Born at the Right Time Read online

  The growing revolution in my life due to assistive technology ran parallel to the blossoming of my marriage and fatherhood. In October 1988, Mary became pregnant again. We were over the moon.

  I had been a senior lecturer since January 1981. On two occasions I had applied, unsuccessfully, for promotion to an associate professorship, the second-highest level on the Australian academic ladder. Given Mary’s pregnancy and the need for greater financial security, I spoke to Professor Francis Trindade. Francis had first taught me in 1968, and he had co-written with me my first article. He understood the changes that were occurring in my life.

  Francis explained that in my unsuccessful applications I had been using academic referees who were friends rather than experts in my field. ‘You actually have to go out and look for referees who have standing and gravitas,’ he said. He advised me to approach referees from significant university law schools, who could independently assess my work.

  By this stage I had published considerably more material, and I did as Francis advised. This time I was successful. I would begin an associate professorship at the beginning of January 1990.

  The assistive technology that had already made major changes to my life kept progressing in leaps and bounds. Although the Keynote Gold computer was fabulous, it didn’t solve the problem of the printed book. Here it was the brilliant American inventor Ray Kurzweil who made the printed word accessible to us blind with a very clever invention.

  In 1974 Kurzweil had worked on developing the first multi-font scanner. At that time, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanners could only scan one or two fonts. Briefly put, Kurzweil invented a machine that was able to scan pages printed in various fonts. When this was combined with Charge Coupled Device (CCD) flatbed scanners and speech synthesisers, it was possible for Kurzweil to build the first reading machine for the blind. It was launched on 13 January 1976 and was rather large—I understand it was about the size of a small washing machine.

  I didn’t get to experience my first Kurzweil reading machine until March 1989, when Lois and I went along to a demonstration held in downtown Melbourne. By that year the Kurzweil reading machine had shrunk to the size of a small table-top sewing machine and it was being marketed in many countries. I remember being so very excited. At last it would be possible for me to read the printed word on my own and without the kind help of others. However, the cost of the Kurzweil machine was approximately $20,000, which was well beyond our budget.

  In early June 1989, a month or so before Daniel’s due date, we went to hospital because Mary was concerned that her labour was coming on early. We ended up spending the day there before the doctors sent us home—it was a false alarm. However, at the time I was under pressure to mark exam papers in what was a relatively short turn-around period between semesters. I was on the lookout for someone to read me those difficult-to-decipher, handwritten scripts; Mary agreed that one way to pass the time while she was lying there that day in a hospital bed would be for her to read to me some exam papers.

  I recall that I gave a Credit grade to one paper. Mary suggested that I was being too harsh and that she would have awarded a Distinction grade. I countered that I had been marking papers for years and that I knew when a student paper was a Credit and when it was a Distinction. A woman in a nearby bed asked us what we were doing. When I explained, she expressed her incredulity. Let me just say, as many teachers can attest, marking can occur in all sorts of places.

  The evening before Daniel’s birth, we returned to the hospital. Given that I couldn’t drive, the hospital staff kindly said that Mary and I could sleep overnight in a little room at the end of the ward. When I woke up, I asked Mary how I could possibly walk through the ward full of ladies in my pyjamas to have a wash. Mary replied that all the women there, including herself, were about to give birth, and that I was ‘hardly of interest to any one of us here’.

  Daniel finally came into this world at 5.04 p.m. on Tuesday, 4 July 1989, around three weeks early but otherwise fine. There were a few scary moments after the birth, but Mary recovered quickly. I looked after two-year-old Gerard while Mary was in hospital for a week. I suspect toddler Gerard was sustained on bottles, chocolate frogs and chocolate custard. However, he is now a big strapping man and no harm came to him from his week-long absence of vegetables.

  We had arranged to have Daniel baptised in our Catholic parish church in August. However, Daniel had some congestion in his little chest and we did not want to take him out of the house on that very cold Sunday. We had, of course, sent out invitations and prepared food. The parish priest who had baptised Gerard agreed to come to our home to christen Daniel. Actually Daniel was baptised in our big salad bowl, and then we all shared a celebratory meal.

  We learned much later and to our great dismay that that priest was a paedophile who had ruined the lives of a number of young people. Perhaps to escape criminal charges, he returned to England, where he died. This was a shock to us both, but it was a bigger shock to Mary. I said that he had only really held our boys when he baptised them. For Mary, however, the fact that he had betrayed trust was a devastation from which I don’t think she has ever fully recovered. After all, trust is an important quality in relationships; in all faiths, trust between clergy and laypersons is, and should be, very special. For the two of us, this discovery (years later) was devastating given our shared passion for young lives.

  As a baby, Daniel was fascinated that I couldn’t see. When he was about sixteen months old, Mary found him wandering around the house with his eyes screwed up tightly to experience how a blind person would navigate around the home.

  I did love bathing our children. When they were very small, I never sought to bathe them in the baby bath without the presence of Mary or Mary’s mum. Once the children were big enough for the proper bath, one of my evening treats was to bathe them. I obeyed all the rules—putting in the cold water first, testing the temperature of the bath water with my elbow and never leaving them alone in the bath. If Mary was away doing her immigration work, or if she happened to be out for a few minutes, or if the doorbell or telephone rang, I simply picked up a protesting child, wrapped him—or her, once Kate came along—in a towel and then answered the door or the phone with the child in my arms.

  I did love the splash of our water play, and also the feel of their soft little bodies as I endeavoured to clean them. Of course being blind I could not see the dirt, but by carefully washing them all over I hoped that it would all rub off. If a child was only a little messy and I was not up to bathing them, then I found that a moist face washer usually did the trick.

  In many ways the bond I shared with Gerard only strengthened as our family grew. Mary always said that I was Gerard’s solace when one day he suddenly found himself abandoned by his mother, and she returned home with—a brother! She was never sure that Gerard ever quite forgave her, although it did not take him long to realise that the new baby had potential as a partner in crime. For his part, Daniel idolised his older brother—and still does, although in some ways they have grown into very different men. He followed Gerard around like a little puppy.

  Unlike his brother, Daniel took a long time to develop speech, although he communicated perfectly with Gerard, who used to translate for him. Gerard was a cautious child, who would think carefully before engaging in risky behaviour. Daniel, however, was the baby who would porpoise-dive out of the cot; or crawl into the garden and plant his face to deliberately fill his mouth with dirt. He was in turn impetuous, hilarious and frustrating. He remains the one of our three progeny who has sustained the most injuries, even though it is Gerard who has chosen a profession (surfing) that is fraught with personal danger.

  Of course, children occasionally mirror some of our failings. Mary told me that one day she found toddler Gerard kicking a toy along the living-room floor saying, ‘Bloody children, bloody children!’ When Mary asked him what he was doing, Gerard simply said, ‘I’m being Daddy.’

  For Mary, these were
years of increasing busyness. In addition to birthing and caring for two children, a huge amount was happening in the area of law she was making her own. The Migration Act had been stable for decades, but suddenly a legal skeleton that had simply vested power in the Minister for Immigration was transformed into a regulatory system big enough to fill two phone books.

  When Daniel was barely five months old, two boats arrived in the north of Western Australia carrying asylum seekers from Cambodia. While Australia had embraced the fugitives from the conflict in Vietnam, the reaction in November 1989 was dramatically different. Then Foreign Minister Gareth Evans labelled these boat people ‘economic refugees’ and stated that the peace deal in Cambodia meant that country was now safe for everyone. The Cambodians were to spend several years in detention in Australia before winning their freedom and (eventually) a new life in this country.

  For Mary, these events marked the beginning of a lifelong career in advocacy and human rights litigation. While at university, she had taught English to Vietnamese migrants admitted to Australia as refugees. This work speaks of her deep compassion. In fact, she was a mover and shaker behind the establishment in Melbourne of the Victorian Immigration Advice and Rights Centre, now known as Refugee Legal.

  It was during these years that we sponsored a young refugee woman from Cambodia (who we called Pheap). She lived with us for a short period before moving in with her sister, Guek, and her family. Mary supported Pheap at school and encouraged her to go to university where she eventually studied law at my old law school at Monash. In later years Mary would support other young refugees from Afghanistan and Pakistan who came to call her ‘Mum’. The most important of these was Riz Wakil, a talented young Hazara man who started his own business as a graphic designer. He has been part of our life ever since.

  Gerard began attending the Monash Family Cooperative Crèche for a couple of days a week in 1989. Later Daniel also spent some time at the crèche. This was where I had visited Mrs Tsai’s kindergarten class as a single man. Suddenly and, so it seemed to me, miraculously—like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis—I had been transformed from a visitor into a fully-fledged parent of crèche children. My paternal longings had turned into parental realities.

  It was around this time that I learned my mum had given birth out of wedlock to a baby boy, Michael, a dozen or so years before she met my father. I was told of this by one of Michael’s children. When I was a small boy, I met Michael a few times, but I don’t remember much about him. Of course I never knew he was my half-brother. He eventually drifted out of contact with our family, although his children remained involved with us even after their mother re-married.

  Although Mum and I were very close, she never breathed a word about any of this. However, once the details of my half-brother’s birth became clear to me, many things fell into place. The truth did not shock me at all, but it made me even more conscious of the burdens carried by so many women of Mum’s generation. In those days, few young women had access to contraceptives, such as they were. I assume that Mum gave birth in a Catholic home for unwed mothers. Her parents, as was the case with many Catholic families at that time, adopted the child when he was a toddler. The family sent Mum away to a live-in job, where she was the nanny to another couple’s children. Mum must have found this heart-breaking. To be denied the care of your own child and to be made to care for other people’s children seems a rather cruel punishment to me.

  I have deep sympathy for my mum because, when I was a young man I longed for children. That longing was exacerbated by the belief that I thought it very unlikely I would ever have children of my own. Her longings must have been intense.

  It will be recalled that when I was seven years old, I had my left eye removed. Thus when I met Mary I had a prosthesis in the left eye socket and a useless and misshapen right eye. A few weeks after Daniel’s birth, Mary sat me down for one of those serious conversations. She asked me to think about my right eye, which was really a dead and useless organ in my body. She explained that its removal might improve my appearance, but, more importantly, it would lessen my headaches. I said I’d think about it.

  In February 1990, at the age of forty-one, I had my right eye removed. It was a more complex operation than we expected. As Mary’s dad, Gerard, explained, some of the fibrous material behind this dead eye had calcified and had to be scraped out. When I woke afterwards, I was in so much pain I couldn’t speak. Mary was holding my hand.

  I heard a member of the hospital staff saying that the operation had gone well and that I was okay. Mary said words to the effect that she knew me and that I looked like I was in considerable pain. The nurse must have changed her mind, because she injected something into my bottom that knocked me out for twelve hours. When I awoke, I was fine. I was so very glad that Mary had had the presence of mind to insist that I be injected with a strong painkiller.

  My set of new plastic eyes was crafted by Patrick Loyer, who was born in France but who settled in Melbourne. Whenever I need a new pair, I fly down to see Patrick. When he makes eyes he looks at the entire person, and he always crafts mine while having regard to the subtle changes in the contours of my face. He is an artist, a dear friend and a true craftsman, and I think that his eyes have played a significant role in helping me secure the positions I have occupied in succeeding years.

  13

  Independence

  Like all babies, I built my life with the senses available to me. I suspect that some of these developed to compensate for my lack of vision.

  If I had to nominate a hierarchy in this respect, I would say that my ‘first’ sense was my sense of smell. Smell is how baby animals identify their mother, their first source of food and nurture. I am not sure how this played out for me, confined as I was to a humidicrib for the first months of my life and with limited experience of being breastfed. I do recall, however, having a very keen sense of smell. Even today, I rely on my ability to smell to help guide me through life’s daily tasks.

  When walking near my home, I identify the local shops from the different odours they emit. The newsagent is distinguished by the rather sharp and dry smells of ink and papers. The fruit shop has that slightly heady aroma of fresh greens and ripe fruit, with sharp variations between the seasons; this shop is particularly delicious at Christmas time. The chemist has its own smell too, with wafts of scent mixed with stranger chemical odours. The shoe repairer smells of boot leather; the drycleaner of acrid chemicals. Then there is an outlet of a large chain sandwich shop, not a place I like to visit but very distinctive in its smells.

  From the early 1990s, traffic lights that made a clicking noise began to appear at crossings. These days in Australia’s capital cities, there are networks of these clicking lights, and for the sight-impaired they take much of the stress out of walking along footpaths and crossing busy streets. Before clicking lights, if I came to a busy corner I would have to hold up my white cane and wait for a passer-by to take me across. Now the clicking lights enable me to safely cross on my own. Another change that took place in the 1990s was the fitting out of ATMs with synthetic speech and braille.

  In about 1990, I estimated that I had some thirty-two kilometres of recorded tape in my Monash University Law School office. I wasn’t very good at either labelling or indexing so many reels of tape, so, rather inefficiently, I relied on my memory. This meant that on occasion friends would see me feeling along my bookshelves and taking down and trying various tapes until I found the correct one.

  Again, it was Professor Francis Trindade who assisted me. He was the major mover and shaker in obtaining external funding so that the Monash Law School could purchase a Kurzweil reader. In November 1989, the Kurzweil machine arrived at the Monash Law School. At the same time my promotion to Associate Professor was announced.

  It’s impossible to explain how I felt when I sat there in front of the Kurzweil reader for the first time. Of course I was anxious to read labour law books; but, as I sat there, I thought that no
w I could read any book whatsoever, whether or not people approved of what I read. No longer did I have to ask people to read books to me; I could do it all by myself. I no longer had to be censored, either by my own shyness or owing to good manners. Never before in the history of our world, had blind people been in this position, where we could scan material and have it read out to us in high-quality synthetic speech.

  The Kurzweil machine’s one disadvantage, if it can really be regarded as such, was that once it scanned a page, it simply spoke it out. There was no way I knew of to attach the Kurzweil to a personal computer to store the spoken word. This may have been owing to my limited technological skills. However, by using a cable to connect a tape recorder to the Kurzweil, I could store onto tape all of the spoken words that had been scanned. The Kurzweil rapidly increased my productivity and I have never looked back.

  In mid-1990, Mary, Gerard, Daniel and I travelled to Toronto, Canada, so that I could take up a semester-long exchange teaching position at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. With two very small boys, settling our family into a new city, albeit for only six months, made it a very busy and demanding time, especially for Mary. I taught comparative labour law at Osgoode and I also read a lot on Canadian evidence law and of course on Canadian labour law. Mary worked on her PhD and she also sat in on courses on Canadian administrative law and immigration law. If that wasn’t enough, Mary undertook voluntary work at Osgoode Hall Law School’s refugee law clinic.

  Three memories from our six months in Toronto come to mind, one frightening, one rather special and one simply humorous.

  Mary, who was only thirty-one at the time, set off on our plane trip with me, plus a three year old and a twelve month old who was just learning to walk. We think that in Hawaii the children ate something that disagreed with them. On the flight from Vancouver to Toronto, both boys fell ill and were overcome by diarrhoea and vomiting. When we landed in Toronto all four of us were rather messy. Mary went off to get our luggage, leaving me with Daniel in the stroller, while I held Gerard, who said he was going to be sick again, up against my shoulder.