Ron McCallum

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Professor Ronald Clive McCallum, AO (b. 1948) is an Australian legal academic. He is an expert in labour law, and has served as a Professor and Dean of Law at the University of Sydney. He is the first totally blind person to be appointed to a full professorship in any subject at any university in Australia or New Zealand, as well as the first to become a Dean of Law in those countries.^[1]

[edit] Early life

McCallum was born in Melbourne ten weeks premature and weighing only three pounds. At the time, treating this required placing the baby in a humidicrib with uncontrolled oxygen. While this prevented McCallum from dying, it meant that he permanently lost his sight.

His father, Patrick McCallum, who had suffered from post-traumatic stress due to his participation in World War Two, died during McCallum's childhood. He was thus raised by his mother, Edna McCallum, along with his two brothers Maxwell and Edward in the Melbourne suburb of Hampton, in relatively poor conditions. He attended schools for the blind, where it became apparent that he was intellectually gifted.

His last 4 years of schooling were spent at St Bede's College in Mentone. 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. He studied labour law - a course he claims to have taken only because it fitted his timetable. The subject changed the course of McCallum's life forever. He has said that, within the first few weeks of the course, "suddenly the law made sense and my life made sense".^[2] He graduated from Monash Law School with a Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1970, and a Bachelor of Laws in 1972. At age 36, McCallum met Mary Crock, a graduate from the University of Melbourne, whom he married a year later. They now have three children Gerard, Daniel and Kate.

[edit] Professional career

Upon graduating, he went into academia, becoming a law lecturer at Monash.^[3] He became increasingly well known for his work on labour law, and has published 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 world-wide 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 Professor of Law at Sydney University. Nine years later, he commenced a five-year term as Dean of Law.

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. He has also done extensive work for the blind as the Chair of Radio for the Print Handicapped of New South Wales Co-operative Ltd, a company that operates radio 2RPH, which reads newspapers and magazines for blind and for other print handicapped listeners over the air. Since 2006, he has been a member of the Board of Vision Australia Pty Ltd, and in November 2006 he was appointed as one of the two Deputy-Chairs of this Board. He has received a Centenary Medal for his work, and in 2006 was made an Officer in the Order of Australia.^[4]

McCallum made headlines in 2005 by his criticism of John Howard's government's WorkChoices legislation, a policy he claims is fundamentally flawed.^[5]

McCallum retired from his position as Dean of Sydney Law School in 2007.^[6]

[edit] References