I was walking around putting one board on each table in front of each patient and then I saw that the boards were landing on the floor just as fast as I was putting them down. The patients were throwing them down, thinking it would be great fun to get me to pick them all up again.

Then one of the patients started hitting another patient on the head with his board and that was soon the new game, one patient using his board to belt all the other patients.

The male nurse and the others who had been standing at the back of the room, arms crossed, waiting to see what would happen, were falling about laughing, but I was determined not to let them get to me so I kept on saying, ‘Now, come on, this is government equipment, it’s very expensive, and I’ve ordered it especially for you. It’s important that you treat it with respect.’ But by this time the patients were taking their communication boards and putting them in their mouths or throwing them around like frisbees.

Some people might have given up at that point but not me. Oh no, I couldn’t let the whole normalisation thing go. I’d been told a hundred times not to expect miracles and that things would take time to change so maybe it was just a matter of taking it one patient at a time. So I picked out one patient – his name was Hugh, and he was pretty young, maybe twenty, and he couldn’t go anywhere unless he was in one of those chairs with the padded headrests – and I sat with him for, I don’t know, maybe a year, trying to get him to punch out just one letter on the stupid communication board.

No, okay, I’m exaggerating, it wasn’t a year, but it felt like a year that I had my hand under his elbow and his arm dangling down over the communication board, just waiting, waiting, waiting for him to tap a letter, any letter. And it just never happened, Jack, and I don’t say that to make a point, it’s just the truth.

Not once in all the time that I sat with Hugh, or with any of the other so-called smart patients at Caloola, did any of them make their hand like a beak over a water bowl, like they’d told us they’d do, and poke at a letter. But that was obviously not the result I was supposed to report back to my supervisors at the Health Department because when I did report that back, they basically said, ‘You must be doing it wrong.’

I was absolutely sure that I was doing it right but they still felt the need to send some expert over to Caloola to give me more training. So then there were two of us sitting with this one patient, waiting for him to punch out something like, ‘I am Hugh,’ and to my absolute amazement, he actually did.