For a woman with her head in the clouds, Suzi Duncan is extremely grounded. Sure, there are days when she has to use a wheelchair to get around and others when, using crutches, she falls, but for Duncan the sky’s the limit – literally.
The Whittlesea woman is a commercial pilot and instructor, dedicated to helping disabled people to fly through the organisation she founded, Wheelies With Wings.
A dedicated volunteer, her work has taken her to a refugee camp in Sudan and a leper colony in India. At home she has assisted the mentally ill and others through art therapy.
But it could have been a very different life.
“I contracted polio as a child in the mid-1950s and spent several months in an iron lung [an airtight metal tank that encased her body from neck to toes and forced her lungs to inhale and exhale through changes in air pressure].”
Polio is a virus that has been virtually forgotten because of a successful vaccination program, but between the 1930s and 1960s there were 40,000 cases in Australia. It affects the muscles and breathing and can lead to paralysis.
Duncan was just a baby when the virus paralysed her from the neck down. Doctors said she would never breathe unassisted or walk. They were wrong.
“It is thanks to the courage of my mother – who refused to listen to conventional medicos at the time – and a radical doctor who did things differently, that I am who I am today,” Duncan says.
“Progressively, I came out of the iron lung, mum taught me to swim, I built up my upper body, then learnt to walk.
“But my horse was my first legs,” she says, adding that she rode her horse to primary school in the Latrobe Valley.
As a teenager she competed in show jumping against able-bodied people. Then came competitive swimming.
“I decided I could be an athlete, super fit – I became invincible above the waist.” Duncan competed in shot put and discus, and as a 15-year-old started her lifelong work of helping others by volunteering to train children at Little Athletics.
In the 1980s she worked in third world countries, including India where she helped at a leper colony and Sudan where she taught skills to Ethiopian refugees who had been peasant farmers.
In 1990 she took to the skies. “It was the ultimate freedom. Up there I was independent, there was no pain, no disability. I flew aerobatics – I was able to dance in the sky.”
In 1993 Duncan gained her commercial pilot licence and got her instructor rating in 1995.
She designed a detachable hand control that allowed people without the use of their legs to control the rudders. She says flying schools that would have been reluctant to permanently modify their aircraft can use the temporary device to teach disabled people to fly.
“The hand control came from my dream of helping others to fly and to have freedom,” says Duncan, who was awarded a Churchill Fellowship for this project in 1998. In the mid 1990s, Duncan set up Wheelies With Wings and raised money to set up a scholarship program in her name to give people with disabilities 15 hours of flying lessons and training over a fortnight.
“I took a blind girl flying; she flew the plane,” Duncan says. “Her guide dog was in the back seat. I don’t know who had the best fun, the dog or the girl.
“The overall aim is to give people a boost in their life through flight.”
Duncan received a Nancy Bird Walton award, named after the founder of the Australian Women Pilots’ Association, for her contribution to aviation in 1998.
At home in Whittlesea, Duncan volunteered to provide art therapy for people with acquired brain injury and it “snowballed” to include such groups as refugees. “Art is a powerful form of expression for those of us who can’t express ourselves easily; people who have been tortured or survived a war.”
After Black Saturday in 2009, she became part of the bushfire recovery effort by using art to help survivors.
Duncan was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2009. She says that although her work has been recognised, the community owes a lot to the volunteers who do “the dirty little jobs”.
“It could be the person who opens up the hall every time there’s a meeting, or the person who makes a cuppa or sweeps the hall; it’s the volunteers who drive the community.”
But Duncan’s health is deteriorating and she is unable to do all the things she wants to do. She has handed over the management of Wheelies With Wings – which is based in New South Wales but offers flying scholarships Australia-wide – to others, but is still its patron and fund-raiser.
She relies on a wheelchair when she is out volunteering to prevent falls, but uses crutches at home.
“I still feel physically elite in my head, it [reality] is a bitter pill to swallow.”
Details: visit wheelieswithwings.com.au
National Volunteer Week runs from May 13 to 19.
