By Elizabeth Caffery
This little boy with his compelling eyes and confident stance is Jim Burns. Jim contracted polio in 1919 when he was six years old. He never walked again and lived his remaining sixty years as a paraplegic with severe deformity.
Jim is my uncle. I recently published his story in a book called Captain of his Destiny. The title, based on the poem Invictus, reflects Jim’s determination to defy his disability and live a ‘normal’ life. Jim, the ‘Captain’, was ‘unconquered’ allowing no obstacle to thwart what he wanted to achieve in life.
Music became his world. He was a brilliant violinist and master music teacher. His pupils played in his string orchestras, ensembles and piano accordion bands, with Jim as the conductor. They performed in concerts attended by hundreds of people.
He was an inspiration to countless young musicians and is still respectfully remembered throughout the South Burnett rural community where he lived.
Jim’s accomplishments were astonishing… He folded up his matchstick legs and walked on his hands.
He pedalled his wheelchair, made from a mutilated bicycle, into inconceivable places without assistance. He drove a car towing a caravan around Australia. In his 60s, he travelled overseas with his wheelchair to California, Canada and the UK.
The book took me 45 years to write! I first began to gather stories and materials in 1981 shortly after Jim’s death. It was challenging as Jim left no written life memoir. Then, my family life, my teaching and dairy farming became extremely busy, and I ceased my work on Jim’s book. Following my retirement from teaching in 2005, I resumed writing by compiling local histories.
In 2024, after writing The Heart on the Hill which celebrated the centenary of the Maleny Catholic Church, I made a pledge that it was now time to complete Jim’s book. I was fortunate to find some of Jim’s former pupils and friends, many in their 80s and even in their 90s, who gave me stories. It was a humbling experience to meet with them, listen to them and record their memories.
Because of my close personal connection to Jim, writing his story became a deeply emotional journey – sadness at the gravity of some of his lonely and painful experiences, elation when discovering news reports of his triumphant post war concerts and fulfillment through my opportunity to tell his story to the world.
I wanted to honour this incredible human being – his fierce willpower and extraordinary resilience as he carefully suppressed his constant pain behind his charismatic personality and warm, smiling face. I hoped that the book would speak to the heart of anyone struggling with life’s adversities and become especially empowering for people who live with disability of any kind
It is a story of courage.