ADDC :: Australian Disability & Development Consortium

Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 28/10/2009 Reporter: Kerry O’Brien

Excerpt from Transcript

KERRY O’BRIEN: Therese Rein, disability has been a constant in your life from the very beginning, hasn’t it? Can you briefly recount your father’s story?

THERESE REIN: Yeah, I can do that. Dad grew up actually in Sydney. And he was a rower and a rugby player when he was a boy, always loved planes, joined the RAAF and was in a – was the navigator during the Second World War. He was in a plane that took off and then crashed. And as a result of that, he experienced a severe spinal injury, which progressed into him being a paraplegic.

So he had quite high spinal legion. He was wheelchair user and he was certainly in a wheelchair when I was born.

He decided … he came back from India where he had been in this plane crash and he wanted to go to university. And they – people around him said, “Actually, John, you can’t. You won’t get in because you’ve got a handicap. You’re handicapped, John. Just in case you hadn’t …”

KERRY O’BRIEN: ‘Cause you’re in a wheelchair you can’t study.

Yeah. You won’t be able to physically get to the university. You won’t be able to get up and down the steps in the lecture theatre. You’re not going to be able to do this. I actually think for my dad that was kind of a red rag to a bull, really.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Didn’t people also say, “But you don’t have to worry because you will be on a pension all your life, you’ll have financial support all your life …”?

THERESE REIN: Yeah, they said, John you’re entitled to the total and permanent incapacity pension, you’re a veteran, you’ve done your bit for the nation, mate. So you don’t need to work and you don’t need to do any of those things. The nation owes you.

And I think for dad that wasn’t what he wanted from the nation. What he wanted was to study. And he wanted to do a degree in aeronautical engineering ’cause he had loved planes since the time he was really tiny and had been fascinated by flight.

And so he went to university and he graduated. And he graduated at Sydney Town Hall and got a standing ovation. That’s very special, isn’t it?

KERRY O’BRIEN: And tell me about when he cracked his first job.

THERESE REIN: Yeah, so he then wanted a job and they said the same thing to him, “John, nobody is going to give you a job mate, because you’re handicapped. I think people don’t want sometimes for people to try and fail. I think people don’t necessarily want people to have go in case they’ll be disappointed because living with someone’s disappointment is a very hard thing. So I think they were trying to protect him from disappointment.

And he tried and he applied for job after job after job. And my mum, who was a physio, and

KERRY O’BRIEN: How handy!

THERESE REIN: They met in a hospital – he wasn’t one of her parents. But they met in the hospital and she just encouraged him. She was there, she urged him on. She challenged him. Have another go. Let’s have another go. Let’s try this one.

And eventually somebody gave him a go. Somebody who was an angel in our family history, his name is Keith Thompson, who…

KERRY O’BRIEN: He drove from Melbourne to, I think, Adelaide.

THERESE REIN: He drove from Sydney to Adelaide

KERRY O’BRIEN: For a three three-day tryout.

THERESE REIN: For a three day … three half-day tryout. So he and mum packed up the cars and drove to Adelaide. And he turned up at Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury in Adelaide, and he there meant to be there for half a day. He was meant to go home at lunch time and he didn’t he stayed all day. Wasn’t meant to come back until the Wednesday, turned up on the Tuesday; stayed all day; turned up on the Wednesday, stayed all day; Thursday the same thing and the Friday the same thing.

And at the end of Friday, Keith Thompson came to him and said, “Well, mate, you’ve got the job.” All the other aeronautical engineers are also sitting down.

KERRY O’BRIEN: So what have you learnt from your father in that regard?

THERESE REIN: A number of things. The first thing I learned I think from him, implicitly, was that to find your field of fascination, to find the thing that you find really intriguing. And to put your energy into that because that creates its own energy.

And the second thing I think is something that I actually heard Sir Phillip Craven say at the recent 20th anniversary of the Paralympics in Bonn, and that is that, what Paralympians do – and my dad was a Paralympian. What Paralympians do is they don’t focus on what doesn’t work, they focus on making what does work, work to the max. And that’s what my dad did. And I think I’ve learnt a little bit about how to do that from him.

KERRY O’BRIEN: When you started your business, was it oriented to finding jobs for the disabled?

THERESE REIN: Mmm.

KERRY O’BRIEN: So again, this was the influence of your father?

THERESE REIN: Absolutely. So what happened for me was I studied psychology. I had this really big week where I handed my thesis in on the Tuesday, did my final exam on the Thursday, packed my apartment on Friday, got married on the Saturday, left the country for five years on the Sunday. Came back to Australia five years later not having worked as a psychologist, with two little kids and looking for what job was I going to.

And I started working with people who had had injuries at work and who couldn’t go back to their pre-injury job because of the nature of their injury. And so they felt like they had hit a brick wall. They just didn’t know what they could do. They were not in work. They were on workers compensation, they hated that. It was a lot less money. They hated being dependent and I thought, Aw, I know these people! I know what this feels like.

Often they had depression following all of that. They were at home. They’d lost their occupational identity. And helping them to find out that, that “ah-ha”! That field of fascination and the, “Yep, this is what I can do, rather than what I can’t do.” As soon as I started doing that, I thought that was “ah-ha” for me. This is what I want to be doing with my life, helping people find out what they can do and helping them then get that job and keep the job and regain their confidence and get back on their feet.

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