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The Truth About ‘The Thinker’… How Julian’s Sculpture is speaking for Australia’s Disability Community!!

Access, inclusion, diversity, disability rights… if you live with any form of disability you would probably be used to these terms floating around your existence almost on a daily basis. Also, amongst these terms you would probably be aware of the expectation that we, in the disability community, have to be thankful for the improvements that our society has made for disability rights in the recent decades. Although this is absolutely true, if you are anything like me, you would absolutely  understand that there are some parts of our Australian society that still need to improve on inclusion.

About sixteen years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Sculpture By The Sea with my family and some of our friends. Along with the many lame poses us teenagers did against the sculptures the one other thing which we all remember about this day is how inaccessible it was, especially as we really struggled getting down to some sculptures and I couldn’t access part of the circuit. This is why I was particularly intrigued when my friend Julian posted online that he was doing a campaign to make the Sculpture By The Sea exhibition more wheelchair accessible.

Being an amazing Architectural designer and former volunteer then employee at Sculpture By The Sea himself, Julian saw an opportunity for him to use these two things, as well as his experience of being a wheelchair user, to improve the access at the Sculpture By The Sea festival. As you would imagine, due to my pass experience I was completely intrigued when I saw that Julian was building a sculpture of a wheelchair user to enter into the competition. This was because I have been good friends with Julian for many years and knew how much of an amazing ambassador and an incredible person he is. 

As Julian explains in our video below, the original plan was to have a ramp going to the lower part of the exhibition. However, this was shockingly declined by the council. One of the reasons for this decision is the fear of wheelchairs being on the path in popular periods, increasing risks to able bodied people and wheelchair users. Personally, I feel that this reason automatically highlights how some people still think of us , wheelchair users, as not equal in our society and it seems like wheelchair access still isn’t class as a necessity.

Despite this setback, Julian decided to create a sculpture that represents this situation, along with the constant struggle of access that our community of wheelchair users have on a daily basis. He went straight to his computer and got to work designing ‘The Thinker’, a sculpture of a male wheelchair user in the famous ‘thinkers’ position, a reinterpretation of the famous Auguste Robin’s sculpture. Julian specifically designed this amazing piece of art to represent the constant process that wheelchair users need to go through in order to just simply access the community. 

From my perspective, I absolutely love that this representation is involved in our community, particularly in an event like Sculptures by The Sea. I feel that this is because a movement just like Julian’s will speak volumes in completely transforming the face of disability, access and inclusion within our Australian society. However we all know, trail blazers just like Julian can’t do this alone. So it’s us, who need to magnify this voice and find our own ways to contribute. It’s us who need to join this movement and make sure that the words of inclusion and access become an expectation in our society.