From The Lowest To The Highest

“The brakes are smoking!” I shouted to Duncan over the noise of screaming disc brakes as I tried to control a 75km/h speed wobble on the Alpine Way above Khancoban, near the New South Wales–Victoria border. I was doing my best to hold the tandem-trike steady with my one functioning hand while trying to let my blind stoker (the rear cyclist on a tandem bike) know what was going on. I was his eyes, he was my legs and we were more than 2000km into an adaptive human-powered journey that would take us from the continent’s lowest point to its highest.

- Paul Pritchard

I WAS PART of a five-person team, each with a heap of disabilities, attempting to be the first to cycle between Kati Thanda–Lake Eyre and Mt Kosciuszko, on the Lowest to Highest expedition. The team was Walter Van Praag with cystic fibrosis and only 38 per cent lung function; paraplegic Daniel Kojta who pedalled with his hands; Conrad Wansborough who lives with chronic pain after a spinal injury; legally blind Duncan Meerding; and my hemiplegic-epileptic-aphasic-self.

This ride would be the culmination of years of planning and the development of a philosophy of empowerment for people with disabilities. We were all very interested in moving away from the charity model, where people are largely pitied, to the more inclusive social model, whereby people are disabled by barriers in society not by their impairment or difference.

I have used a recumbent trike ever since being released from hospital in Liverpool in the UK in 1998 after spending an entire year there. My then girlfriend, Celia Bull, and I were climbing Tasmania’s infamous Totem Pole, a slender dolerite column at Cape Hauy, when the climbing rope dislodged a block that scythed 25m through the air smashing my skull. This traumatic brain injury resulted in hemiplegia, which is the loss of movement on one side of the body, and aphasia, an inability to comprehend or formulate language.