I come from South Africa, originally, but I married a New Zealander, so I've lived in New Zealand a long time. My first child was actually born in Swaziland. My second child, who is a disabled child, was born in New Zealand.

It was then that I found that I had to start asking for help. And I wasn't used to that. I wasn't used to asking for help, because I had grown up in Apartheid South Africa and I had been one of the "haves", as opposed to the "have-nots". I had learnt to...it had never occurred to me that I would one day be in a position where I had to ask for help. So that was quite tricky.

Contrary to what I was expecting, I really enjoyed becoming an Australian citizen. And I think it is because for the first time in these 18 years since Adrian was born, and since I first met my husband, I suppose, we were all in the same boat! We all became Australians at once.

The funny story about that is because Adrian is incapable of taking the oath and conducting himself well in a sort of formal setting, he wasn't going to go to the ceremony, but he still had to go to the immigration department, so they could cite him to make sure he really couldn't do anything for himself. But we were there for quite a long time, and while they were sort of looking at all the forms and everything - we'd had all the paper work done - but they still wanted to cite him, as they put it in their technical words. So they cited him several times because he can't sit still. Once he's in his wheelchair he just wants to go, so he kept pushing himself away and my husband was walking him around and around and he was smiling, he was singing "Happy Birthday" to everybody in the place, and, eventually, after lots of fiddling around on the computer the immigration clerk said to us, “please can you go back and get another certificate from the doctor to say that he's incapable of taking the oath because I can't find a slot in the computer to fit this bit in”, so we said fine, yes, we'll do that. So it meant going back to the doctor, etcetera, and of course the doctor won't do this unless he actually cites the child as well, so that meant getting another carer, another trip to the doctor, got the form.

But anyway, Adrian became a citizen before we did because he didn't go though the ceremony. And we did actually enjoy the ceremony very much, yes.