Born at the Right Time Read online

  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, electronic 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 superintendent 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 Protestant 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 significant. 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 detaching 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 interesting 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.

  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 Australian 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 transcribers 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. Obviously 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 excellent 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 re
call on one occasion he took us boys rock climbing on some gentle rock embankments 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 disciplinarian, 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 introduced 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 competition. 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.