Disabled people are not there to inspire other people; they are who they are, Dan Buckingham tells Michele Hewitson.
Dan Buckingham, chief executive of Able – the production company that creates audio descriptions making “the visual verbal” for the visually impaired, former Wheel Blacks star, telly presenter for the Paralympics and celebrity speaker – was at the beach recently. “Which is challenging. Two things I loved before my injury: sand and snow. So, getting up the mountain and coming off the beach … wheelchairs are just difficult to get through in those environments.”
Almost everything that is written about him begins with the details of his injury, which you can see might get a bit tedious. So let’s tai ho, eh? Instead, here he is at the beach with his wife, Samantha, and their two young children, Etta and Louis, having a nice normal family day out. He sees a geezer looking at him while he’s making his way through the soft sand. He knows that look. “You know, sometimes I can feel it before it happens. Someone coming to give me help.”
The man comes back and tries to help a third, then fourth time. This is tricky, of course. Nobody wants to live in a world where people are not kind and don’t want to help people they think might need help. He knows that; we all do. But you know what? You can be disabled and nimbly able.
He says, carefully, that after 25 years of being in a wheelchair he can get a bit “agitated”. He has thought about this a lot, because he is thoughtful and nobody enjoys getting agitated. He talked about the beach incident with Samantha: “Like, what is it? I just thought, what is it? What’s a good approach? He goes away feeling like shit. I come away feeling like shit. The kids have come away having just seen something they don’t quite understand. So, I think that after 25 years, I’m still figuring out the best way to navigate these so-called social situations.”
We all have difficulty navigating social situations, don’t we? “That’s a good point. I think with disability, there’s a lot of things you can zero in on, but to a large degree, it’s just life, it’s work, it’s holding a relationship – they’re all things that everyone navigates. It’s just maybe heightened with a disability.”
He met Samantha, a voice artist, when they were both working in the telly industry. It’s fair to say he pursued her. It’s fair to say he is an accomplished pursuer, of a future wife as well as the things he sets his sights on. An outfit called Attitude Pictures was making a doco about the Wheel Blacks. He’s a chancer. He asked for a job. By 2019, he was CEO.
He was part of the Wheel Blacks team that won gold at the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games. He captained the team from 2007-13, then again in 2015-16. At the Beijing Paralympics in 2008, they placed fifth, and, he has said, went from being lauded and “treated like heroes” to having their funding cut and being treated like losers. He is not one to sit about feeling like a loser.
He has always been competitive. He likes structure and process. But he is nothing if not adaptable. “I’ve got two kids. One is 5 and one is 2½, so I’ve had to embrace the joys of the unstructured.”
This farming life
He grew up on a 405ha sheep and beef farm in the Catlins, where the weather comes in straight off the Southern Ocean. It is wild and wildly beautiful. You have to be resilient to farm in the Catlins. He loved it and loves it still. He thought he might take over the farm from his parents after he’d gone to university (he planned to become a surveyor) and been backpacking around Europe.
The farming life is tough and rewarding at the same time. Though he didn’t take over the farm, he thinks it was a good grounding for his future. “Just from being from a farm and seeing how hard they [his parents] both worked to set up a good future for me and my brother and sister, something that’s passed along.” So he learnt resilience from his family and his environment.
He was raised a Catholic and went to St Kevin’s College in Ōamaru as a boarder, then, for his final years of secondary school, to Verdon College in Invercargill, where he was captain of the first XV.
He describes himself now as “a non-practising Catholic”. He thinks the “cultural part of being a Catholic” is what remains for him. “So, I’d say it’s part of me but not a part I necessarily identify with.” As for God: “It’s beyond our level of knowing what’s beyond and the big great reasons for all things. I’m sort of struggling for the word that I feel. But I’ve given that up to knowing that I’ll never know and I’m more inclined to just be.”
He is not a navel-gazer. “I don’t think wondering is a big part of my personality. I don’t sit there and look at the stars and wonder too much. There’s so much unknown and we never will [know].”
He used to dream he was walking. “I think that often when I dream, when I’m walking, there’s always a catch to it. I’ve got my wheelchair with me and I’m happy to push my wheelchair. I’m kind of surprised that I’m walking, right?”
He seldom remembers his dreams now. He just collapses into bed “and some sort of blackout period”.
His Celebrity Speakers page says: “Dan uses a wheelchair but he is a far cry from the cliché inspirational speaker who lives with disability.” But what does that actually mean? He refers to a TED Talk by the late Australian writer and comedian Stella Young, who was also disabled and used a wheelchair. Her talk is about “inspiration porn”, and the ways people with disabilities are portrayed as objects of inspiration.
It’s the “super-crip” model, he says. “What’s that terrible quote? ‘The only disability is a bad vibe.’ You can show someone with a prosthetic doing something amazing. It’s like they’re using it to inspire whatever it is … If that person over there in a wheelchair can do it, then so can I.” In other words: disabled people do not exist to inspire other people.
“This is a very large part of my life. But anyone who gets to know me, or anyone with a disability, they find out pretty quickly that, yeah, we just are who we are. We’re either a good person or a bit of a prick, or somewhere in between.”
Is he an optimist? “Yeah, I think to my detriment sometimes. A little overly optimistic and things hit me in the face. But generally, short answer, an optimist.”
Which doesn’t mean that he, like everyone, doesn’t have frustrations in his daily life. He thinks there can be a perception that “as you go along in life, you figure it out and it gets easier … and there’s this nice linear graph. And I think the opposite has been true for me. I think the last five years have been some of the most challenging times.”
What has changed in those last five years has been the arrival of children Etta and Louis, and not being able to do those seemingly small things that we mostly take for granted. For example, when his heavily pregnant wife has to go into the ceiling cavity of the house to carry down something heavy.
“It would be so much easier if I could just, you know, walk over and pick it up. I think I get frustrated, for sure, and it’s unhelpful, for sure. It’s easy to know in your mind that it’s helpful to think: control the controllable. But also the mind goes and thinks about how much easier it would be, of course.”
He was not destined to become a farmer, but he has the attributes of a good farmer. He is resilient, innovative, ambitious and dogged. Also clever. You have to be clever to be a good farmer. Or a good chief executive.
Able has just launched Sight Unseen, its first foray into content production. It is a five-part online series and uses that “audio description”. The accompanying blurb explains it better than anything I can attempt: “a feature that allows visually impaired people to engage with visual media by delivering an extra layer of audio that describes what’s happening on screen.” Clever, eh? And also cleverly, Sight Unseen combines a showcasing of what Able provides and advocacy for the visually impaired, which is also what Able provides.
The online series manages to be informative about what it’s like to be visually impaired, and funny. There is Roman the farting runner. That is funny because, isn’t farting always funny? Roman is seen approaching a car. He is blind. “He gets in the driver’s seat. Just kidding.”
There’s Tom, who, while discussing what it is actually like being disabled and attempting to describe it, makes a speculative joke about, “what if we started disabling able-bodied people …”
Buckingham thinks part of the appeal of the series will be the glimpses and insights it offers into other people’s lives, which is what all good documentaries should do. “I think disability is intriguing for people.” He thinks that’s because “it’s still unusual enough. ‘How do people live life like this?’”
He understands the curiosity. “I mean, when it’s well done. Occasionally, it’s not well done. I think most people come in with a sensitive, warm and genuine intrigue and so I embrace it.”
The idiot question
As I said, every interview I could find with him opened with a moment in time. This might become a tad irritating, not to mention quite boring, to be defined by a freak moment in time. He once said, in a speech, that in every interview he was asked the same question: if he could take back that moment in time, would he? How is that for an idiotic question? He’s a tetraplegic. As an advocate for the disabled, is he supposed to say that no, of course he wouldn’t?
He is having a fulfilling life, he’s a successful business man, a happily married family man, he has a box full of medals, and so on. In addition to being an idiotic question, it is also a complicated question. You might think it is even more complicated for him. Well, yes, and no.
What would your answer be? There are moments in everybody’s lives where if you could, you would take back a moment, surely?
He is philosophical enough about the answer. It does sometimes irritate him. But he is mostly sanguine. Twenty-five years is, after all, almost half a life time ago. “I’m almost disconnected from it, even though it’s a large part of my history.” And: “There are so many moments in life. If you take them all away, what are you left with?”
He found himself on the bottom of the scrum, during a friendly game of rugby, broke his neck and ended up in a hospital bed at the Burwood Spinal Unit in Christchurch. “The short answer is: it would have been fantastic if it didn’t happen.”
It is, if you thought about it for just a second, the obvious answer. So maybe don’t ask the question. He was 18 then; he’s now 44.
Perhaps paradoxically, he never lost his love of rugby, despite it being rugby that so altered the trajectory of his life. It did and it didn’t. He was ambitious, and remains so. He was competitive, and remains so. In other words, disability might have changed his life. It hasn’t changed who he is.
Who is he? A good person. And so not a bit of a prick. Just don’t try pushing his wheelchair at the beach when he’s told you, ever so politely, to sod off.
