Ron McCallum - Born at the Right Time

Ron McCallum AO is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, the first totally blind person to be appointed to a full professorship at any university in Australia. He has been chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Geneva, has received a Centenary Medal for his work, and was the 2011 Senior Australian of the Year.

I thank Ms Rachael Jane Chin who with skill and empathy edited my original manuscript. Rachael made appropriate suggestions, additions and deletions under my direction. Rachael aided me in more clearly expressing key thoughts and feelings about aspects of my life. Without Rachaels caring and competent editing this book would never have been published.

Ability First Australia is a not-for-profit strategic alliance of leading disability service providers working to ensure that persons with disabilities and their families are able to maximise choice in their lives, and I sit as an independent director on its Board. Ability First provided funding which enabled me to obtain the editing services of Ms Chin. My gratitude extends to Mr Phil Cave AM, Chairman of Ability First, and Mr Andrew Rowley, CEO of Ability First, for their enthusiastic support of my writing this memoir.

Emeritus Professor Ron McCallum AO

First published in 2019

Copyright Ron McCallum 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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This memoir is dedicated to three extraordinary women whose love and care have so enriched my life:

My mother, Mrs Edna McCallum, who died in 1985,

My surrogate mum, Mrs Lois Doery, who passed away in 2013, and

My wife, confidante and life companion, Professor Mary Crock.

In the year of my birth, the lives of the blind and visually impaired in Australia were much harder than they are today. The few who reached the heights of professional employment, such as lawyers and teachers, had mostly gone blind as the result of an accident or injury sustained during the Second World War; they had received their initial education while they were still sighted.

A number of blind people taught music, but most of those blind from birth were confined to sheltered workshops or to assembly jobs or roles as telephonists working the old-fashioned switchboards. After all, since we blind people could not read print, clerical jobs were unavailable to us at that time.

I was born prematurely in Melbourne in 1948, when my mother was forty years old. Because my arrival into the world was between eight and ten weeks early, my breathing was laboured and I was placed in a humidicrib and given pure oxygen. The outer shell of these humidicribs was made mainly of perspex, a material that had been used to manufacture the transparent canopies of fighter-plane cockpits during the Second World War, which had just ended.

Initially weighing three pounds two ounces, I lay in the foetal position in my survivor capsule and breathed in oxygen, while my mum and the caring staff watched over me and monitored my progress. What was not then fully appreciated was that the eye is one of the last organs to develop in vitro. Pure oxygen is far too strong for the developing eye, and consequently, like so many other premature babies at that time, I survived but I lost my sight. This condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia (RLF), or retinopathy of prematurity. Since the mid-1950s, with greater medical knowledge and much more careful oxygen monitoring, it has become a rare condition, certainly in developed countries such as Australia.

My birth was obviously a traumatic event for my parents. I think that my father never really accepted me. I do not remember him ever picking me up or holding me close. He certainly made little attempt to foster a fatherson bond with me. Even now, I cant really guess what was going on in his mindeither with me or my brothers. My blindness seemed to make me something less than whole in his eyes. Did he see it in some strange way as undermining his manhood? In many cultures, especially in the past, children disabled at birth are perceived as being punishment for a parental wrong. Did my dad feel this type of stigma?

On the other hand, my mother was determined that I would survive, entire and whole. She came to the Royal Womens Hospital every day for two months, just to sit by my humidicrib and to be with me. I am sure that her presence greatly assisted my survival.

I was my parents third child. My diminutive mother gave birth to three boysTed, Max and mein the space of three years and one month. No doubt, she must have found herself very busy. By the time of my birth, the family had moved into a two-bedroom Housing Commission home in Raynes Park Road, Hampton, which is a bayside suburb of Melbourne. There were then no paved footpaths, and the major shops were more than a kilometre away.

To go shopping, Mum had to pack us three boys into the stroller and set off for a brisk walk. We didnt own a car, nor did we have a telephone, but this was hardly unusual in young post-war families like ours. Dad worked at the General Post Office in downtown Melbourne, and on occasion he did shift work.

After my birth, I am almost certain that my parents broke off sexual relations altogether, and the strain within the family at times became acute. Even before I was born, Dad had been violent towards my mother, usually when drunk. I cannot know whether this violence or family stress played a part in inducing my premature birth; it is something on which I do not wish to dwell. At this remove, it no longer mattersI was born.

While Dad and I were never close, I was still too young at the time of his death in 1962 to learn much about his life. I do know that his marriage to my mother was his second, and that it was his first family that had kept him out of the First World War. Dads first wife bore him their first childa sonin 1913, then another two sons and one daughter. I suspect that it was Dads remorse about staying at home the first time round that led him to volunteer for service at the beginning of the Second World War. Many young men lied and put their age up in order to enlist, whereas my father pretended he was younger than he actually was.

We three boys knew that Dad had children from a prior marriage: this was not something that was hidden from us. When we were small, I vaguely remember his son Lloyd visiting us with his wife and children. These half-siblings were very much older than us and we treated them more like uncles and aunts. I have stronger memories of Dads daughter, Jean, whom we called Aunty Jean. When she came around, she would say, Got a kiss for your Aunty Jean! At the age of seven or eight, kissing aunties was not high on my priority list.