Australians at work: Brett Morris, the volunteer
A football tackle, life in a wheelchair — then what? Brett Morris still has his dreams, and a job he never thought possible.
There are no wheelchairs in Brett Morris’s dreams, no disabilities. He can’t make sense of why his vivid dreams refuse to recognise his reality. His night-time dream self stands six feet tall. He’s strong and lean and sprints across football fields, bounds across white-sand Gold Coast beaches, dives into deep blue ocean waters and swims, swims, swims with powerful arms and legs towards a dream horizon that can never be reached before his waking life eyes open at 6.15am.
He sees his feet at the end of an electric bed, wrapped in soft cushion moon boots to protect his heels and ankles from bedsores. His feet remind him he has been a quadriplegic for the past 26 of his 47 years on Earth. It is in this still moment that he makes the first and most important choice of his day: to go to work.
There is a mobile phone beside his bed and he can use it because he has limited movement in his arms. He could, if he made the choice, call his boss at Gold Coast Airport where he works two jobs — part-time volunteer information officer, part-time human relations officer — and explain that, on this particular morning, he’s not willing to endure the modesty-erasing, pride-destroying three-hour physical siege that is simply leaving home.
He chooses work. And this is how he gets to it. He has five regular carers — Laura, Kim, Emma, Dianne and Janelle — working on rotational shifts. This morning Emma enters his ground floor unit on Boyd St, Tweed Heads, at 6.30 and slides open the curtains, letting yellow light hit Brett’s framed pictures of breaking ocean waves. There’s a sign he picked up in Venice Beach, California: “To The Beach”.
“Afghanistan?” asked the sympathetic souls who’d shout him beers in the bars of LA.
“Nah, mate,” Brett was quick to clarify. “Got hurt playin’ footy in Australia.”
Emma signs and dates a log book at a table in the living room. She fixes Brett a green tea and a glass of water, puts a load of washing in the machine. With a mobile hoist she transfers Brett to a shower chair in the bathroom next to his bedroom. He fits himself with a lubricated self-catheterising system. “K-Y Jelly on the end and insert,” he says, nonchalantly. He washes his own hair. Emma brushes his teeth and applies shaving cream to his neck and cheeks so he can shave his own face. She checks his body for bedsores and washes him with soap and an exfoliating glove. She dries him, rubs sunscreen into his face and arms, rubs deodorant under his armpits; a couple of splashes of aftershave around his neck. She hoists him from the shower chair back to the bed, wipes the shower chair down. She rubs vitamin E cream over dry skin areas and dresses Brett in his Gold Coast Airport volunteer business shirt and pants, polished black leather shoes.
More than four million people in Australia are living with a disability, some 2.1 million of them of working age. A little more than one million of these people are employed and another 114,900 are looking for work.
The key to all this morning movement between Brett and Emma, all these small means to small ends, is patience. Patience comes from empathy. Empathy comes from decency and decency comes from wherever you can find it. One step up the carer’s emotional ladder from patience is grace and Emma has it in spades. She hoists Brett from the bed to his electric wheelchair, returns the hoist to the bathroom. She makes Brett an omelette he eats with a metal fork that he grips by putting his thumb through a ring welded to the fork’s handle.
Brett’s been in this unit for 17 years. It wasn’t built to accommodate his needs: not enough wheelchair space in the kitchen; some drawers too low, some handles too high. But he loves the place. This place is independence. He loads a backpack with a non-slip portable tray table, a fork and spoon, a hat and sunglasses; finds his airport security pass lanyard. He checks his emails on a laptop. Emma cleans the benches, washes and dries the dishes, hangs the washing, empties the kitchen bin and says goodbye to Brett with a gentle hand on his right shoulder.
At 9.32am — more than three exhausting hours after waking — Brett Morris wheels out through his electric sliding front door, which locks behind him. “Right,” he says, full morning sun flooding his face. “Off to work.”
It was an ordinary tackle. No malice in it. Nothing outside the rules of rugby league. One defender around his legs, one up around his spine. Brett was 21 and strong, second row for the Dalby rep side in Queensland’s lush Darling Downs. He was a full-time baker. He had a girl, maybe the love of his life. Three straight years of young love that was going places; around the world if he could save enough bucks.
“Straight away, I knew I was gone,” he says.
He was lying flat on the football field and all he could sense was his face surrounded by blackness. Everywhere black, like he was floating in it, and the only thing that was rising out of the black was his chin, cheeks, nose and eyes that could not place in the dark void the voices that were calling his name.
On the street outside his unit, Brett wheels to the edge of the road, waiting for a gap in traffic. His life is a series of smooth kerb entry points. The number of these in any city across the world is a sign of how much that city cares for the disabled. A car stops for him on the left, another on the right. He nods gratefully and powers the wheelchair across the road. “It’s 200m to the next crossing so I always cross here,” he says. “Sometimes nobody stops for you and that’s fine. I don’t expect any special privilege.” He heads north up Boyd St, following the salt air smell of Coolangatta Beach.
His pre-teen years were spent 15 minutes’ drive from here in Palm Beach, where his parents, Deanna and John Morris, ran a beachside caravan park. He was the eldest of four kids. A beach rat who considered school a temporary pause between morning and afternoon swims. Water was life. Water was freedom. The family moved to Dalby when he was 11. Deanna ran a local tennis school and Brett played squash, tennis, indoor cricket, rugby league into adulthood, between part-time jobs working heavy tools on cotton farms and moving through slop at the local piggery.
Brett turns right into Florence St, going where the kerb entry points are. Left into Wharf St, passing a shop selling electric wheelchairs.
He remembers waking up in Princess Alexandra hospital after the accident with his head fixed in a brace. He’d been transported from Dalby via helicopter. He’d suffered breaks in the C5-C6 segment of his spine. He was paralysed from the neck down. His first question wasn’t about his chances of walking again. He asked the attending specialist if he would be able to make love to his girlfriend.
Turning left into Bay St, Brett passes a cafe where two old men sip coffee outside. “You’re not speeding again are ya, Brett?” asks one of the men. “Not today,” Brett winks.
He lay in intensive care for three months. “Then they get you into this big wheelchair with a high back support and this is the first time you’re sitting in a wheelchair,” Brett says. “And you’re in this wheelchair for 10 hours a day, stationary, just sitting there because your body is getting used to a life in a wheelchair.” Brett’s mind would drift back to all the times in his life when fate might have said he should have ended up in a wheelchair. “I was always diving off bridges,” he says. “Jumping into gorges. I remembered the time I skied through mud while being towed by a LandCruiser. A lot of stuff. You think about all that.”
After almost four months, a small miracle. Some feeling returned, enough small movement in his arms to enable him to hold down a job, unlike so many of the quadriplegic friends he meets at weekly physio. He can feel the urge to urinate. He can be aroused by touch. “Anything above where my break is has become extremely sensitive. Touch is good around the ears, neck, face and head. That alone can nearly drive me to climax. It’s weird. It comes down to touch; just kissing and hugging, they’re the big ones. The real basic stuff.”
There’s a traffic jam at the entry to the Tweed Mall off Wharf St. Too many cars and too much gotta-get-to-work urgency. Horns honk, tyres screech. A car pulls out of a lane unexpectedly and a delivery vehicle swerves to avoid it. Both cars stop. The delivery driver barks out his window Faarkin’ this, faarkin’ that, then speeds off. The recipient of the abuse slams the accelerator pedal aggressively, in hot pursuit of the van. Brett turns back to the footpath, rolls on quietly. “Perspective, huh,” he says. “It makes me laugh. I see that all the time when I’m going to work.”
The things we bitch about. Traffic. Bad coffee. Poor wi-fi. Kid didn’t make the A-grade cricket team. Some days in the airport volunteer job, Brett will assist people who are late for their flights, have lost their luggage. “You see them losing their crap over this stuff,” he says. He helps them find the lost luggage desk, fast-tracks them through queues, and feels them calming in his presence. Hard to stay bummed about arriving in Bali six hours behind schedule when that quadriplegic in the wheelchair back at the airport seemed so damned chipper.
Brett rolls past The Coolangatta Hotel onto a pedestrian crossing leading to the shared-use path snaking along Coolangatta Beach. All these tanned and glorious able bodies. Young surfers with boards under their arms. Couples walking hand-in-hand. Skateboarders zooming past Brett’s wheelchair. Dogs on leashes pulling their owners on. Perspective is able bodies on Segway scooters. Perspective is being envious of an ibis walking freely in circles around a Big Mac box.
He wheels to the edge of the beach — as far as he can go before the sand threatens the wiring in his wheelchair. He does this every morning. He pauses, studies the blue water and pictures the same man he sees in his dreams, bodysurfing the waves that crash in the same wild formations he has tattooed across his right forearm. Just that one view of the ocean justifies his three-hour slog to exit his home. He has to get up. He has to get outside. He can’t stay in bed. He can’t go back to The Slump.
The hard part for Brett was how magnificent humans were, the sheer size of the hearts inside the people surrounding him. People had so much care and compassion in them that he struggled to comprehend it. People were so beautiful that it hurt. “People want to help you so much that you let them do it,” Brett says. “Getting people to always do stuff for you is a no-no. I [used to] let everybody do everything for me. And I got lazy.”
His mum Deanna stepped up after the accident. She travelled four hours every day from Dalby to Brisbane to sit beside Brett in hospital. She and John found a place at Banora Point in the Tweed Shire and moved Brett in. For 10 years, Deanna was Brett’s full-time carer. She did the early years without a hoist, heaving her son onto beds, into showers, into vehicles, with brute strength and the power of will, love and a mother’s worry.
“Caring is not an easy job,” Brett says. “You’re cleaning up people’s body fluids, you’re cooking, you’re hoisting, you’re manually handling them. It’s a hard job and a lot of people are doing it for nothing, just for their family members, and a lot of people aren’t getting any support. Mum did it all by herself for 10 years until I had to tell her the toughest thing I’ve ever told her.”
He told her to stop. He was deep in The Slump. That’s what he calls the period of his life from the age of 27 to 30. The Slump was no activity. The Slump was eating, sleeping, watching movies on TV and never moving from a living room recliner. The Slump was rarely seeing the ocean. The Slump was cigarettes and too much booze. “I was getting people to do the shopping for me. I was getting people to do my catheter.” His mum was losing weight with work and worry. “I needed her to live her life,” he says. “And I needed to get my life back. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I had to say, ‘Mum, I don’t need you to look after me anymore’. It felt like I broke her heart.”
He applied for the unit in Boyd St. He applied for carers. New Zealand-born Laura Godinet became his primary carer. “Best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “She showed me a different way to live. I was taking pills for muscle spasms. I was on pills for sleeping. I was on tablets in the morning and the night. Then Laura got me onto natural vitamins, exercise, reiki, acupuncture. She just gave me one big kick up the arse. I fought her on everything. ‘I can’t do that, I can’t do this’. Everything I told her I could never do, I have done.”
Work was one of those things. “That three hours this morning, that’s every morning,” he says. “To me, it seemed like too much hassle. That’s three hours where I could just sit there and watch television.”
Two years ago, Laura saw an ad for a Gold Coast tourism information officer. Brett phoned up. That job was long gone, but there was a volunteer position going at Gold Coast Airport. It involved greeting people in the airport, helping them out, informing them. “I don’t say ‘never’ anymore,” he says. “There’s always a way to do it.”
Late last year, Brett landed his first paid job in 26 years, joining Airport Retail Enterprises, which runs the airport’s food and beverage businesses, in a human relations role. It’s his job to familiarise new employees with airport security, geography, workplace health and safety, where they need to be, how they need to do things. He can’t remember being this content. And he knows it all started from that choice to let his mum live her life.
“But here’s the thing about that,” Brett says, stopping on a pedestrian bridge that curves towards the airport. The strangest thing. Deanna was free to enjoy the later years of her life. She knew her son was going to be OK. He had found his independence and she was free to care for herself. “Cancer,” he says. “About six months ago. She’s in palliative care. She’s got it in her bones and blood. She deserved the best life. She got me to where I am now. She’s done everything for me and she’s finally free to live her life and what happens?” His neck moves well enough to shake his head. “I don’t understand that,” he says.
The final stretch of his long wheel to work is a shortcut through the Southern Cross University, Gold Coast campus. He wheels past the main building where students shuffle between lecture rooms, folders under their arms, backpacks over their shoulders, long lives ahead of them. The girlfriend he had during the accident was 19 at the time. She wanted to go to university. “I loved her,” he says. “But that’s too much for her to take on at 19. That’s totally understandable. She had her whole life ahead of her.” She had plans, she had dreams.
It’s been four hours and 20 minutes since Brett Morris woke up from his. He doesn’t know exactly what his able-bodied dreams are trying to say to him. He thinks about them often. He thinks about them when he’s at physio and his legs are fixed in a special brace that allows him to stand up, maybe his single favourite moment in any week.
He wheels into the airport car park. “I’ll tell you how I choose to see those dreams,” he says. “That’s the brain telling me it’s all still out there for me.”
He takes a left towards the terminal’s sliding entry doors, lets the airconditioning cool a body that’s been hoisted and rolled and turned and prodded and squeezed and wheeled for 90 minutes beneath a relentless sun. “Hey, Brett,” says a colleague at the visitor information desk.
“G’day,” Brett smiles, settling in for another day at work.
Next week: the stay-at-home mum
Previously:
Australians at work: Jodi Allen, criminal lawyer
Officer in charge: Ian Park, Fortitude Valley police station