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Thank you, Alex, Ministers and guests.
I was a bit worried for a moment I might have had to burst into song there so I'm a bit relieved!
I would like to tell you how the captions have changed my life and other hearing impaired people
here in Canberra and around Australia.
As a child, my first experience of going to the theatre was the pantomime,
and I immediately loved it because the actors really encouraged you to be fully involved
and I just thought it was wonderful, as this little tot, trying to help Jack get up the beanstalk
and make sure that Prince Charles found Cinderella. It was real fun.
We had a great time.
And then a bit later on, my grandmother decided
that I should have a little more experience with the theatre
and I went to Gilbert and Sullivan, and of course I think my favourite was the 'Pirates of Penzance' and I loved Mabel.
I wanted to find the 'poor wandering one',
or maybe I would have preferred to be one of the little maids going to school.
Then in the '60s I sailed off to England and one of the girls that I was flatting with was Ann
and she was an actress, and she was actually a character actress
and she was very good but she didn't have the killer instinct, I suppose, to get to the top.
But she was very successful in Rep and we would often spend our weekends
enjoying the Rep around England, and I particularly liked Chesterfield,
and we actually went over to the Isle of Jersey to see her.
But when Ann was resting, she worked for the BBC
and we were able to get free tickets to various plays in the West End.
And I just was amazed by Sir Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness.
They just seemed to be able to sweep you up into their role, whatever they were playing.
And of course I went to Stratford on Avon and I think the highlight there was Eric Porter in King Lear.
That was actually Shakespeare absolutely at its best.
But, moving on, we came to live in Canberra, Haydn and I, and of course we enjoyed the theatre at the time,
especially the School of Arts Cafe, which was one of my specialties. I loved that!
But then one day, I went along to the Canberra Theatre and I was - it was a John Williamson play
and Jacki Weaver was in it, and in her character she had this rather high, wispy voice
and I thought, "Hmm, I don't seem to be able to hear this all that well".
And in her character, she had a lot of jokes and suddenly everyone around me was laughing
and I wasn't laughing and I got this feeling of absolute isolation,
with everyone enjoying themselves and I wasn't.
And this was the first time I really felt I wasn't really enjoying this.
I didn't really blame my hearing but when Haydn said, "Come on, let's go to the theatre",
I would say, "No, let's go to the art gallery" or "Maybe we'll go for a drive or a nice dinner at a quiet place".
So I was choosing visual things to hearing things.
And this actually continued on for 23 years.
So just to sort of put this in perspective, if you think of this theatre here,
if it was full of people who were 65 and over, a third of those people would have some form of hearing loss
and may choose not to come to the theatre.
But hearing loss is not just an isolated thing.
Your family and friends are also involved in this,
and if a family member who's got a hearing loss isn't going to come to the theatre,
maybe their family won't come either, like what happened to Haydn.
So that actually knocks out two-thirds of the audience here, which is a lot of people.
So how has the captioning rekindled my lifelong love of the theatre?
Well, I wear two hearing aids and people have said to me, "Well, why don't you turn them up if you can't hear?",
but it doesn't work like that because my hearing aids are tuned to speaking.
When I turn them up, actually things become a bit blurred, a bit too noisy.
What I need is clarity, and that's what these captions give to me.
I don't have to turn up my hearing aids.
I have clarity of what I'm hearing, a little prompt.
I also need to see people's faces mainly to really hear properly, and you'll often find in a play
they'll often start it off with someone being off-stage, that's really hard for me,
or they may be way up the back of the theatre, maybe not looking at me.
Again, for me normally that's hard but with the captions, I can capture every one of those words.
So the first play that I came to here in The Playhouse was 'Weary', about Weary Dunlop.
It was fantastic!
The captions were wonderful and I really enjoyed myself for the first time in a really long time.
I also love musicals but I often found as my hearing got worse, and even with hearing aids,
when the music started up, I couldn't hear the words so I would go along and hear the music
but I wasn't getting the full benefit.
So when 'Keating! ' came along, I thought, "Wow, this is great!".
So off we went with the captions, and of course bursting onto the stage and off they went,
and I could follow all the words.
I think the highlight for me was the love duet with Cheryl and Gareth.
I thought that was a real showstopper and I understood every word and I was laughing with everybody else.
Rapid speech can be difficult for me, so when the Bell Shakespeare Company bursts onto the stage
and they speak so rapidly with that energy, the captions are just fantastic.
And I've found as the performance went on
and we've actually gone through the ringer a bit with what they were doing,
I wasn't the only one looking at the captions.
Everyone around me were checking on the captions as they got a little tired and they were following on.
So the benefit of The Captioning Studio captions are, well, I've always enjoyed the plasma screen.
I find that really good to see.
And The Captioning Studio captions don't scroll.
I've been up to Sydney and everything and they sort of scroll up and I find that really irritating
and I find often - because it's sort of going up, going up, going up,
I often will miss what's actually being said and you get a bit behind.
But with Nari's, they just come down so I know I can just look to the end
and that's where I'm going to be able to see them and they're stable.
I like their font - nice and clear. Often it can be a bit wispy otherwise.
And the different colours she uses, like my hero might be blue and the cad might be red,
so if I miss one of them, I know what colour I have to actually look at, where they are on the screen.
And of course the Apps application is going to be wonderful because that means -
because I normally sit over here, that's my favourite spot, so I look at the captions and look on the stage,
but I'll be able to sit anywhere now and I look forward to being up there in the dress circle.
I think that will be really special.
And, of course, the beauty of now subscribing is when I was look through the program,
some of the things I've thought, "I'm not really sure about that, but there's captions, I'm going!".
And I have found many times that that play that I wasn't sure about has been the highlight of the whole season.
So I'm very rich now.
So just finally, I would particularly like to thank the Canberra Theatre
for enabling me to come back to enjoy the theatre
and, of course, I must thank The Captioning Studio because they have the best captioning in the world.
Thank you.