turning my white body a progressively raw shade of pink. I squinted, still catching roses in my nostrils, trim lines of flower beds in front gardens numbers sixty-three, forty-seven, seventeen.
At the corner a tram rumbled by on a rattling straight line to mysterious places unknown out there in the disappearing distance of the hazy city center with its towering buildings. Around the corner, press the button, and press, and press and and and and presssssssssss. The lights spoke back changing from green to red and I crossed in between the movement of cars, standing in the spaces, navigating my maze, car horns filling the space between my ears. Past the motorcycle shop with its glossy lickable metalica and painted handwriting that glided like a dream over rounded surfaces hugging shiny silver metal.
Ming Wah, Cafe Milk Bar. I could read words and make the sounds to them and this one felt good in my mouth and rang softly in my ears with poetry. Ming Wah, Cafe Milk Bar. It had timing and rhythm and rhyme. And it smelled strange. And it was dim and beckoning with its checkerboard floor and red tassel things hanging from the ceiling, little pictures all around and gold plastic with scrolled shapes curling. Ming Wah, Cafe Milk Bar. It had allure.

Donna Williams, BA Hons, Dip Ed.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.
http://www.donnawilliams.net

I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Owners of this country throughout Australia, and their connection to land and community.

The clock in the hall struck five o’clock on a summer afternoon 1972, a Friday. My skinny pale legs ran around the billiard table chanting ‘oh my hairy Godfather’ from the Jackson Five cartoon from last week, poking out and putting back the net pockets at the corners, at the sides, in turn as I
passed. It would make the world tick and all would be well. Read the rest of this entry »

The numbers on the clock radio read 8.29pm when the first in a stream of tonight’s doorbell chimes sounded in the cacophony of sixties rock and seventies kitsch spinning black and vinyl on the record player. Read the rest of this entry »

Sense of thirst and hunger are so taken for granted by most people that its hard to work out how we actually develop these things. Of course we have to have the neurology that makes that possible, primarily things like hypothalmus function which drives the messages and urges to drink or eat, but also perhaps the cerebellum which takes those messages and helps us to process them for meaning. But sense of thirst and hunger can also be a cognitive function, part of an information processing capacity, part of a developmental disability or part of a missed step in early neurological, behavioural, social emotional and communication patterning. My sense of thirst and hunger have probably been gone a long long time, but to understand where they went I have to look at what opportunities they have to develop in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

I was asked to write some words of encouragement to a group of functionally non verbal teens with autism who use their typed communication in their work on a wonderful monthly newsletter produced by a group in Arizona called ACT. This is what I wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

ALIEN EXPERIENCE

Bored that I am with my boring little world
If I created fantasticorium, a little less snorelorium
I might have met with the creatures from another galaxy
and because I was so important and so interesting,
they beamed me up, abducting me
and their space ship was amazing, more than you will ever know
for only I was to be taken where the special people go.
But when I got to the door of the spaceship I was made to step aside
For the door was too small for my head, so I couldn’t get inside.

by Donna Williams
http://www.donnawilliams.net/weirdoslikeme.0.html

Most people associated with the autism rights or autistic cultural movements have no idea what it was like at the start…

Jim Sinclair reminds us:
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The movement and travel and physicality of sound was experienced as textures and movement, and in the painting the characters simply give the context…. I love sound, as a muso, singer, but equally spent my first 10 years 90% meaning deaf… so sound was purely patterns, movement, variations… later it had pragmatic purpose, associated meanings… but I’m blessed to have known both planets and this pic captures that journey for me. Read the rest of this entry »