Meet our newest intern, Isabelle
Creative Folk | March 2, 2026Welcome to our latest intern Isabelle Drake from Griffith University.
What attracts you about being an intern for Celebrate Living History?
I am drawn to this internship because journalism is a great way to communicate and teach others about important and influential events, places, people, concepts, etc.
However, Celebrating Living History specifically caught my attention because they focus on the preservation and communication of local history.
It is a topic that I have become passionate about after a recent university assessment that opened my eyes to the significance and importance of a lagoon to (one) the local first nations people and (two) the biodiversity and survival of internationally traveling sea birds.
Learning about, understanding and respecting nature and cultures different to my own is a concept and practice in my day-to-day life, that is a fundamental value ingrained into my person from childhood. This assessment left me horrified, disgusted and appalled by my own ignorance and the lack of community education and awareness surrounding our local histories, especially, regarding the histories of indigenous peoples and colonisation in the area.
This is the reason I was ultimately attracted to Celebrate Living History’s internship as it allows for community education.
Who is an older person that you admire and why?
Johnnie Gill, born during the 1860s, the reason his existence is known is because of a book called ‘Who Was Johnnie Wheels?’ by Victor Sullivan (his Great-Nephew).
He was a severely handicapped individual due to an accident with a sheep crushing him and snapping his spine at nine-years-old that caused excruciating pain. Johnnie was expected to succumb to his injuries and die but he never did. The accident left him unable to sit, stand, or walk, his only means of movement (as a child) was to physically drag himself around on the ground.
During this time period due to cultural biases and prejudice having a family member with any obvious physical disability, handicap, chronic ailment, or special needs was seen as a family embarrassment and humiliation which led to the disabled family member being confined to and hidden in the family house – often isolated to a singular room. This is what makes the publication and Johnnie Gill so important. The biography gives us direct and personal insight and representation into the lives of those who were disabled, handicapped and ultimately voiceless during these eras in western history, when those with disabilities were actively erased from memory.
It is also, sadly, the reason Johnnie Gill is so inspirational, because despite his disadvantages he led a far more successful life then most abled people. He taught himself how to fix clocks and sewing machines; learned how to get himself from one place to another and invented his own means of transport, despite his family trying to isolate him to a single room in his earlier years; ran a successful sheep shearing business with one of his nieces – who would hold the sheep as he sheered them – and beat out their competitors; earned his own income and living; and even got married.
He forced people in the world to not only acknowledge his existence but also interact with and pay him for services that they themselves either could not perform or could not achieve the quality of that Johnnie could and treat him with – what would have been considered during the time period – some kind of semblance of humanity.
If you could jump into a time machine, what era would you visit and why?
If time machines existed, and safety were guaranteed, there are two places that I would have to flip a coin to choose between.
The first is the Victorian era which I am enthralled with due to the social and cultural impacts and influences of the era as the foundation of Western Culture, especially, from a gendered historical perspective, as it was arguably the most oppressive era for women to have lived during throughout all of western history.
The second time and place would be Alexandria, Egypt, in the years before The Great Library of Alexandria burnt down and spend the time learning and studying ancient cultures, languages, lifestyles, food, beliefs, animals, performing and visual arts, academics, etc.