Tracey supports people with disability, advocates for change, creates art and is raising 2 teenage daughters. She is profoundly deaf and ‘unapologetically Tracey’.
‘I didn’t choose to be deaf, but it’s part of who I am, and I’m doing the best I can,’
Tracey reads lips. ‘My eyes are my window to the world,’ she says.
Her parents, Carol and Ed, helped her open that window at a time when families had little support and no clear path forward.
Tracey was born deaf in a small country town in 1977. There was no internet, little local support and no deaf adult to reassure her parents about what her future might hold.
Carol first noticed that baby Tracey did not react to sound. A local doctor dismissed her concerns, but a specialist later confirmed her instincts.
‘There was no help. Where do you go next?’ Tracey says. Not knowing where else to turn, her parents focused on spoken language and lipreading.
From age 3, Tracey travelled hundreds of kilometres from Benalla to a specialist school in Melbourne, where she learned to speak and lipread.
She wore large hearing aids connected to batteries. Carol made a special vest to hold the large batteries they needed. ‘Mum said I took to it like a duck to water.’
‘The school was an absolute godsend. To learn the letter P, we used mirrors and tissue paper so we could see and feel the puff of air as we made the sound.’
Lipreading became Tracey’s main way of following conversations. ‘It takes constant focus to lipread, I need to see a person’s face and can miss words if people turn away’.
When Tracey returned to Benalla to attend mainstream primary school, the experience was ‘horrific’. She sat at the front to read the teacher’s lips, but they weren’t always facing her when speaking.
Carol and Ed pushed for simple adjustments, such as teachers facing her and carpet squares that reduced classroom noise. ‘Tracey doesn’t have 3 heads,’ they told the school. ‘Just turn towards her so she can read your lips.’
Her parents kept those battles from Tracey. But they taught her to ask for what she needed and never let others decide what she could do.
‘I was already advocating for myself because there was no one else to do it for me,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t change that experience. I learned how to speak up.’
Nowadays, while technology and awareness has improved, Tracey says attitudes still create barriers. ‘People often assume they know what a deaf person needs,’ she says. ‘But everyone is different.’
Tracey uses humour to challenge those assumptions. When people ask where her accent is from, she names whichever country comes to mind. When a friend asked how she could drive, she joked, ‘I drive with my eyes and my hands on the steering wheel.’
She describes her life as a pizza. ‘When I was a little girl, being deaf felt like the whole pizza,’
‘Now it’s just one slice. Lipreading is part of that slice. The others are being a mother, daughter, worker, artist, social work graduate and advocate in my community. Together, they make up who I am.’
‘I wish a 50-year-old deaf person had said to me that life will get easier,’ Tracey says. ‘And I wish somebody had said that to my mum and dad, because they had nobody to turn to.’
Now Tracey shares her story so other deaf people and their families can find the words her family never did. ‘You can learn from a book or a website, but there is nothing more important than speaking to somebody who has gone through it.’