Aphasia WA

Introducing Julie. Julie loves to travel and in 2025 a highlight was travelling to Bali with her son, Travis, and her daughter-in-law. This was her first trip in about four years and she had a fantastic time! Julie also enjoys sport, watching soccer in the winter time and going along to Little Athletics to watch her granddaughters Stella and Ivy take part.

Reflecting on 2025 Julie shared that her highlights included:

🛫 Her trip to Bali

🏊‍♀️ Swimming

🍤 Going out to restaurants and eating some of her favourite foods including prawns.

In 2026 Julie hopes to:

🌏 Do more overseas travel

🏡 Paint her house

👯‍♀️Catch up with friends regularly.

❤️ Julie’s advice for people with aphasia is to get involved in the Conversation Groups.

👩‍🎓 Late last year we had a lovely collaborative experience with students from Curtin University. Joy, Xuanxu and Melissa visited a couple of our Conversation Groups, and spent time talking with members about their reflections on 2025 and hopes for the year ahead.

📝 Generously, people shared their stories and Joy, Xuanxu and Melissa wrote them down. We will feature these stories over the coming weeks.

❤️Join us in learning about some of the people who come along to the Conversation Groups.

🙏 Thank you to Joy, Xuanxu and Melissa for your special work!

⭐️🐠 Introducing Jim and Glenys Kerr

❤️ Jim and Glenys are part of Aphasia WA’s community. Recently we were talking about sharing stories from the community and Glenys offered some of her beautiful writing.

📝Since she and Jim started their journey and life with aphasia, Glenys has been writing both of experiences had and snippets of the funnier moments too. Like when Jim meant to praise Glenys by telling her she looked “quite elegent” for a night out but ended up saying she looked “quite elephant” 🐘!

🎣 Glenys has kindly shared this absolute ripper of a story about Jim’s experience of returning to fishing after his stroke, and becoming a volunteer with a a fabulous organisation called Fishability.

Over to Glenys:

“Jim has been fishing passionately since he was about 8 years old when he walked a few kms from his home (carrying all of his fishing gear) to Nedlands Jetty. It’s been a huge part of his life and he has quite a collection of photos and stories gathered over the years; fishing every state in Australia and many other parts of the world.

On a fishing charter, about a year before Jim retired, he had a chance to help a group of hearing impaired anglers. He loved the experience and said that, in his retirement, he would be so happy to be able to help other ‘less able’ folk, enjoy a day fishing.

Retirement came and we searched high and low to find a suitable opportunity for Jim to fulfill his wish. It was proving to be more difficult than we had anticipated.

Another year went by and we headed off on a bit bigger boat (ship) to cruise from Singapore to Japan. It was during that cruise that Jim unfortunately had his stroke and we were both medically disembarked in Hualien, Taiwan, where we stayed for a month. After Jim’s surgery I was asked by the surgeon to test if Jim could read or write (clearly checking for Aphasia). I asked Jim to write the word ‘Love’ (in the little notebook that a beautiful Buddhist nurse gave me) and to my utter astonishment, he did a childlike drawing of a fish swimming through rough ocean waves.

Jim was diagnosed with Receptive and Expressive Aphasia; we returned home to start our Aphasic journey.

During Speech therapy, at Osborne Park Hospital, I saw a flyer advertising Fishability.
At first I thought it would be a safe environment for Jim to attend as a participant, as he was quite unsteady and not making a lot of sense verbally. When we arrived at Fishability to hopefully arrange for Jim to join in the activity, he took it all in then said he would rather help than be helped.

Now 50 volunteer sessions later that exactly what he does!

He has since volunteered at Hillarys; Mindarie, Garvey Park, Nedlands Jetty (coincidentally!) on the Fishability Boat that leaves from Royal Perth Yacht Club and on the annual Top Gun Fishability charter.

Jim still can’t tell anyone the name of the fish that he helped them catch, nor name a lot of the fishing equipment but he has proven he still knows how to catch fish 😊