Ngaire Pakai
Yaama SBS acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and pays respects to elders past and present and ongoing in stewardship in knowledges since time immemorial. Welcome to Speak My Language Disability. Listen as we share stories of first nations people who are engaging
in their passions while living with a disability. Throughout this series, you'll hear inspiring stories from leaders and advocates within the community who have successfully pursued their dreams in their chosen fields. I'm Ngaire Pakai and in this episode, I have a yarn with Skye Cusack. She's a
Dulgubarra-Yidinj, Indonesian and Chinese writer, journalist and comedian living in Rubibi Broome. Skye shares stories that make you laugh, cry and call your therapist. Her most recent work "Checked Out" received a 2025 Elevate Grant, 2025 Copyright Agency Varuna Fellowship and is shortlisted for
the 2025 Penguin Write It Fellowship. Skye navigates the world with an invisible disability and joins us to share her. Thanks for jumping on and having a yarn with us today.
Skye Cusack
Thank you. I'm excited to be here and to have a yarn with you.
Ngaire Pakai
So I gave a little bit of an intro there, but can you introduce yourself? Who are you, who's your mob, where are you from?
Skye Cusack
I am, Skye So my mob, the Dulgubarra-Yidinji Yiddinji mob, are, in the Atherton Tablelands. Specifically, my family's in Yungaburra, which is about an hour away from Cairns in far North Queensland. But I'm currently based in Rubibi, or Broome on Yawuru Driven Country. Just working as the marketing
coordinator at Magabala Books.
Ngaire Pakai
Can you share with us your journey in understanding your own invisible disability?
Skye Cusack
Yeah, it was a very long, stressful journey and I laughed and I cried and I sung and I danced and I did all the things that you do. So I kind of have, like, a smorgasbord of disabilities. I guess. So. I'm someone who lives with physical and mental disabilities, so I have dissociative amnesia, and I
also have ocd. And, I've had both of those things since I was a very young child. The physical disability, which I don't have a diagnosis for, it's just like, that's the journey that I'm still on. I'm trying to find out what that looks like, what diagnostic criteria that could relate to. Yeah, I
just, like, sometimes I can't walk and so, it's tricky to talk about it in a very clean, linear way. Other people will say to me, like, oh, like, 'what's your disability?' And I'll say 'sometimes I just can't walk and I don't really know why or what I'm going to do about it'. But yeah, so I guess
that's kind of a summary. Sorry, I wish I had like a clean answer for you, but I guess that's my lived experience as someone with a disability is like, it's a very messy, rambly answer and that kind of is genuinely how it feels for me.
Ngaire Pakai
So you self advocate in the workplace. In what ways do you champion your voice in what's now been dubbed as 'constructive complaining'?
Skye Cusack
Yes, I am a very constructive complainer. So I'm kind of lucky now working at Magabala Books that I don't have to do that. I feel like for most of my career working as a marketer, I've always kind of cosplayed as like neurotypical and physically abled. So I used to work in finance. The thing about
working in marketing is that you understand the dynamics and the strategies that you use to promote something normally for monetary or kind of social recognition gain. And so a lot of people apply that to themselves. And so especially when I was younger and I was really trying to just present as
like a white leaning, mixed race person who was neurotypical and physically abled, it kind of took me, and that was all coming from a place of shame in terms of self advocacy. It was really hard and shame is something that I'm really trying to kind of disassociate from my journey and my feelings
around what I'm talking about. Yeah, I guess step number one was being in a place where I could advocate for myself. Because it wasn't just in the workplace, it was also to every single doctor I've ever seen. Because the unfortunate, truth is that for pretty much all of my life I've also been
someone that's lived in a larger body. I like to use the term fat when I talk about my body. So, you know, being someone who's fat and also being someone who oftentimes can't walk, there is kind of an associated stigma of like, oh, well you can't walk because you look like this. And then they kind
of assume that maybe I have like these certain lifestyle behaviours or habits. And there's a lot of blame that we get externally and I internalised a lot of that for a long time. But when I was in predominantly like white neurotypical spaces, particularly like when I worked in finance and tech, a
lot of it just kind of was about like there is kind of like that burden of education. And so I did a lot of work with our HR team and I helped to create policies around being queer in the workplace, disabilities, like a lot of education. Yeah, so then I guess kind of structurally things have to
change. Luckily now I work for organisations where you can just kind of have conversations with leaders to kind of make these changes and then just kind of being really open. But it is hard because you need energy to do all these things. And with a lot of my experiences with mental and physical
disability, like I didn't always have the energy and so it's just like a lot of self care, a lot of being quite vulnerable. And then, you know, I did actually make the decision to kind of leave those spaces in the end. Yeah, I like to hopefully think that because a lot of my work was about policy
and about like organisational changes that things did get better for people that came after me. But you just have to have a lot of love for yourself and a lot of love for the people that you're trying to constructively complain to. Because if it's not, happening in good faith, then you can't have
Ngaire Pakai
You're going through school at the moment. In what ways has education been inaccessible or now accessible for you?
Skye Cusack
Yeah, education was a big thing for me growing up. It was big for me in the way, so when I was growing up I actually went to 14 different schools and so my family moved around a lot and I also pretty much consistently got bullied at every single school I went to. I think I feel very privileged and
very grateful that I have been able to get an education in a country that, where, you know, like the rubric in the curriculum kind of matches the way that my brain works. So I always got pretty high grades in school, I think I also didn't kind of realise that I was disabled until I was probably like
almost in my 20s. Yeah, I actually didn't finish year 11 or year 12, but I am from Tasmania and when I was in year 11 and 12 they weren't compulsory education. And yeah, I had a pretty bad time at school, especially because I have dissociative amnesia. like it's hard to remember things. That's a fun
side effect of amnesia. Things like that were really tricky. And I don't know, I guess I just have the gift of the gab. So I somehow always made it through presentations and exams. And it's sad because I really do love learning. And then I didn't go to university, I kind of had this alternative
pathway into marketing and writing where I just worked really, really hard. That's the one thing I've had my whole life is like just this insane, almost inhuman work ethic. And I think that's brought me through anything. And so I didn't go to uni for a really long time, which is kind of in the
spaces I'm in, that's quite rare. But then a few years ago I decided that I did want to go to university and so I applied to RMIT. For some reason they accepted me into a master's programme. But I'd never been to university before. But I guess I've been working in this industry for, like, nearly 13
years. And so they kind of had a lot of recognition of prior learning because I've been working in my field for so long. And so they said you can just start at a master's of marketing. And I was like, I've never been to university in my life. Like, why are you doing this to me? Like, it was the
weirdest experience. I did not know what I was doing. Like, I don't know if I can describe to you what it's like to go straight into a master's programme. And that's your first university experience. I was quite nervous because I was like, I know that I'm going to need support, particularly because,
yeah, like, and I was working full time when I was studying, I was working full time at the bank. In addition to all of this, I also, have struggled with disordered eating and I have a diagnosed eating disorder. And so I was like, I went to the doctor and I went to the GP and I was like, look, I
can't walk. I also have seizures. Like, I have amnesia. Like, I don't really know how to put this all into a plan when I don't have a clear diagnosis. And so they said, look, you have a diagnosed eating disorder and that comes with its own set of, like, fatigue and stress and things like that. So
that's what we'll put down on the plan. But then I think you should go to the school and kind of explain more outside of the diagnosis. And so I don't want to say that having disordered eating was like a life hack of mine. That's not the kind of impression that I want to give. But I think I was just
very lucky and I feel very grateful that both the school and my GP were understanding. Because there is kind of like this weird thing of if you do have an invisible disability, or you're still in the process of getting a diagnosis, but you still need support in the meantime to live your life and
achieve your goals. Yeah, I don't know. I just felt so grateful that people were willing to work with me and help support me in the ways that they could while still ticking all the boxes.
Ngaire Pakai
You are also in the creative space. You're currently developing a young adult comedy manuscript with Magabala Books. How has your work in marketing helped you in your storytelling?
Skye Cusack
I actually just signed the contract for that yesterday. I'm really excited. So I actually got the publishing offer or I was told that they would like to acquire it for publication before I started working at Magabala Books. So I think maybe sometimes people think that just because I work here, I got
offered that, but I want that on the record. I did get told that they were interested in acquiring my book for publishing before I got the job here. And I worked on that book for a very long time. And the book is about some of these things I've talked about experiencing fatphobia in the medical
industry. It's about, you know, being black and living with OCD and needing to advocate for yourself with mental and medical health practitioners. And so it is like a YA comedy book, but it does hold a lot of that lived experience, especially in a small town. And it also kind of explores kind of the
dangers of what happens when the system fails you and kind of how do youth interact with each other and what kind of like, toxic, unhealthy surrogate relationships do they form in place of systems that aren't helping them? And when you're beginning advocating for yourself and you have like these
life struggles and you're experiencing stigma and you're in the process of getting a diagnosis, like how do you advocate for yourself in the meantime? And I think that's something that I'm really passionate about, is you still need to live and exist and get support in the meantime while you're on
those journeys. And so the writing for me, when I first started writing it, I never thought it would get published. Like, that's insane. Yeah, I don't know. Like I was writing it because no one had ever written anything that I had read like that. And I think that's what a lot of people in
marginalised communities, now that I work at Magabala Books and I talk with people in the industry and I go to conferences and I meet other authors and creators. That's what I hear a lot. I wanted to write a story that I've never read before or I wanted to write a story to see myself in there. And I
think I didn't really know much about being black. I didn't really know what that meant. I didn't know how to get published. I didn't even kind of think that was an option. And it was only because, I was working as a marketing manager at Black and Bright, which is a First nations literary festival
based in Naarm that I kind of found out about Magabala Books and that I kind of felt confident to even submit it. Marketing, like I said before, to work in marketing is kind of like a cheat, I guess, because you learn all about how to promote something. And so I think I've just become very good at
thinking of myself as a product, which also comes with, like, a whole other, like, moral quandary of, like, do I want to think of myself as a product?
Ngaire Pakai
You're also a comedian. How are you funny?
Skye Cusack
Allegedly, I'm a comedian. I'm actually doing a comedy show this weekend. I don't know. This whole comedian thing was truly an accident. Like, I don't think that I meant for it to be funny. So when I, and actually the whole comedian thing came out of publishing this book with Magabala when I kind of
first wrote the manuscript that was sent to be submitted, it was quite serious because I'm tackling these things like weight stigma and disability and mental health and things like that. And then, you know, they read it and they were like, you are funny and you can put comedy into this book. I had
an old boyfriend, as we always do, who had told me, like, our whole relationship, like, Skye you're not funny, you're just pretty. And then that in itself was funny. Because if you look at people like me, I don't look like the type of person that would just be pretty in a relationship. Like, you
know when you look like me and you have the body shape and the hair texture of someone like me, like, they're not people who are, like, used for their bodies or, like, used just to be pretty. And so even that in itself was funny. And then, yeah, Magabala was kind of like, we know you're funny and we
think you can bring more of that into the manuscript and kind of play with. I guess I have, like, a very, like, cheeky sense of humour and I do like to find the absurdity in things. So especially, like, you might be like, how is advocating for yourself to a doctor, about weight stigma funny? But I
like to think that I found A way to do that in the book. And then I guess from there I just have had kind of like a crazy life. And so when I do comedy, I'm kind of just like telling yarns. But, like, maybe I'm not funny. And I think I have a very subjective type of humour that just comes from being
like a black fella that's just had like a hectic life. And the lore of Skye Cusack, I guess, is just like a little bit wild. So if you say, how am I funny? I say, I don't really know. And it's all kind of just happened accidentally.
Ngaire Pakai
When it comes to sharing stories, you're doing this through a manuscript, through a YA book. What advice would you give other people who want to share their stories?
Skye Cusack
My work isn't particularly like, cultural, so I'm not telling like my mobs, like cultural stories and lore and things like that. But even so, I think the first thing to do, especially, you know, like, if you're a black writer, is I always talk to my elders and especially to my grandfather. And just
to make sure that what I'm doing is like, is something, I think just sense checking. So, yeah, getting cultural permission from elders is a big one for me, which maybe people wouldn't think about if they were writing stories like mine because I'm not writing like strong, like cultural stories. But I
still think it's important and just kind of, yeah, sense checking from communities as well. I'm understanding that even though you're telling your own story, you don't represent a community. So, like, having the understanding of like different representations and so telling other people what you're
writing and asking questions, sense checking is really important because your lived experience is like, not representative. And sometimes I guess, I write fiction, but like, do I really write fiction? Because you can hear from what I'm saying that obviously it's very strongly based on things that
I've been through. You have to be responsible with what you're saying and very purposeful and just kind of coming from a place of respect, that's kind of the biggest thing that I do.
Ngaire Pakai
So when it comes to people who want to keep an eye out for when works come out from you, where can they find you or where can they find this book?
Skye Cusack
People can find me on Instagram if they want. This is like, I'm very like, I'm kind of like a humble queen, but I'm trying not to be. I've been told to be less humble. You can find me on Instagram. skyela.dyela. In terms of the book, it's still being published. Like, I only signed the contract
yesterday. I would just say, like, check back in with me in, like, a year or two. But I am kind of publishing other things in the meantime. So, like, I do writings for journals and I'm also on Instagram. I just make really stupid videos. That's my work that's immediate. That you can see in the
meantime is my dumb little tiktoks.
Ngaire Pakai
I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your story with us today.
Skye Cusack
Thank you for having me. It was really lovely.
Ngaire Pakai
Speak My Language Disability is an initiative funded by the Commonwealth Department of Social Services. It is led by the Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales and proudly delivered in partnership with SBS.
