'Nothing is impossible' - Part 2, chapter 4-8 - The Spastic Centre

to the Hostel as soon as medically possible. The problems which existed at that time, 1952, still exist thirty years later. The
majority of cerebral palsied children could not make their needs known to the nursing staff, because their spasms increased under
the stress of the unfamiliar surroundings. In our Hostel the staff understood their nursing needs. That highlights a fact that I shall
emphasise again and again – that speech is still the major handicap of the cerebral palsied.
Again, as happened in our previous buildings at Mosman, we finished this building without injury to the voluntary workers, though
there were some ‘close shaves’. One voluntary worker was a deserter from a Russian ship; he had no English, but he got a job
with the foreman assisting the plumber engaged in erecting the roof gutter three storeys up on the western end. His ladder had
slipped, resulting in him being suspended by his hands over a partly-secured gutter and shouting directions, and probably
swearing in Russian, to the onlookers. It took two or three minutes to erect the ladder again and to rescue him. He loved the
Sydney beer and his party trick was biting sixpences in half with his teeth!
On another occasion, one of the building workers was at the bottom of a ten metre shaft that had been filled with rainwater; in
the absence of a pump we only had a rope, bucket and windlass. Due to the rain, the slippery sides of the shaft gave way, resulting
in the heavy steel windlass whizzing down to the bottom of the hole, but amazingly the man at the bottom saw it coming and
flattened himself against the wall. He escaped unhurt, with not even a bruise to show for this experience.
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With hindsight, thirty years later, I believe we should have made the bathrooms and the toilets with immediate access to the
dormitories, and possibly the dormitories should have been restricted to six or ten beds. The concrete and brick building does not
readily allow alterations and extensions to be made, and the cost of these has been exorbitant over the past fifteen years. On the
other hand, a more lightly built Hostel, taking advantage of modern building materials, could give us more advantages in
correcting design error. Those advantages would have to be equated with the tendency to extend the use of buildings as long as
they stand up – in Sydney, temporary hospital wards built in the influenza epidemic in 1919, are still in use.
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Completed in 1957, the beautiful Country Children’s Hostel, ‘McLeod House’ at Allambie Heights is a lasting monument to the
voluntary labour of skilled and unskilled city men from all walks of life, who over three years erected the building at weekends at
a cost of $387,000, at a fraction of the cost of paid labour, in order that some unknown country child should have the same chance
in life as city children.
I must pay tribute to the volunteer workers who laboured so successfully over the years from 1946, until their section of the job
came to an end with the building of the Country Children’s Hostel and Centre Industries’ factory in 1961. During those years, we
had teams of two hundred volunteer workers when we had a ‘pour’ of concrete underway. These pages are a tribute to the
kindness and skill of those many hundreds of amateur and professional Sunday builders who wove something of their own
generous spirit into the very fabric of these buildings – in order that some unknown cerebral palsied child should ‘get a break’.
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While the Country Children’s Hostel was building, my family was growing up amid all the traumas, excitement and problems of The
Spastic Centre. It was all worthwhile, but we had to be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the telephone
never stopped ringing and you could not ignore it for fear of a transport breakdown or, much less often, an offer of help.
For example: On one Saturday my wife was suffering from a severe migraine headache when the phone rang and the caller said
that he wanted to come round and have a discussion with me and my wife. Audrie was barely able to lift her head off the pillow,
so in those circumstances I suggested he put the appointment off to the following week. He was evidently miffed, but accepted
my apologies. He arrived at the appointed time on the following Saturday, and presented us with a cheque for one thousand
pounds. Mr Cliff Miller had raised that amount from his associates at the City Markets. For more than thirty years following, he
maintained his identification with fundraising for The Spastic Centre. It taught us a salutary lesson, which we never forgot.
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In the ten years that had elapsed since the Centre’s foundation, we had established a firm financial and technical basis, and it
was time to move out of The Centre and re-establish our own family links. I had a block of land in a suitable position midway
between Mosman and Allambie, and there we built our home.
With Mr Pollock’s supervision, and drawing upon my expertise as an amateur builder, I put in the foundation beams and engaged
a team of bricklayers to build the walls; when this was finished I started single-handed on the roof and floor timbers. I only
worked on Saturdays, because on Sundays I was in charge of the volunteers at the Country Children’s Hostel – so it was slow
work, and one year had gone by since I started on the job.
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