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When we were young my sisters and I spent many happy hours playing with a Hornby clockwork trainset which my father had collected in the 1920s. It had a gauge of about two inches, three shiny locomotives, and enough tracks and rolling stock to populate three bedrooms and a hallway. So I wasn’t surprised when my […]

The NZ Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline was launched at Parliament on World Autism Awareness Day, 2 April 2008. It is a world first in that it is a whole of life, whole of spectrum and whole of government approach to autism. It will be a living guideline so can be updated regularly and have gaps […]

Last Friday was a great day. An hour before we set off for the Big Day Out, the mail arrived. It contained our older boy’s first set of NCEA results. He achieved every Level 1 standard he sat, and picked up a couple of merits along the way.
For an Asperger Syndrome child we once thought […]

Saving child cancer services at Wellington Hospital has been a major public health issue lately. However, this situation need not have arisen if some forward planning had been done in the 1990s. It takes about 15 years to train a paediatric oncologist and there is a global shortage of these and other skilled health professionals. […]

Autism has featured in the mainstream news lately with a flurry of activity after the NZ Medical Journal of 12 October published an article by a New Zealand doctor working in Australia, proposing that Janet Frame had high-functioning autism (HFA). Rehabilitation physician Sarah Abrahamson of the Queen Elizabeth Centre in Ballarat analysed Janet Frame’s autobiographical […]

A friend just sent me a link to a story about polar bears cavorting with huskies in the wild (thank you), and, more relevantly, in my subsequent meanderings on the website of Speaking of Faith, a programme in the american public radio stable, I stumbled across, and am currently listening to its latest offering: Being […]

“The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted and to the fullest extent of his powers. […]

Working from estimates that one in every 150 of us resides on the autistic spectrum, I have just discovered, with the Statistics NZ population clock as my guide, the possibility that 27,910 people in New Zealand currently experience life from this perspective.
Added to this group are those who are trying to understand what a position […]

The development of the Evidence-Based Guideline for Autism Spectrum Disorder is a significant cross-government project. The Guideline will be for anyone supporting or working with a people with autism, such as professionals or family members, who will be guided by what is known as ‘best practice’ according to internationally peer reviewed research. For those with […]

Anyone who was at the launch of A Perfect World on Monday night will tell you that “Billy Glish” — David Cohen’s old school friend Bill English — gave a soulful and eloquent speech about the challenges faced by families for whom autism is a daily reality. His observation that the book gave lie to […]