Sigrid Macdonald is a Deaf creative, accessibility advocate, and community worker with her own consultancy business based in the historic municipal building on Molesworth St. Sigrid met with Sara Browne to share her story, along with Auslan interpreter, Hilary McPherson. 

I grew up in the Northern Rivers, between Byron Bay and Newrybar so I have a pretty strong connection to the area. I went to Byron Bay Primary and High School and then after high school I moved to Brisbane briefly. I planned to study agricultural science and it didn’t work out.  

There were a lot of reasons why but mainly it was because the access at the university wasn’t set up before I arrived. By the time I was there it was very difficult trying to organize interpreters and note-takers. Very quickly I fell behind in the course. At school my parents and I also always had to endlessly advocate for interpreter access, it never was able to be taken for granted, but up until then I’d not had any periods where I didn’t have interpreters, thankfully. That’s so unusual in the Australian Deaf community! I didn’t stay in Brisbane for long, about two or three months, before I thought ‘this is not working’. 

I always had people in my family who gardened, my mum and my grandfather especially. Significantly my dad got back into farming when I was about 12. He grew up with cows and horses in Wilson’s Creek. We were living in Byron for my early childhood but then we moved to the farm in Newrybar and I really enjoyed that. I preferred that lifestyle. When I did work experience, I went to a place in western NSW called Eugowra which is near Forbes. It was quite a big property, sheep and mixed cropping. I always had this idea that I would work in agriculture somehow. The course was at University of Queensland so for most of my high school years I had that image in my head. I applied and got in, that was the plan. But plans don’t always work out. 

I have two younger brothers, one is two years younger and one is 12 years younger than me. Around the time we moved from Byron to Newrybar was when I had a very young baby brother. Life was good. I have lots of good memories with my brothers. 

I learned Auslan when I was very young. I was diagnosed as Deaf around nine months old and my family learned sign language straight away. All my family went along to classes at TAFE, my parents and my grandparents. They learned Signed English then. I always had connections to the Deaf community and I was exposed to Signed English and Auslan around the same time so I grew up with access to language and both ways of communicating. My family always instilled a sense of pride in me about Deafness.  

After university didn’t work out, I decided to come home. I moved into a flat here in Lismore with my partner at the time. I didn’t do anything for a few months, trying to work out what to do, where to go next. It was quite traumatic that the course didn’t work out. It wasn’t a nice experience, being thrown in the deep end. I’d been told that the access would all be sorted out but when I got there it wasn’t. And at the same time leaving home. So, when I came back, I was really disappointed.  

I was lucky that I had so many connections already in Lismore and a very good friend working at Southern Cross Uni who said to try the environmental science course. She helped me reach out to Southern Cross to see if I could get into that course before the end of the year. The plan was to do a few units then try to go back to Brisbane. But it turned out that I really loved the environmental science course. It reignited my connection with Lismore and I worked out that I didn’t want to leave. So, I stayed and finished the course there. 

Sigrid with friend Samantha who convinced her to go back to university

As it turned out when I finished that course, I was able to get a job back in Brisbane in the private sector with a small mining company as an environmental officer. 

I was still with my previous partner and we lived in Brisbane for about three years and when that relationship ended, that job ended as well. I moved into a flat in Brisbane and did some work as an Auslan Language Model (ALM) supporting students in the classroom who were Deaf. That gave me a bit of time to again rethink what was going to be happening with life.  

During that time, I reconnected with my now partner, who’d I’d known for more than 10 years, who was from Northern Rivers. After a few years we moved back here to Lismore because I’d found a job with what was then called the Northern Rivers Social Development Council. It’s now called Social Futures. I worked with a really cool program called Ability Links which was about connecting people in the community with each other in order to pursue goals and look at barriers and come up with creative solutions to challenges in life. I really loved that job. It made me realise that that’s what I really like doing - connecting people with each other.  

Around the time we moved back, we had our first child. We’ve now got three girls - Freya, Arwen and Elin. I feel so lucky to be raising children in the Northern Rivers. It feels right. I really put a lot of effort into making sure my children are known in the community, that they have support and a network around them. My parents are still here in Newrybar. My grandparents are still local. Barney’s family are all local as well, on his mum Hilary’s side, we’re good friends from way back. He has family in England who were able to come over when we had children. That was really lovely to meet Barney’s English family. 

For me, working at Ability Links was great because they had a recruitment policy right from the start that was about intentionally recruiting people with lived experience of disability or Deafness or mental health barriers, or neurodivergent. That meant the team always had up to half of our people with first hand lived experience and that was a new experience for me in a work environment, to have that level of lived experience in one team. It was fantastic. The whole team benefitted from that and we were able to draw from each other’s expertise and meet the community and meet participants where they were in life at the time. I formed such great friendships with people I respect so highly. I learned so much about working together as well, by the end was job-sharing the manager’s position. Co-managing was a really great experience in terms of workplace flexibility and accessibility.  

That made me realise how much I value that peer support model and the peer way of working with the community. It was a state government funded program that was defunded. I knew that I wanted to keep doing that kind work in that way, connecting with community and offering services. I had already been doing tours at the gallery for Deaf people to come along and learn about that art. They were the first regular tours for Auslan users in regional NSW. I kept doing that and built on it and then set up Second Nature Strategies.  

The aim of the business is to make inclusion second nature. So I work with local organisations who are looking at their own practices and how they can better offer their services or products to more of the community or all of the community. Primarily it’s a consultancy business. It’s just me, I’m a sole trader at the moment. I have a pretty good support team around me that contribute in lots of different ways. It helps that I’m able to put things in place to make my job inclusive for myself! I share an office and collaborate a lot with Hilary, she’s also an Auslan Interpreter, here in the old municipal building. They’re beautiful rooms. It gives us somewhere to work but it’s also a really nice meeting place to meet with clients.  

The great thing about this building is that it’s accessible which is quite tricky to find. It’s an old building but it has the ramp outside, it’s got really wide hallways, an accessible bathroom. The museum upstairs has had a lift installed which is good. 

When you look at the census data it shows that for people using sign language per capita, Lismore, by far, has the highest ratio of sign language users in the population.  

There are a few things that led to that. Here we have had the Deaf unit at Lismore Public School. There is a pretty good cohort of people working to provide access for Deaf people. There was a group of interpreters in Lismore who really set up the country’s first formal interpreting network. TAFE has also had the Auslan course running for a long time. Over the years there’s been a lot of movers and shakers I guess in the Deaf community in the Northern Rivers. 

Through the 80’s and 90’s we also had a lot of Deaf people, as well as interpreters, that formed the Deaf Community Association. That was kind of the first independent organization in Australia, perhaps another in WA. There’s always been people here putting a lot of effort into keeping our Deaf community safe and alive and thriving. 

NORPA, Arts Northern Rivers, the Lismore Regional Gallery, Elevator gallery are examples of some of my clients who are looking at ways to engage with the wider community, particularly around access. I also work with organizations not necessarily in the arts.  

I haven’t really talked much about how passionate I am about the arts. It’s always been part of my life so it’s really nice to have fallen back into the arts with my access consulting. It’s very fulfilling. I recently curated Face Me: The Art Of Deafhood at the gallery which was a way to connect Deaf artists with their contemporaries as well as the community here. It was really well received.  

All of my family enjoy and appreciate and engage with the arts in some way. Growing up I learned that art was important and certainly my parents now, they love having art around them. They collect art. 

When I’m not working, I’m with my three children, they are six, four and one. Although they’re pretty notorious for coming to work with me as babies! I’ve been getting back to my gardening now which is lovely. It’s been pretty consistent throughout my life that I come back to gardening, I guess that’s my environmental connection.  

Sigrid on the job as tour guide at Lismore Regional Gallery

Of course I’ve experienced prejudice, I don’t know a Deaf person that hasn’t experienced that. It’s a big part of the motivation behind the work that I do. It’s driven by the fact that Deaf people don’t get to access all of the opportunities that the wider community do. That’s what needs to be looked at and changed. It just so happens that I’m often doing that in an arts related field. We find that the arts is a really good way to connect the two worlds and to communicate ideas about how the community can be more welcoming and accepting of Deaf people. My partner is Deaf as well so we share that experience and passion around access. 

My partner also works in access. He works in live captioning, providing transcripts and live captions for university students or online webinars and things like that. So it’s a big part of our family life as well. He’s also a blacksmith and knife maker, he started up the Northern Rivers knife making group. He wanted to explore his practice a bit more and started learning those old skills that sometimes get a bit forgotten. He’s found a common interest in the community but they haven’t been able to meet as much because of covid. They’ve got a strong online supportive connection. At home he works in the shed on various projects so there is a lot of creative elements in home life as well. My kids are always at the gallery and they get into the creative programming that happens around Lismore. 

My own creative practice is pretty varied but painting is probably my longest running creative endeavour. I do come back and forth. I’ve also created digital work and botanical art as well. I also collaborate with other artists looking to create work that can be enjoyed by a wide audience by making it accessible.  

When I’ve travelled around, I’ve never felt that same kind of connection as I feel here in Lismore. Even though I grew up in Byron and Newrybar, I really feel like Lismore and surrounds is home. I haven’t travelled overseas yet. I have so many future plans. I really want to continue to see my community embrace the Deaf community here. We have such a long and vibrant history but it’s largely hidden from the wider community. One of my goals would be to highlight that and bring it to the surface more, working with the whole community to understand Deaf culture and learn to love that for what it is.