Born at The Right Time Chapter Sampler

First published in 2019
Copyright © Ron McCallum 2019
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1
Less than Auspicious Beginnings

P
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 edu
cation 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

2 Professor Ron McCallum
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 moni-
toring, 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 father–son bond with me. Even now, I can’t really guess
what was going on in his mind—either 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 Women’s 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 boys—Ted, Max and me—in the space of three years and
one month. No doubt, she must have found herself very busy. By the

Born at the Right Time 3
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 didn’t 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 matters—I 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. Dad’s first wife bore
him their first child—a son—in 1913, then another two sons and one
daughter. I suspect that it was Dad’s remorse about staying at home
the first time round that led him to volunteer for service at the begin-
ning 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 Dad’s 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.
Dad served as a soldier in the Middle East, but he was invalided
out in about 1942. I know nothing of these details. By that time, he
was an alcoholic. There was an eighteen-year age gap between my
parents: Dad was born in 1890 and Mum in 1908. They married in
Melbourne on 6 June 1943. Although I know little about how they
met, both came to the union with some personal baggage. It is fair to
say that theirs was not a happy relationship.
It is said that the effects of war flow down to the succeeding gener-
ations, and my brothers and I saw the truth of that. Dad’s violence
consisted of swearing at and pushing Mum, sometimes knocking her
to the floor. I was terrified, especially as a toddler and small child. To
make things worse, I couldn’t see what was going on. These memories
remain distressing for me, ghosts on which I do not care to dwell.
Although I don’t remember it in great detail because I was barely
three years old, my brothers used to talk about one occasion when
my father took an axe to one of the bedroom doors and we all fled
to a neighbour’s house. The police were called, although in those
days perpetrators of domestic violence were generally let off with a
warning. This saga was told and retold over the years among us three
brothers as though it were some sort of classic rescue folktale.
I do remember, when I was about six, pushing Dad on his legs and
telling him not to hit Mum. But he just swatted me away, in what for
him was a reasonably gentle fashion.
As I sit here, the memories come flooding back. I recall feeling
the bruises on Mum’s elbow after he pushed her over. I remember
touching the part of Mum’s scalp where Dad had pulled out a hunk
of her fine hair. Clearly he was suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder caused by his military service in the war, for which he never

sought or received help, but of course that is hardly an excuse for his
behaviour.
In those days, domestic violence was swept under the carpet. I am
sure that our neighbours knew that Dad was violent towards Mum.
However, it was an unwritten convention in that era that what went
on behind closed doors was not interfered with or even discussed. As
we grew older my father’s health declined and he was less capable of
violent behaviour.
Mum had known several blind people before I came along, which
helped her cope more easily than my father with the challenges
I faced. She insisted on me behaving ‘normally’—for example, she
would scold me if I raised my voice unnecessarily to be understood.
This is what many blind people do, making them rather noisy to be
around. Mum made it clear that I had to learn to survive and to thrive
in a world of sighted people.
I hear you wondering, ‘When did you realise that not being able
to see made you different from others?’ I don’t quite know how to
answer this question. I must have had some knowledge, even before
the age of two, that I could not do some things that others were able
to do. To begin with, ‘they’ had something that prevented them from
falling over, while I fell over far too often.
One memory stands out for me. Just before the coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, when I was four years old, Mum was
reading a story to us three boys. She was explaining the pictures to Ted
and Max; I think the pictures may have been of jewels or crowns or
the pageant—I don’t quite remember. I put up my hands to touch the
book, but of course I couldn’t feel the picture. Mum said, ‘Remember,
darling, that you can’t see—so you can’t see the pictures in this book
and you can’t see the printed words on its pages.’
I think this memory stuck because I loved the stories Mum read to
me. Her words cut into my consciousness. To think that when I grew

up I wouldn’t be able to read stories seemed terrible to me. I still think

that one of the worst things about being blind is not being able to read
the printed word with my eyes. Certainly, by the age of four I knew
what seeing was about, at least in part. I knew that I couldn’t see and
would never be able to see.
Mum ensured that we three brothers treated one another equally.
I remember joining in their games, even the ones I perhaps should
not have. On one occasion we all climbed onto the shed in our back
garden—it was a little more than a metre and a half high. One by one we
jumped off to demonstrate our prowess and bravado. I can remember
Max saying to me: ‘Of course you can—just jump,’ and so I did.
I am pleased that my family was not over-protective and that
they encouraged me to take risks. I say this in spite of the inevitable
injuries that followed. One afternoon, when playing with my brothers
and other children, I slid down a bank on some open land near our
house, which left me with an impressive scar on my right buttock,
courtesy of a misplaced brick on which I broke my fall.
When my second brother, Max, went to school and I was four,
Mum enrolled me in an ordinary kindergarten for a term. My kinder-
garten teacher was very nice, but I do remember being confronted by
the situation that there were some games in which I couldn’t partic-
ipate. However, being in a class with ‘ordinary’ children broadened
my horizons—quite literally as I was no longer confined to our house
and yard.
Of course, Mum taught me how to go to the toilet and how to
dress myself, in the same way as she schooled my big brothers. I also
learned to tie up my shoes after a fashion. Even today, tying shoelaces
up tightly doesn’t come easily to me. I’m not sure why, but this kind
of fine-motor movement has always posed challenges for me.
The mention of shoelaces and trembling fingers evokes for me
cold wintry days in Melbourne. Our house, like most in Melbourne

at that time, didn’t have central heating. There was a fireplace, where
we burned wood, and a small electric radiator heater. I can remember
getting half-dressed under the bedclothes to combat the frosty
mornings. We also used hot-water bottles on freezing nights to warm
our beds and toast our chilly toes. The coldness was accentuated by
the fact that we didn’t have hot water in the home. There was a gas
bath heater to heat up the bath and shower water, but to wash dishes
in the sink meant that we had to boil the kettle.
Many years later, one of the very first things I did when I began to
earn money, was to pay for a hot-water service for the family home.
Even today, I never ever take hot water for granted. I still find it a bit
of a miracle to have piping hot water come straight out of a tap.
Like many other post-war families of modest means, it was many
years before we acquired a refrigerator. Instead, the ice-man came and
delivered cold blocks of ice, which we put in the ice-chest to keep
things cool. Nor did we possess a washing machine. Instead we used
a gas copper to wash our clothes. I remember feeling the stick with
which Mum used to churn the clothes in the hot water. And then there
was the complex task of wringing out the clothes through what was
called a wringer: two rather lethal rollers that could suck in careless
fingers and hands, and squash them flat.
Of course, in those far-off days, disposable nappies had not been
invented. The housework of sixty years ago, almost all of which was
done by women, was hard and gruelling. We children benefited from
Mum’s efforts, perhaps without appreciating the human cost that
she bore.

2
Early School Years, Discovering
Beethoven and Playing Cricket
P
In mid- 1953, when I was four-and-a-half years old and I had

completed a term in the local kindergarten, Mum enrolled me in the
kindergarten class of the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind. This
was a residential school for blind children, situated in the Melbourne
inner-city suburb of Prahran.
I remember some aspects of my first day there quite clearly. Mum
was a fine seamstress and she made most of my clothes. She had
dressed me in one of her beautifully crafted handmade shirts. I was
quite a small four year old and, with her guidance, I spoke very clearly
and politely.
It was a Monday morning when I was introduced to some teacher
or another and was taken away to a room with girls and boys of my
own age. After a little while, I asked when I could see my mum. I was
told by a teacher, no doubt with the best of intentions, that Mum had
gone back home and had left me here playing, but that she would

return on Friday afternoon. I was very disappointed. I would not have

been upset if Mum had come to say goodbye. For me, introductions
and farewells are very special; they serve to book-end events. I still feel
cheated by this slight deception.
I remember the place for its cold, thick stone walls. Children from
metropolitan Melbourne arrived at 9 a.m. each Monday, and went
home on Friday afternoons when school had finished at 3 p.m. Thus
we spent Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights away
from home. Of course this got me away from the tensions of my home,
where violence could unexpectedly break out, but as a pre-schooler
I initially found the nursery dormitory strange and daunting.
I didn’t like some of the boarding-school food, but I do remember
my favourite meal, egg and chips, which we often had on Monday
evenings. Like many post-war kids, we were all given cod-liver oil
to increase our vitamin intake. It tasted really horrible and smelt
even worse.
When Mum and I turned up one Monday morning in February
1954, we learned that a letter had gone out to the parents of all the
boys saying that, as the refurbishment of the boys’ dormitories was
not yet ready, all the boys were to stay home for a couple of weeks.
Unfortunately, Mum hadn’t received the letter, and so I found myself
the only boy in a class of girls. It was decided that I should stay for the
week, and that I could sleep in the old dormitory, which of course
I was used to.
Not only were our sleeping quarters segregated, but there were
separate girls’ and boys’ playgrounds. The reasons for this elude me
completely. It was just how it was: perhaps this reflected the fact that
most private institutions such as schools were segregated by sex. At
recess on that February Monday morning, a couple of the girls who
wanted to do the right thing took me to the entrance of the boys’
playground and told me that I could go and play. I walked into the

playground, but of course there were no other boys and so I began

to cry.
In the distance I heard a radio broadcast via the loudspeakers that
were situated in and around most of the classrooms, all connected to a
transmission source. Radios had always given me a sense of security—
after all, my lack of vision did not affect my hearing. I walked towards
the sound of the broadcast and into an empty classroom. I was still a
small boy and the loudspeaker was high up, so I raised my arms up,
but I still couldn’t reach the voice, which made me cry even more.
Then a teacher came in. He lifted me up, told me that I was okay and
to dry my tears, and I felt much, much better. I think that for the rest
of the week I was allowed to play in the girls’ playground.
In my prep year—or perhaps it was in year one, I don’t quite
remember which—I began to learn braille. This ingenious system
uses raised dots on paper to allow blind people to read. The blind
Louis Braille devised most of this extraordinary invention in 1824,
when he was a fifteen year old living in the dormitory of a French
residential school for the blind.
Imagine a group of six raised dots. This grouping is called a braille
cell. The six raised dots in each cell can be viewed either from each
end (vertically) as two parallel rows of three dots each, or from each
side (horizontally) as three parallel rows of two dots.
If we look at a braille cell from top to bottom, we have two parallel
rows of three dots each. We call the dots in the left-hand parallel row,
dots one, two and three. The three dots on the right-hand parallel
row are called dots four, five and six. Put together your index, middle
and ring fingers from both hands and you’ve got it. Your six fingers
represent the dots and they will be in two rows of three dots. Louis
Braille worked out that in a braille cell of six dots, there are sixty-three
possible combinations of dots. For example, the letter A is dot one,
B is dots one and two, and C is dots one and four. Braille consists of

the alphabet, and also various shorthand symbols. For example, the
shorthand for the word ‘the’ is dots two, three, four and six.
Before machines for writing braille were invented, braille frames
were used to ensure the even spacing of the dots. A braille frame
contains lines of cells with six places in each cell where one can
puncture the paper with a stylus and make dots on the underside of
the paper. When the paper is turned over, a blind person can feel the
dots through the pads on both index fingers, and work out the letters
and the symbols. All of us, blind and sighted, read from left to right.
However, the person who is writing the braille on the braille frame
(they were called braille transcribers) must always write the braille
letters backwards and from right to left. Remember that when you
push through dots onto paper, the dots come out on the other side
of the paper.
When I began to learn my braille letters, I used what was called a
braillette board. It had groups of six holes in the form of the braille
cell, and to make the letters, one pushed pins into the holes. The
pins had round heads on them, which meant I could easily feel each
letter and could learn to put them together into words. Once I had
mastered my letters, I used a braille frame to learn to transcribe the
letters backwards and from right to left. These days, of course, elec-
tronic braille displays mean that children never have to learn their
braille back to front. When I was a little older, I learned the symbols
for braille music. Again, I had to be taught to transcribe these musical
symbols from right to left.
I learned my numbers on a board called the Taylor slate. It was
devised in 1836 by the Reverend William Taylor who was super
intendent of the Yorkshire School for the Blind in England and was
originally known as the ‘ciphering tablet’. This board consisted of
many star-shaped octagonal holes into which one could fit square
pegs made of lead. On the top of the square peg was a bar, while at

its bottom were two raised dots. By turning the square peg in the
octagonal hole, one can feel either the bar or the two dots in eight
different positions. These angles correspond to various numbers.
Interestingly, the Taylor slate appears to be remarkably similar to the
board used by Nicholas Saunderson, who was a blind mathematician
who lived in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. He taught mathematics at Cambridge University.
I had a truly remarkable teacher—a young and highly gifted
woman named Evelyn Maguire—in years one and two, and also for a
time in prep class. One of my most treasured memories is of Evelyn
reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to our year two
class. It is still among my favourite books.
Another of my cherished memories of being with Evelyn was
when she took several of us into town to meet participants in the
1956 Olympic Games. We met a man from Belgium to whom Evelyn,
who had been raised in Vietnam, spoke in flawless French. I was
truly amazed that Evelyn could speak another language. We also met
several young American sailors, who were the first Americans I had
encountered. Of course they had real American accents, like those
I had heard on the radio, and they were all so very tall. They picked
me up and let me wear their sailors’ hats.
Evelyn challenged me and always answered my questions. One
day, something about babies being born came up in class. Evelyn
explained that women had a hole through which babies came out.
I asked her could I please feel her hole? She told me that that was
something I would have to discuss with my wife when I was married.
Evelyn lived well into her eighties. When we chatted in her senior
years, Evelyn was still amused by this story.
The Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind contained not only our
school; it also housed a sheltered workshop in which blind people,
mainly men, made cane baskets and straw brooms. Before the days of

ubiquitous plastic bags, people used cane baskets for their shopping.
I believe it was a badge of honour to purchase a basket, or a bassinet
for that matter, that had been made by the blind.
The sheltered workshop, which was known as ‘the factory’, was
separated from our school playground by a fence. We could hear
their knock-off hooter each afternoon. One day, when I must have
committed some transgression, a staff member yelled at me that once
I turned sixteen I would be out of her hair and I would find myself on
the other side of the fence, making baskets.
I was not finding life good at that time. There were the stresses of
domestic violence at home and at school I was being bullied by some
older boys. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was smarter than these
bullies, but to be told that I would be making baskets in the factory was
the last straw. I remember sitting on Evelyn’s lap and crying. She must
have told me—and this I remember—that I was going to do better
things than to make baskets. This gave me the courage to hang on.
Thinking back, it is hard to recapture the sectarianism that was
endemic in the Australia of the 1950s. From my memories and from
what I have learned since, the Institute for the Blind was a very Protes-
tant charity, full of noble ideas about how the blind should be assisted.
I don’t wish to exaggerate, but in some way we Catholic kids were
made to feel lesser than the other children. It is difficult to understand
at this remove, but the Catholic–Protestant divide was most certainly
present in the Australia of the mid-fifties, no doubt a hangover
from Australia’s first white settlement in 1788. These memories of
exclusion have led me to feel deep sympathy for my Australian sisters
and brothers of the Muslim faith, who are now seen as lesser citizens
by the Christian Anglo-Celtic majority.
Brother Patrick O’Neill, a Christian Brother, was a towering figure
in my primary school education whom I first met when I was in year
one at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind. He and two very

kind older ladies would come in to give us Catholic children religious

instruction. Brother O’Neill was born in 1886, as one of eleven
children of a farming family in Ireland. He had very poor sight, and
he joined the Christian Brothers’ novitiate in 1901 when he was only
about fourteen years old.
I believe that he promised the Virgin Mary or God that, if he
could retain his sight he would become a missionary. He arrived in
Australia in 1906, and twenty years later he lost his remaining sight.
For more than forty years, right up to his death in 1968, he worked
tirelessly for the blind, especially in Victoria.
Two memories stand out from these early religious-instruction
sessions, which were conducted after regular school on Wednesday
afternoons at the Institute. After much pleading on my part, I was
permitted to stay on to attend the senior religious class. I wanted
to be with the older group because their teacher was reading them
a story about a little boy named Eustis, who hid in the catacombs
with his family to escape persecution from the Romans. No doubt he
wished to keep away from the lions, which were fed Christians in the
Coliseum. I don’t think that I was particularly religious, but I loved
history and stories; I had little access to reading material, and was
delighted to listen to stories in any form.
The second memory that comes to mind is far more signifi-
cant. In 1956, Brother O’Neill took several of us to meet Archbishop
Daniel Mannix, who was then over ninety years old. Patrick O’Neill
and Daniel Mannix, being Irish down to their boot-straps, went back
a long way, which explained Brother O’Neill’s ability to get us an
audience with this famous man. We were told that the Archbishop
was not simply a very famous person, he was also a very holy man.
We were instructed to call him ‘Your Grace’ and told to kiss his ring.
I vividly remember sitting on the old man’s lap and asking to feel
his ring. I remarked that it slipped round and round. The Archbishop

replied that it had fitted him more firmly when he was a younger man
and had had thicker fingers. It was not until I studied Australian history
that I realised the significant role Archbishop Mannix had played in the
anti-conscription campaigns during the First World War.
When I was seven years old and in year two, it was necessary for
my left eye to be removed and replaced by a plastic prosthesis. My
retrolental fibroplasia had caused blood vessels to grow in the back of
my eyes and destroy the basic structures required for sight by detach-
ing my retinas away from the optic nerves. Both of my eyes were, to
say the least, messy; they were virtually dead organs. Worse than that,
the blood vessels fibrosed and became hard over time, causing me a
lot of pain and headaches.
I was referred to Dr Hugh Ryan. I liked Dr Ryan’s waiting room
because it contained a series of steps that I loved to run up and down.
Some of the women and men who were in the waiting room were
very concerned about me playing on the stairs. I remember Dr Ryan
coming out and saying, ‘Ron, of course you can run up and down my
stairs. You are such a clever boy.’
I had my eye removed at the private section of St Vincent’s
Hospital, which was known as Mount St Evans. Having my left eye
removed at the age of seven was much less traumatic than when I had
the second eye removed at the ripe old age of forty-one. I must have
seemed a rather articulate, if not precocious little boy, albeit very
small and slight in stature. For whatever reason, the staff didn’t think
I would like the children’s ward, so after the operation I was put in a
room with five or six older men.
Once I had recovered sufficiently, I had fun climbing into bed
with each of my fellow patients, apart from one gentleman who had a
sore leg. I was cuddled and read to, and enjoyed lovely conversations.
I was probably even given chocolate. In retrospect, this was the kind
of contact with grown men I had never had before, and I loved it.

That same year I encountered my first wire audio recorder. It was

demonstrated to us at school and I was allowed to talk on it for a
whole minute. I think I spoke about creating a raffia serviette ring.
Even at the age of seven I could see that this was going to be inter-
esting and important for us. These machines were the first primitive
magnetic recorders, using magnetised wire as thin as fishing line to
capture sounds such as music and speech. I recognised the potential
of this technology. Stories and small books could be read into these
machines and played back to listen to as many times as the listener
wished.
P
My life underwent a subtle but important change the following year.
The St Paul’s School for the Blind, Melbourne’s first Catholic blind
school, had been established through the work of Brother Patrick
O’Neill, and I joined the first intake of students in February 1957.
The transition from the Blind Institute to St Paul’s was hardly
traumatic. When the school began, several of us moved there
together, including my good friend Peter Walsh, who had been with
me since prep. I left those cold stone walls of the Blind Institute; gone
was the sheltered workshop across the other side of the playground
fence, standing as a reminder of the limited futures then facing blind
children.
I found myself for the first time in an extraordinarily large house.
The school was located in an old Victorian-era mansion in Fernhurst
Grove, Kew. It had a kitchen and bedrooms, and even a ballroom.
It was the first large house I had ever seen. By ‘seeing it’, I mean the
understanding I gained walking inside the building, learning of its
size by pacing out its rooms and listening to the echoing sounds of
voices and footsteps.

In spite of its grand dimensions, St Paul’s was smaller than the

Blind Institute, but it had a family atmosphere and I was much, much
happier there. Instead of stone walls, the mansion had beautiful wood
panelling, which I loved to feel. The smell of greenery was all around
me.
It is hard to reconstruct the height of adults whom one has known
during childhood and early adolescence, but from my recollections
Brother O’Neill probably stood only a little over five feet tall in the
old measurements. Because he had come from such a large family,
perhaps he lacked proper nutrition as a small boy.
Brother Patrick O’Neill was, however, a complex man. He was
sometimes pugnacious and a little short- tempered. However, he
was obviously a very shrewd businessperson and, on occasion,
charming in that special Irish way. On the other hand, he was very
nineteenth-century Irish in his outlook. He regaled us with stories of
what he regarded as the British occupation of his country throughout
his childhood.
Brother O’Neill was something of a visionary, for all his lack of
sight. He had seen so many changes in his long life, from aircraft
to radio, to television and tape recorders and orbiting satellites.
I remember him saying that one day there would be ‘some kind of
band around the earth that will allow people to communicate with
each other’. He reassured me that, in ways he didn’t quite know,
I would experience technological advances in my lifetime that would
enable me to read. How right he was.
St Paul’s School began with very few resources. Brother O’Neill
had to gather volunteer braille transcribers so we would have Aus
tralian books to read. From the late nineteenth century, right up until
the 1960s and beyond, books in braille in this country were mainly
created by volunteers, most of whom were women. These tran
scribers copied printed texts by brailling them out. This was usually

done by punching in one dot at a time with a stylus. For example,

the letter O is made of dots one, three and five, so the transcriber
had to punch in these three dots to reproduce the letter O. Obvi-
ously each transcriber had to learn braille, including all of the braille
symbols and contractions. It must have taken a great deal of effort to
find and train up the number of experts that we had available to us.
Without these transcribers I would not have received such an excel-
lent primary education.
My first teacher at St Paul’s was Bill Holligan, and I was among his
first students. He had barely left school himself, being only nineteen
or twenty. Bill was as much a young uncle as he was a teacher. Like us
students, he sought to master braille. In fact, he was learning braille
while trying to teach us its finer points.
Our first classroom was in the garage of the Fernhurst Grove
mansion. Every morning Bill would arrive on his motorbike and park
it at the back of the classroom. We loved it when he read to us, and
he always treated us as thoroughly normal children. I recall on one
occasion he took us boys rock climbing on some gentle rock embank-
ments near the Yarra River. Standing and belaying, he lowered us
down on the rope. We just loved it.
I was with Mrs Essie Eather for four years from years five through
to eight. Essie was then aged in her early fifties. She was a stern disci
plinarian, but Essie really loved us. I don’t think that you can be a
truly good teacher unless you love your students, and I have tried to
follow Essie’s example throughout my life.
Essie taught me all of my subjects including French, mathematics,
history and English. She encouraged me to work hard on English
grammar, a critical tool to acquire for any communicator. She intro-
duced us to debating, with the assistance of her son Gary who was
then studying law at the University of Melbourne. Gary went on to
become a distinguished Melbourne solicitor. Interestingly, Essie also

saw the law as a potential occupation for me. She read to us every day,
and she instilled in me a love of poetry. I particularly enjoyed the light
Australian poems of Banjo Paterson and CJ Dennis’s The Songs of a
Sentimental Bloke.
Finally (and I can hear her voice while writing this more than a
half century later), Essie used to tell us that we would be ambassadors
for blind people throughout our lives. We should be ever conscious,
she said, of our potential impact on those around us. Again, I have
tried to take her words to heart.
Another of my special teachers at St Paul’s School was Hugh
Jeffries. It was he who introduced me to the blind cricket compe-
tition. Hugh was born in 1917. He had some sight, but by the time
we met, all of his peripheral vision had disappeared. Hugh taught
music, but I can’t help thinking that if he had been able to use the
information technology that is now available to me his career would
have taken another path. He was interested in business and in politics.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, he possessed a broad view of the
world. It was true then, as today, that the vast majority of blind people
live in developing countries, and Hugh showed deep compassion for
the millions of blind people denied the assistance that we enjoyed.
When St Paul’s was established, Hugh was appointed head
of music. He taught me the piano and how to read braille music.
Although he could not see anything at that time, he also taught
partially sighted students to read printed music. He told me he could
see the music lines and staves in his head.
I well remember when I was about ten years old, Hugh played
us Beethoven’s magnificent Fifth Symphony. He also loved the music
of Johann Sebastian Bach, inculcating in me a passion for classical
music that I have carried with me ever since. Hugh taught me musical
appreciation to year eleven, and it was a subject I enjoyed and which
presented no difficulties for me.

By the 1960s, mechanical braille printing presses had been

invented but, to the best of my knowledge, no such press was yet
operating in Australia. The printed books St Paul’s purchased came
mainly from the Royal National Institute for the Blind in England.
We received some American books, but they were mainly on religious
topics. Thus, my early education was very British indeed. I remember
in years three and four that the two most interesting books I read were
With Scott to the Pole, about Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedi-
tion to the South Pole, and The Nine Days Wonder, which chronicled
the nine days in May/June 1940 when small craft took the retreating
British army off the Dunkirk beaches and back to safety in Britain.
Somewhat differently from sighted children of my time and age,
I read far more English than Australian books.
I devoured all of the historical books in the tiny St Paul’s library,
and I found the lack of books to be a real problem, which continued
throughout my life. Of course, the information technology advances
over the past thirty years have given me an abundance of literature
that I never could have previously imagined.
In his own way, Brother O’Neill seems to have had an idea that
I could become a lawyer. After some three or four years at the school,
in an endeavour to encourage me, I remember him speaking to me of
Dudley Tregent, the first blind lawyer of whom I became aware.
Dudley was blinded in October 1918 while serving in the artillery on
the Western Front. He lost his sight shortly before the armistice, having
just celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Having matriculated before he
joined up in 1915, upon his return to Australia Dudley decided to enrol
in Arts and Law at the University of Melbourne. With help from the
newly formed Australian Repatriation Department, he succeeded and
was admitted to legal practice in 1925. He established Dudley Tregent
and Co, which proved to be a very successful Collins Street law firm.
I recall meeting Dudley at a function many years later, probably when

I was studying law myself. My recollection is that he was very polite,

and had the high treble voice and the very soft hands of an old man.
At St Paul’s School, life was very busy. Every morning, we got up,
washed and dressed, and then we all had to make our beds. As we
wore uniforms, I didn’t have to worry about colour coordinating my
clothing. I simply had to change my shirt, underwear and socks and
find my pants from where I had thrown them the night before. I found
tying my tie to be relatively easy. As a parent, I had no difficulty in
teaching our two sons to arrange this aspect of their school uniforms.
One skill I have never mastered, though, is that of the manicurist. As a
child, Mum used to cut my nails. Without my Mary, this is still a task
that can lead to nasty injuries if I am left to my own devices.
Being at a residential school, I suspect, is a bit like growing up as a
child on an Israeli kibbutz. We were like siblings—in our underwear
together. There could be no real secrets. That special relationship
endures even today. Former President of the World Blind Union,
Ms Maryanne Diamond, was also a St Paul’s alumna. There was no
bullying and I had space to grow.
With the help of my friend Peter Walsh, I began listening to
short-wave radio broadcasts in about 1961. Short radio waves enable
broadcasting from one country to another and, before the advent
of the internet, this was an important way of disseminating news.
I listened to short-wave broadcasts fairly constantly, right up to when
I was a young lecturer in law at Monash University. The BBC, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Voice of Germany and
Radio Netherlands gave super news coverage. They also broadcast
innovative programs on a variety of topical and thought-provoking
subjects. As I couldn’t read newspapers, these broadcasts gave me a
window into politics and social movements throughout the world.
I also listened to Radio Moscow, Radio Beijing and, after the Russian
takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to Radio Prague.

I am sure that this short-wave listening greatly broadened my

horizons. After all, the ABC of the early 1960s had very few current-
affairs programs. If I hadn’t had short-wave access to the BBC, my
outlook would have been far less informed. At St Paul’s I also became
more familiar with a new development in tape recorders: the mag
netised wire had been replaced by more durable magnetic tape.
As I got older, sport became a more important part of my life. As
was the case with other residential blind schools, we used guide ropes
for track-and-field work. These ropes were strung across the sports
field in parallel lines, supported by poles. The blind runner would
hold a sliding handle attached to the rope, being guided along the
length of the rope. On sports days, I enjoyed the hop-skip-and-jump
and became reasonably good at it.
At the age of thirteen, I joined one of four blind cricket teams
in Victoria. We played on Saturdays at what was then the Victorian
Association of the Blind’s ground at Kooyong. The competing teams
were made up of men and boys, with some members being totally
blind, and others partially sighted. It was here that I first met fine men
who had spent all of their lives in sheltered workshops.
I believe that blind cricket was a game devised by blind men
who were employed as basket makers. The men used their skills to
construct cricket balls of cane or wicker. To ensure that the balls made
a noise, they were filled with beer-bottle tops. They were weighted
with a piece of lead, to give them substance and potential bias. The
rules of blind cricket require the bowler to bowl under-arm. For the
ball to make a noise, it must bounce at least once before and once
after the halfway line of the cricket pitch.
I was a bowler, and before bowling a ball I had to call ‘Right!’ to
the batter. The batter then would reply ‘Right!’, after which I would
call ‘Play!’ and bowl the ball. To make it easier for batter, bowler and
fielders, batters batted one at a time. This meant that the bowlers

always bowled from one end, and the batters always batted from the
other. Batters who were totally blind were allowed to have one of
the partially sighted team members as a runner. So, when I batted
and I hit the ball, my team mate would run for me. This is a sport
I enjoyed into my early university years. It helps explain my con
tinuing fascination with all aspects of domestic and international
cricket.
P
In 1959 my oldest brother, Ted, left school aged fourteen. This was
permitted under the law at that time. He started out taking a series of
odd jobs, but later carved out a fine career in the transport industry
with a multi-national firm, working his way up from driving trucks
into middle management.
After finishing year six at our local Catholic school, my second
brother, Max, moved to Hampton High School, where he stayed up
until mid-way through year twelve. He left school to work for an insur-
ance company, moving on later to employment in the Weather Bureau,
where he developed expertise in the emerging field of computing.
My general living skills improved as I got older. Even as young
as seven, I would help my brother Max prepare Mum’s coffee and
take it in to her. In those days of relative privation, we used a liquid
substance called coffee essence (derived from chicory), which came
in a bottle. When a little of it was dropped into boiling water the
concoction tasted a little like coffee. We had no electric toaster at
that time, so we used to put bread under the griller of our gas stove.
Max and I made fine toast. My mum ensured that my blindness
did not in any way exempt me from household chores. From my
early years, I took turns with my brothers to dry and later to wash
the dishes.

In my last two years at St Paul’s we were given cooking lessons

on Monday evenings after school. The staff were concerned about
us using knives, so they were forbidden. However, I learned the rudi-
ments of baking and I loved cracking eggs into bowls. This early
training helped me later on. In many respects my early schooling gave
me the basics of life skills that would carry me into adulthood.

Born at The Right Time Chapter Sampler

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First published in 2019

Copyright © Ron McCallum 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

Allen & Unwin

A catalogue record for this

ISBN 978 1 76087 501 5

Set in 11/16 pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 4 8/4/19 2:39 pm

Less than Auspicious Beginnings

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 1 8/4/19 2:39 pm

these humidicribs was made mainly of perspex, a material that had

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 2 8/4/19 2:39 pm

time of my birth, the family had moved into a two-­bedroom Housing

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Born at the right time_TXT.indd 4 8/4/19 2:39 pm

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 5 8/4/19 2:39 pm

up I wouldn’t be able to read stories seemed terrible to me. I still think

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Born at the right time_TXT.indd 7 8/4/19 2:39 pm

In mid-­ 1953, when I was four-and-a-half years old and I had

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 8 8/4/19 2:39 pm

return on Friday afternoon. I was very disappointed. I would not have

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 9 8/4/19 2:39 pm

playground, but of course there were no other boys and so I began

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Born at the right time_TXT.indd 12 8/4/19 2:39 pm

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kind older ladies would come in to give us Catholic children ­religious

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 14 8/4/19 2:39 pm

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 15 8/4/19 2:39 pm

That same year I encountered my first wire audio recorder. It was

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 16 8/4/19 2:39 pm

In spite of its grand dimensions, St Paul’s was smaller than the

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 17 8/4/19 2:39 pm

done by punching in one dot at a time with a stylus. For example,

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 18 8/4/19 2:39 pm

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 19 8/4/19 2:39 pm

By the 1960s, mechanical braille printing presses had been

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I was studying law myself. My recollection is that he was very polite,

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 21 8/4/19 2:39 pm

I am sure that this short-­wave listening greatly broadened my

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Born at the right time_TXT.indd 23 8/4/19 2:39 pm

In my last two years at St Paul’s we were given cooking lessons

Born at the right time_TXT.indd 24 8/4/19 2:39 pm

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time of my birth, the family had moved into a two-bedroom Housing

In mid- 1953, when I was four-and-a-half years old and I had

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