Life on the West Island - Born at the right time

This year, one of the West Island’s most beloved institutions is recognising a significant anniversary. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is celebrating 20 years of its flagship radio programme, Conversations, which began in 2005 as Conversations with Richard Fidler. In the past few years, Sarah Kanowski has joined Richard and the two now intersperse their fascinating five days a week hour-long talks with a range of famous and not-so-famous guests.

To celebrate their anniversary, in August the hosts are rebroadcasting 20 of their favourite conversations with notables including Alan Alda, Jennifer Saunders, Bryan Brown and Stan Grant. But most are with people you may never have heard of, but who have remarkable life stories to relate. These include Charles Lomu, the Tonga-born barber who helps boys to become men; Vickie Roach on her turbulent life in and out of gaol and strife; Iraq war correspondent Michael Ware on surviving PTSD; and Sharonne Zaks, who revolutionised dentistry by helping patients to overcome fear. Among this superb collection, perhaps the most moving has been the story of the man who wrote the memoir Born at the Right Time.

Ronald McCallum was born in 1948 in Melbourne, ten weeks premature and weighing only three pounds. At the time, premtaturity was treated by placing the baby in a humidicrib with uncontrolled supplemental oxygen. While this treatment prevented McCallum from dying, it meant that he permanently lost his sight. He was diagnosed with retrolental fibroplasia, which left him totally blind from two days old. (Singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder, born in 1950, was blind from shortly after birth due to the same treatment.) His father, Patrick McCallum, who had post-traumatic stress due to his experiences in World War II, died during McCallum's childhood. He was raised by his mother, Edna McCallum, along with his two brothers in the Melbourne suburb of Hampton, in modest circumstances.

In his Conversation with Richard Fider, Ron explained his successful lifelong strategy to cope with blindness. He learned Braille at an early age, and attended schools for the blind, where it was quickly recognised that he was a gifted student. The only member of his family to finish Year 12, McCallum achieved outstanding results, and was accepted to study law at Monash University. Though he had originally planned to be a history teacher, he was encouraged by his mother to try law for a year. At the time, prospects for blind people to have careers outside sheltered workshops were few.

So determined was Ron to become a lawyer, he completed his studies by having friends and fellow students read his textbooks aloud onto cassette tapes. He estimates he has 84 kilometres of these tapes.

While at university, McCallum studied labour law. He has said that, within the first few weeks of the course, suddenly the law made sense and my life made sense. He graduated from Monash Law School with a Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1970, and a Bachelor of Laws in 1972. He later pursued graduate studies in Canada at the Queen's University Faculty of Law, earning his LL.M. in 1974.

Upon graduating, he went into academia, becoming a law lecturer at Monash University. He became increasingly well known for his work on labour law, and he ublished 10 books on the topic, as well as numerous chapters, journal articles and papers. He was invited to teach at Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and Duke University in the United States. While in North America, he was appointed to the National Academy of Arbitrators. In this role, he has participated in five worldwide comparative labour law studies which have been published in what is now titled the Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal.

In January 1993, he was appointed the foundation Blake Dawson Waldron Professor of Industrial Law at Sydney University. Nine years later, he commenced a five-year term as Dean of Law. McCallum is the first totally blind person to be appointed by any university in Australasia to a full professorship in any field or as Dean of Law.

At age 37, McCallum married Mary Crock, a B.A., LL.B., and PhD (Law) graduate of the University of Melbourne and now Professor of Law at the University of Sydney. They have two sons and a daughter.

In the 1970s, Ron started to use the earliest versions of text to speech computing, for the first time putting him on equal academic footing with his sighted colleagues. He has since been an earlier adopter of many electronic aids for blind people and has become a mentor to numerous other individuals in their use.

In a lifetime of multiple honours and achievements, McCallum is the inaugural president of the Australian Labour Law Association, and the Asian regional vice-president of the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law. In 2008, McCallum was elected to the first United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,which monitors compliance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities In February 2009, he was appointed inaugural Rapporteur to the Convention and in October was elected chair of the committee, a role which he still retains.

He has also done extensive work for the blind as the Chair of Radio for the Print Handicapped, which reads newspapers and magazines for blind and for other print disabled listeners over the air. Since 2006, he has been a member of the Board of Vision Australia. He has received a Centenary Medal for his work, and in 2006 was made an Officer in the Order of Australia. Then in January 2011 he was named as Senior Australian of the year.

Because of the great advances in technology for blind persons over his lifetime, Ron believes that he was born at the right time. Given his influence and achievements, it was also the right time for the West Island, which owes a debt of gratitude to the ABC for sharing his story on Conversations.