August 23 - 29, 2023
Dawn explores unheard voices in the community By CHLOE JAENICKE
DAWN Mauldon explored how language and social history can greatly inform who we are in her recently published book ‘Unheard Voices’. The book was released on August 1 and explored her life growing up with deaf parents as well as delving into her family history through comparing her own childhood to her mother’s. “I really just wanted to show the contrast in language and belonging between the first six years of my mother’s life and the first six years of my life,” she said. “I also wanted to explore how in the first six years of my mother’s life what a nurturing and loving and tactile mothering instinct she always had.” Ms Mauldon’s book has strong historical connections to the North East through exploring her mother’s childhood. “My grandfather and my great grandfather were some of the first settlers with the farmers out in Bobinawarrah,” she said. “They had the farms there, in Bobinawarrah and Wangaratta, like the Lloyd family farm where my mother grew up.” Ms Mauldon said the stories and anecdotes to write the book had always been there, and it was more of a matter of figuring out how to tell the story in a way that did it justice. “The book idea was always in the background of my teaching life, it waited patiently for me to have enough distance and opportunity to approach writing it, I just didn’t quite know how I’d go about that,” she said.
◆ EXPLORING LANGUAGE: In her book ‘Unheard Voices’, Dawn Mauldon explores how language differences impacts families and communities.
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