When words fail, fists fly and hearts break

He seemed an unremarkable man. I’d never noticed him, though we lived in the same town.

One day we met and he told me a secret. His words never quite left me, though it was almost 40 years ago.

He had attended a party with friends and neighbours and their children. The host arranged a game of pass-the-parcel, adults included.

“I tried to get out of the room, but my kids and everyone yelled that I had to stay,” said this man.

“When it came my turn I messed around, pretending I couldn’t unwrap the parcel, and tried to pass it on, but I was told I had to read out the note that was in the parcel.

“One of the blokes looks at me and says: ‘What’s wrong with you, you silly bugger. Can’t you read?’

“And I just snapped. Punched him in the face. Everything went mad. Blood spurting. Kids crying, people yelling. I can’t forget the look on my kids’ faces.

“I’ve never been so ashamed. My wife tells me I’ve gotta do something about my problem or it’ll be the end of us.

“So here I am.”

He had big hands. But punching anyone wasn’t in his nature, he said. He’d used his hands labouring hard to feed his family.

He wasn’t seeking help for violence. He’d come to learn to read and write.

Judy McGuinness of the Yes I Can Campaign runs an adult literacy class in Airds, NSW, in 2019.Credit: Kate Geraghty

I had come to write a story about a community literacy program for adults. Once I’d heard a few of the stories, I stayed to try to help out.

The stories were almost all about lifetimes of secrecy and shame buried beneath ingenious ways of concealing the lack of abilities that most of us take for granted.

A young man who worked at a hotel restaurant told of his job chalking up the menu.

The restaurant manager handed him a note each day listing the dishes on offer. But this young man couldn’t read the words. He had taught himself to “draw” the words on the blackboard, just as they appeared on the manager’s note, as if he were an artist forging a painting. Nobody, he claimed, knew he was illiterate. The stress of it had become too much to bear.

An older man had spent his working life with timber-cutting teams in the forests, as good a hiding place from a confusing world as he could find. He told me the team members took turns venturing from the forests and driving to town to do the fortnightly grocery shopping. A list of required supplies was compiled.

When it came time for his turn at the shopping, he contrived to get a mate to read the list out loud so he and the team could “check” that nothing was left out. And in this way, he committed the whole thing to memory, never forgetting so much as a bag of potatoes.

“I’ve got the best memory anyone could have,” he told me. There was both pride and ruefulness in it.

The mother of three small children said her greatest wish was to read storybooks to her children at night, and her greatest regret was that she could not. She listened as her husband read to the children and when it came her turn, she repeated the stories by heart, pretending to read.

She lived in terror that as her children grew, they would learn their mother was illiterate and become ashamed of her.

Most of those attending the community program had missed out on learning to read and write in quite unexceptional ways. Some had simply spent unhappy school days down the back of classrooms, overlooked by teachers because they were uninterested, or given to truancy, waiting until they could leave.

A couple were from families who drifted from one town to the next, never staying long enough for schooling to set in.

One or two were found to be afflicted with undiagnosed dyslexia, rendering them unable to make sense of the relationship between letters and words and speech sounds, stripping them of confidence.

None, it seemed, had enjoyed the pleasure of parents reading to them.

That brief period all those decades ago of trying to help adults understand that they could learn to read and write came back to me when it was announced, a couple of weeks ago, that the federal government was to launch a “foundation skills study” to find out, for starters, just how many Australians lack basic literacy, numeracy and digital skills.

The Minister for Skills and Training, Brendan O’Connor, said “around one in five Australian adults lack the basic literacy, numeracy and digital skills to participate fully in work and life”.

It was, he said, “a shocking statistic, particularly for a developed nation which should be doing better”.

Quite. Truth is, however, that the one in five figure is 10 years old, and is no better than the statistics of half a century ago.

Whatever this Foundation Skills Survey discovers is the figure now, governments and educators – and yes, parents – have a duty to move beyond statistics and employ the means and the will to help more Australians learn the basics.

And the emphasis should not simply be on job readiness, but on the dignity of living.

The alternative is to continue to consign too many good lives to secret, unnecessary humiliation and for some, an internal rage simmering.