Of course I couldn’t do it on my own so I rounded up some other staff, and I got one of what they called the Sunbury Citizens’ Advocates who were volunteering at Caloola to help me, and off we went, five patients and five nurses or other aides, into town for haircuts.

I probably don’t need to tell you it was a complete disaster. First the patients wouldn’t sit still on the bus, I suppose because they hadn’t seen outside the walls of Caloola for, what, ten, twenty years, who even knew? Then the hairdresser, who had been all for it on the phone, looked horrified to see us because I suppose until you see five mental patients together you don’t really know what it’s going to be like.

There was no way to stop the patients roaming around her salon and picking everything up, and one of them tore a page out of the Cosmopolitan and put it in his mouth. And then when we got back to Caloola there was a message waiting at reception that a pair of scissors was missing, which sent a chill right through me.

But did I give up? No! Next on my list of things to try was lessons in money, because if any of the patients at Caloola were ever going to learn to live ‘in the community’, which was after all the point of the whole normalisation program, they’d have to learn how to use money and maybe even how to earn it.

The best jobs for disabled people in those days was to sit in wheelchairs under the clocks at Flinders Street station and sell copies of the Herald, but that program only lasted until a gang of punks turned up and bashed one of our patients who was half-blind and in a wheelchair. They also stole his money tin.

From there it was onto the football program, which was the simplest idea of all: let’s round up twenty patients and take them to the footy, maybe once a month. Not to the real footy at the MCG, but just down the road to Sunbury Oval to watch the local team play. How hard could that really be?

Pretty hard, as it turned out, and especially after one of the Sunbury Citizens’ Advocates, who was supposed to be helping me, lost sight of one of the patients for something like five minutes and by the time we found him he had a little girl cornered in the toilet block, and her mother threatened to sue.

Perhaps you’re thinking, ‘Well, maybe the problem was you, Snow. Maybe you were out of your depth and didn’t know what you were doing.’ And that’s fine, you can think that, but the truth is, it wasn’t me that was no good, it was the whole normalisation program that wasn’t working, and the reason it wasn’t working was because the people we had at Caloola weren’t normal. They were crazy, or they were retarded, and all the social work mumbo-jumbo in the world wasn’t going to change that fact. Once I’d finally come to accept that I found myself on the side of the other nurses, the old-timers, just trying to keep the people at Caloola on track and under supervision, so they didn’t hurt themselves or anyone else, and whatever it took to achieve that was fine.