SIDE is delighted to congratulate Year 11 student Brielle Hunt, from Dunsborough, on becoming a regional winner in the ABC’s 2020 Heywire storytelling competition. Heywire is open to young people aged 16-22 living in regional or rural Australia. It encourages them to tell stories in text, photo, video or audio about their life. ABC staff provide mentoring and technical support to winners to produce their stories for radio. Winners are flown to Canberra for the Heywire Youth Summit.
Brielle is the third Heywire regional winner from SIDE. In 2016 Regan Austin and in 2018 Raymond Binsiar were also successful.
Brielle has studied Year 11 ATAR courses with SIDE in 2019. She was shortlisted for the Whitlam Institute’s What matters? Writing competition earlier this year. Her English teacher Jenny Crowe said that “Brielle writes with candour about her life with profound deafness”. Brielle’s submission to the What matters? competition was the springboard for her Heywire entry. Brielle became deaf due to an auto-immune disease which attacked her brain, affecting her temporal and occipital lobes. She studies with SIDE because she spends a lot of time in hospital.
Brielle recently visited SIDE and met with teachers.
Brielle wrote of the support the ABC provided to help her present her story:
Bright and early I awoke to travel to the ABC studio in Bunbury WA. There were microphones and newspapers everywhere! Walking into the office I got introduced as “Brielle, one of the winners of Heywire”. And instantly everyone knew who I was and that I was Deaf! It was the best feeling that my story had already reached so many people.
Read more about Brielle and listen to her story.
Read more about Brielle in an article published in her local community newspaper, Busselton Dunsborough Mail.
To find out more about Heywire follow them on Facebook. They have lots of cool stuff and also link to live feeds such as the radio show the winners do when the Youth Summit kicks off.
