Born at the Right Time

by Ron McCallum

I soon made friends with a group of boys who would walk with me to and from Mentone railway station. Terry McKay, who lived near our house in Hampton, was a nice boy who was always especially helpful. Terry nearly lost an eye when a fire cracker blew up in a bottle. This experience of almost losing his sight drew him to assist me. Every term, a boy from class would be designated to sit next to me and to help me with reading class materials.

  Until my final year of high school I used small tape recorders to record what people read to me. Although Mum was now working as a carer and companion to elderly people and doing piece work at home, she read me chapters of textbooks on most evenings and on weekends, even though I am sure that she would have preferred to relax and to watch some television. Her love and dedication always filled me with such courage to move forward. Without her help I would never have made it through high school.

  St Bede’s was very sporty in that boys-school way. It was important for our school to win at Australian Rules football and cricket. Some of my classmates were interested in horseracing; at that time, Mentone was still home to several racing stables. I could not participate in any of the school’s sporting activities and always felt somewhat of an outsider. On the other hand, what I liked about the school was its scholastic rigour and strong commitment to social justice.

  The school was run by the De La Salle Brothers, a French order with a long tradition of intellectual inquiry. In part, I think that this ethos explains why my classmates looked after me reasonably well, in that adolescent manner. Teachers like the late Larry McEvoy and Brother Quinton O’Halloran always emphasised social-justice issues. Some of this consciousness must have rubbed off on us.

  The 1960s was the era of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and for me of puberty and of awakenings. As a music lover, I found the freshness of The Beatles, and especially the melodies of Paul McCartney, to be truly inspiring. We boys slowly became interested in girls, and especially those from our sister school, Kilbreda. Having said this, I did not really come to know girls of my own age during my high-school years. Because I had only brothers, it would have been better for my social development if I had attended a coeducational school. However, in those days there were no coeducational Catholic schools. While my classmates had girlfriends, or at least bragged about having girlfriends, I did not. I just focused on my work.

  Every Wednesday afternoon in years nine and ten, I would leave St Bede’s and return to St Paul’s School to study music with Hugh Jeffries; after that, I would have my dinner at a cafe and then take the tram to the home of a man named Abraham Wexler, to whom Brother O’Neill introduced me, for science lessons.

  Abraham had been born and raised in Britain. He had been undertaking postgraduate studies in chemistry in Germany when the First World War broke out. Like other foreign students, Abraham was interned for the duration of hostilities, a fact that probably saved him from becoming cannon fodder in the trenches. Abraham and his family emigrated from England to Melbourne after the Second World War. I am sure that as a Jewish man he was motivated by a desire to get as far as possible from the horrors of the Holocaust.

  Abraham had written a book on teaching science to blind children. He believed, correctly, that science was an essential element in our education. His garage was set up as his laboratory. Thinking laterally, he devised and adapted experiments for me and other blind students. In science at St Bede’s I recall doing experiments about light that of course I could not fully understand. Abraham, in contrast, rigged up a light-sensing probe in the top of a pen and attached the probe to a variable pitch buzzer. He then set up convex and concave mirrors. By using the pen, I could trace the light beams and find the focal point using the noise of the variable pitch buzzer. He taught me about electricity and radio waves, about Galileo and Newton.

  As year eleven physics involved too much mathematics for me, I decided to take British history to complete my quota of subjects. This subject was not taught at St Bede’s, but my teacher Larry McEvoy took me through the syllabus; he obtained the relevant books and set me test essay questions. A fellow year eleven student Chris Needham decided to take British history with me. He read me a lot of material, as did Mum and a couple of other helpers.

  In year eleven I was at my most rebellious. I used to take my braille playing cards to class and I would play blackjack or poker with some of my classmates. One afternoon during a free period, when a couple of boys were supposed to be reading to me, we were caught playing cards. The teacher pulled me aside and said that I would get through school okay, but that I should show some responsibility for the boys who were helping me, because they were finding the work more difficult.

  During my final year of high school in 1966, Mum bought me a big reel-to-reel Philips tape recorder. It was one of those large table-top machines. By using a slow speed and four tracks on the tape, each reel could hold about twelve hours of spoken text. I quickly learned to speed ‘read’, or perhaps it’s better to say speed listen, so that I could get through my work. I simply doubled the playback speed of the tape recorder. While this enabled me to ‘read’ faster, the pitch of the readers’ voices doubled. The effect was not unlike the voice used for the chipmunk characters in the children’s cartoon program. This didn’t worry me at all.

  Later, the American Foundation for the Blind produced a cassette tape recorder that solved the voice pitch problem using an ingenious method. By rapidly turning on and off the playback head as the tape passed it, the pitch of the playback voice remained at its normal level when the tape increased in speed. For the next quarter-century, reel-to-reel table-top tape recorders became my work horses. They governed my learning life right up until about 1990.

  I began working solidly in year twelve because I could see that my future depended upon it. Shadows of the men making baskets in the sheltered workshop continued to haunt me. I wasn’t confident of obtaining very high marks. My aim was to win admission into an Arts course and perhaps to become a high-school history teacher. Had this occurred, I am sure that teaching girls and boys history and English would have been an enjoyable and fulfilling occupation. However, I overshot with my marks.

  I was accepted into both the University of Melbourne and the Monash University law schools, and my life took a different direction.

  4

  The Boy Goes to Law School

  Throughout history, various events or developments have led to surges in the number of blind and visually impaired people—and people with other disabilities—in society. For example, many English, French and German soldiers were blinded on the Western Front during the First World War, either from mustard gas or from head injuries.

  For the first time in our relatively recent history, the Australian Government in the wake of the First World War was confronted by a large cohort of blind men. These young men had been born with sight, had attended school, but had cruelly lost their vision in the war. Most had had some education or previous work experience and were not prepared to abandon their place in the society for which they had sacrificed so much.

  Australian lawyer Dudley Tregent was blinded by shrapnel in 1918. He completed his law studies after the war. Other blind soldiers and sailors also completed tertiary studies and entered the professions at this time. To their fellow soldiers, these blind men were not outsiders. Too often their wounds had been a matter of sheer bad luck: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ In 1916 the Germans began training dogs to restore some independence to soldiers who had been blinded in the war. Within several decades, guide dogs for the blind were being utilised throughout the world.

  The Second World War produced fewer blind returnees, but the conflict produced similar practical and emotional responses to disability. Dr Richard Hoover was an American surgeon who wished to assist sailors who had been blinded by shipboard explosions in the naval battles in the Pacific during the Second World War. He blindfolded himself and perfected the long white cane as he roamed around the streets of Boston. It is Dr Hoover’s white cane that
I have used to aid my mobility since I was a little boy.

  I belong to a special cohort of post–Second World War children, all of whom were blinded before the doctors and scientists properly understood the effect of pure oxygen on premature babies and learned to monitor and regulate dosages. There were approximately 10,000 of us retrolentals born in the developed world in the decade before 1955. The vast majority of us emerged from our birth traumas blind or visually impaired, but without other major health problems. The most famous of us is probably Stevland Judkins, who is better known by his stage name, Stevie Wonder. He was born premature in 1950 to a poor black family in Michigan, but from the age of about twelve his prodigious musical talent shone through, and he went on to become one of the world’s most famous musicians.

  Like soldiers who returned from war with disabilities, we retrolentals became our own surge; I believe that we benefited from the group dynamics we created. In the 1960s in Australia, and in the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Western Europe, many of us blind people successfully negotiated primary and secondary schooling. We began to embark upon tertiary studies. We brought along with us other young adults who had lost their sight and benefited from the availability of more progressive education. Students with other disabilities also made their way onto university campuses. This was rather unusual. Throughout most of the world’s history, blind people have not had access to tertiary education. There were some extraordinary blind scholars in the past, but they were truly exceptional people.

  I cannot resist a small digression to talk about one of my favourites. Earlier I mentioned Nicholas Saunderson, one of the most famous blind scholars in British history. Saunderson was born to wealthy parents in early 1682, but was blinded before his first birthday when he contracted smallpox. His parents’ wealth and influence meant that he was able to attend an ordinary school, where he learned French, Latin and, presumably, mathematics. He would have relied on his fellow students and family reading to him, just as I did growing up. The historical record suggests that Saunderson had a prodigious memory and a giant intellect. He entered Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1707, aged twenty-five. There he appears to have become something of a spokesperson for Sir Isaac Newton. Adopting this great man’s theories, Saunderson delivered lectures on Newton’s Principia, as well as on Newtonian mathematics and even optics. When teaching students, he did much of the calculus in his head.

  In 1711, Nicholas Saunderson was elected to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, which had been held previously by Newton. (Interestingly, the late Stephen Hawking, who is arguably the most famous disabled scholar of our time, held the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge for thirty years between 1979 and 2009.) In 1714, Saunderson was appointed by King George I as a Commissioner of the Board of Longitude. He presided alongside Sir Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, the man who gave his name to Halley’s Comet. In 1719 Nicholas Saunderson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. As a married man who fathered a son and a daughter, he has been an inspiration to me throughout my life. Here was a blind man who was able to survive and thrive as a fully participating member of his society.

  Many persons with disabilities seem to have chosen law as a profession. This may be because no other profession allows its practitioners to live so much ‘in the mind’. A detailed knowledge of the law enables lawyers to sift relevance from irrelevance and to speedily diagnose legal problems. It matters not that you lack sight or hearing or mobility. What counts are your legal skills and your facility for diagnosis and the practical application of rules.

  I studied law at Monash University between March 1967 and the close of 1971. Monash was Victoria’s second university and had begun teaching students just a few years earlier, in 1961. Its main campus is situated in the suburb of Clayton, which was then adjacent to semi-rural land at the eastern fringes of Melbourne. This is why the university was nicknamed ‘The Farm’. More than fifty years later, Clayton has been subsumed within Melbourne’s sprawling eastern suburbia. Monash University was designed to cater for Victoria’s growing population, and especially for us post–Second World War baby boomer children.

  In 1967, my two brothers and I still shared a room that contained a double bunk and a single bunk. I had my books piled up on our dining-room table next to the television. In the following year, Melbourne Legacy helped Mum build an extra bedroom. This was called a sleep-out because it wasn’t connected to the house. This gave us more room, becoming the sleeping quarters for Ted and Max.

  No one in my family had ever been to university, so none of us quite knew what to expect. When I received offers from both the University of Melbourne and the Monash University law schools in early 1967, I believe that discussions took place between the two faculties. Professor David Derham was the foundation Dean of Monash Law School. He had left Melbourne Law School to found the school at Monash in 1964. David was very enthusiastic to take me, I believe in part because he wanted to have as diverse a student cohort as possible.

  Professor Derham told me later that, when he was at Oxford, he was taught by Sir Alfred Rupert Neale Cross—arguably the most famous blind lawyer of the British Commonwealth in the twentieth century. Known to everyone as Rupert Cross, this man was born with sight in 1912 but became completely blind as the result of a cancer of the eye contracted when he was a year old. His textbook, Cross on Evidence, is one of the twentieth century’s best-known pieces of legal scholarship.

  A second reason David Derham was keen for me to study at Monash University was that another blind lawyer, Lawrie McCredie, had recently joined the Faculty. Lawrie was born in 1928 into a military family. He studied at Duntroon, Australia’s foremost officer training academy, and was blinded in a terrible accident in the early 1950s when engaged in a training exercise with young recruits.

  Concerned that the heat of the day would render three unused sticks of gelignite unsafe, Lawrie, who was the platoon commander, decided to ignite them and throw them out of harm’s way. The first stick was detonated without incident. The second one failed to detonate, due to its detonator falling off. After warning a nearby solider to stand clear of the danger, Lawrie tied the second, unexploded stick to the third. The fuse having been lit, Lawrie was just about to throw it to the same place as the original, successful detonation when someone walked into his line of aim. An officer suggested Lawrie throw it into a rabbit hole behind him, but it was too late and the two sticks of gelignite exploded in Lawrie’s right hand. Three officers were gravely injured. Lawrie’s right arm, right eye and part of the right side of his face were blown away; his left eye was severely damaged and his forehead was cracked open.

  I find it fascinating that Dudley Tregent and Lawrie McCredie were assisted to study law by the federal Repatriation Department because of their military injuries, the very Department that assisted me. Before Prime Minister Gough Whitlam abolished university student fees in about 1973, all universities charged them. Because of my father’s status as an injured veteran, I received a Repatriation Department scholarship, which took care of the fees and paid for my books and other expenses. Our family would not otherwise have had the means to support my studies.

  Travelling to and from Monash was a little complex. Using my white cane, I had to walk from our home to a bus stop and then catch a bus to Moorabbin railway station. I then took the train for four stops and alighted at Ormond railway station. I then took a half-hour bus ride along North Road, which took me right into the Monash campus. If bus and train connections worked well, and this was the case in the mornings, my journey would take an hour or so. On long wintry evenings, however, it often took me more than an hour and a half to reach home.

  During the first winter, Mum bought me a big coat. To this day I love long coats, because I feel so secure in them. I couldn’t read or listen to music while going to and from Monash, so I would spend the time just thinking. These were the days before Walkman cassette or CD players. Personal computers, iPods and mobile phones were a distant dream. Towards t
he end of my degree the days became very long. I would leave home early and often not return until after 7.30 p.m. I would eat and then fall into bed. Friends with cars gave me lifts on occasion.

  I still remember my first day at Monash University, in March 1967. It was the first day of Orientation Week and I was determined to go on my own. Mum and I had been to Monash on several occasions; she had helped me to enrol. I recall that Mum was a little silent about my first-day plans, but she let me set off alone.

  When I arrived at the campus on that warm March morning, I was rather over-awed by its size. As I have recounted, my family lived in a two-bedroom house; but I didn’t regard our home as small. It may be that lack of sight meant that I didn’t truly understand proportionality. As I can’t see buildings, I still find it almost impossible to get a real sense of size and of the distance between venues.

  I was thrown into all of the usual student activities, with clubs and societies vying against each other and offering ice-breaker activities. I didn’t join any of them, but I went along to their introductory lectures, which were given in a large and echoing lecture theatre. I had never before been in a class of this size. Of course I came home exhausted—but exhilarated.

  The law building was not completed until the beginning of 1968. So, for my first year I had to walk all the way across the campus to the engineering faculty, where most of the law classes were held. The students I met seemed sophisticated, poised and clever, and in the early days I felt awkward and intimidated. It is a measure of my unease that, throughout the whole of the first term, I was too shy and too awkward to ask anyone where the toilets were. So, I simply limited my intake of fluids and held it in—all day. I really felt like a fish out of water.

  In 1967 there were only a couple of old law books in braille and they weren’t much use to me. Lawrie McCredie was tutoring a first-year subject introducing students to law-making by parliament and the courts. He had the casebook read on to tape and he thoughtfully made me a copy. My biggest challenge was finding enough people to read to me or to record legal material so that I could master the relevant subjects. In spite of her heavy work schedule, my mother read me a great deal of material, as did my aunt Florence, whom we all called Aunty Dos. Dos had a withered leg from birth. She used to have a stick and later was confined to a wheelchair. I don’t think either woman understood much of what they read for me, but they knew their reading would help me and their love shone through.