Dr Mark Bagshaw is Deputy President of the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and writes here about his experience of living and working in Australia with a disability.
Author: Dr Mark Bagshaw
Mark looks back over his life and looks forward to positive change for people with disabilities in Australia. This is a moving and powerful reflection of the meaning of disability. Mark describes how he and his peers must make full use of their Life Toolkit in order to live full lives in a society that has often failed to make it easy for them to participate. Yet he shows that these efforts lead to positive change and personal development.
As Mark puts it:
There are only two resources at our disposal that we can use to create and run the society and environment in which we live – the finite raw materials of our beautiful planet, and the infinite resource of the human mind and spirit. Many would argue we have been overusing the former since the Industrial Revolution, and underutilising the latter.
People with disabilities know more than most what it takes for us to live a life of meaning and to make full use of the human mind and spirit.
The publisher is Dr Mark Bagshaw.
Life on the Back Roads © Mark Bagshaw 2015.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.
community, disability, faith & creativity, Australia, Paper
