By BERNADETTE CLOHESSY

This article appeared in the Sunday Age Life section on October 14, 2001 (Page 19)

"At any time in my childhood, I would have given anything, promised anything, for the miracle of complete recovery from the disabling after-effects of my polio I daydreamed that I would dance in red shoes, like the little girl in the Grimm story. She had her feet cut off so I changed the ending to one where I was skipping to school in my beautiful new shoes, mingling with the crowd of other kids, admired for my smart new shoes on my normal-looking feet, invisible in every other way."

So Rhonda Galbally writes in her memoirs, though it's hard to imagine her wanting to be invisible. Best-known for getting tobacco advertising out of sport, she has received an Order of Australia for her services to the community.

These days she has a regular spot on 3LO, discussing health issues with Tony Delroy; she often shares a stage with Sir Gustav Nossal to promote Bill Gates world vaccination program; and her latest venture, www.ourcommunity.com.au, is a website designed to help community groups find funding.

Her biggest challenge, though, has been coming to terms with her own disability. She was just 13 months old when she contracted polio in 1949 and was whisked off to hospital in the middle of the night where she remained on and off for the next two years.

Her parents, Vic and Louise Samuel, had to face a lot of heartache because of the cruel myths surrounding the disease. "My father has told me stories about times when he used the telephone box to ring the hospital to see if I was still alive and people would come along and disinfect it," Galbally says.

She still wears a caliper on one leg and walks with the aid of arm crutches but it doesn't hinder her work. ( "I think it gives her an extra strength," says her business partner Denis Moriarty.)

When we first meet she is giving a talk to a group of physiotherapists studying for their masters degrees at Melbourne University. She's reading a chapter of her memoirs which deals, in part, with her own memories of the medical treatment she received.

The traditional method was to keep the patient completely immobilised. Galbally was strapped into a splint for long periods, especially at night. "The end result was that you wasted away," she recalls. Then came the constant physiotherapy. Even as a very young child, she was very feisty, which led to some pretty torrid struggles with her physiotherapist, Pat Cosh.

"She'd come to our home and I'd crawl off," Galbally says laughing. "Pat says she remembers me yelling at her and her chasing me all over the floor. I used to have to do exercises on the kitchen table. And I wanted to be out with the kids. I would kick at Pat and the other physios. Once I flung myself off the kitchen table and broke my leg. I endured a frightening operation that made no difference at all," she recounts to the health professionals. "I was still disabled, still different from all the other kids."

She had to wear calipers on both legs, which meant she was often labelled as a cripple. "Each year, I was taken to Government House with other crippled children. I felt tremendous ambivalence about it. I remember it being great because you got lovely afternoon tea and a present, and my brother, Martin, did too. But the feeling of being really patronised and of being a charity case gave me a strong aversion to charity and how terrible and humiliating it can be."

Galbally's mother (a teacher) and her father (a factory manager) tried all kinds of treatments to restore their daughter to "normality" and spare her the discrimination. She was completely integrated in the state system at both primary and secondary levels. And for most of those years, Galbally says she was in "healthy denial" of her disability.

Meeting with her on a Tuesday morning at the headquarters of Our Community in a converted warehouse in West Melbourne, she has the aura of someone completely confident in herself.

She's very quietly spoken and I have to lean across the table to catch every word but they flow out without much prompting. As we talk, she sips weak herbal tea, perhaps a legacy from her health promotion days. Behind her, there's a large Adam Nudelman oil canvas of a line of empty shoes heading out through an open door.

"I don't think I showed a lot of promise in high school," she says. "I didn't push myself. Where I became determined was in work; that's where I really came into my own." Galbally has been CEO of one company after another, including the Myer Foundation, the Australian Commission for the Future and the Australian Health Institute, but says her decision, in the beginning, to study economics rather than arts or psychology was a defiant one.

"The biggest hope for me was that I'd find a good man and settle down and have children," she says. "But I thought 'business' and 'head of a company' and here I am." Yet in 1968, at the Notting Hill Pub, she met Ian Galbally, a scientist, and, a year later, they married. In 1972, their daughter, Megan, was born, which Galbally describes as "the most exciting thing that had ever happened". She remembers being unduly paranoid about whether her baby would be "all right", which seems strange to her now as she's become a campaigner to accept people the way they are.

Galbally is fairly reticent about discussing her marriage, which dissolved after 17 years, but describes her ex-husband as "a very good man". "It was a terrific start and I went into fully discovering work with his support. There couldn't have been a better person for me to have married," she says. "It was a very creative marriage; we had a child together and we were both very creative in our work.

" Megan is now 28 and a doctor, studying psychiatry. Galbally speaks of her with obvious pride. "She's a very competent person emotionally," she says. "A good manager of herself and her own life. I think a lot of that's due to her but it also must be something about the way Ian and I managed."

There's a brief silence and she adds, "But I think it was a bad time to be married because there was the women's movement and the human growth movement - and everything was happening." And Galbally was part of it all.

Her disability certainly didn't stop her from taking an active part in protesting. In fact, during this time, she says she totally ignored her disability and "avoided other disabled people like the plague".

Towards the end of the '70s, Galbally got a job with the Victorian Council of Social Service as a policy analyst and quickly became a campaigner for human rights. It was when she came in contact with the disability rights movement that she was forced to face her own disability.

In her memoirs, she writes: "I was at war with myself. The last thing on earth I wanted to do was join them (other disability campaigners). My whole life had been spent staying away from people like that so I could get on with my life. I cringed. I retreated and finally I joined." Acknowledging her disability actually made life easier. Before, she had refused to use a wheelchair at airports even though she would nearly pass out from pain and exhaustion as she struggled down the concourse to the exit. Now she uses a wheelchair when she travels or has to walk long distances. And using two crutches instead of one has also helped enormously. They allow her to walk without her caliper when she wants to go swimming. "I love swimming but it was always an agony getting to the side of the pool," she says.

The crutches she's using today she found when she was in Norway for a conference.

"I gave my papers and then I'd whip away to the fiords. The taxi driver would say 'naked' and I'd say 'no, clothed' but it was very liberating. There were women there who'd had mastectomies walking around without their tops; it's a completely different view of body image."

Galbally's activism for the women's movement and the rights of the disabled (they both came together in her vigorous protests against the Yooralla Miss Australia Quest) stood her in good stead for her future battles heading philanthropic foundations.

Irene Tury, who worked with Galbally when she was heading the Myer Foundation remembers some of those board meetings. "I've seen her fight vehemently across the boardroom table to get something across when she had a closed mind on the other side of the table. She fought like a demon in those situations."

Tury has remained close friends with Galbally. "All of a sudden, I met this energetic, mad, enthusiastic and innovative person," she says. "She made me think outside the square, which I'd never done before." But she can see how other people might find her difficult. "Because she's such a strong woman and has such strong views, a lot of people, I would imagine, would not be comfortable with her."

One person who definitely sees eye to eye with her is Sir Gustav Nossal, Australia's most acclaimed medical scientist. He was the chairman of VicHealth when she was the CEO and they were a dynamic duo.

"She's a very refreshing speaker because she's a lateral thinker," he says. "She will put unusual concepts together and come up with an original idea."

The greatest achievement for VicHealth during Galbally's reign was getting tobacco out of sport. "We led the way for Australia and the world. I had lots of allies who I would never have met in any other life," she says.

"Bob Jane (racing driver) and Ross Oakley (former head of AFL) came up to the Federal Parliament with me and we would walk tirelessly around advocating for Federal Government sponsorship bans." Galbally travelled extensively then and she rates her most exciting trip as one to China. Her determination to see and do everything was almost thwarted when she arrived at the Great Wall.

"They couldn't take a wheelchair so she simply had to be carried," Sir Gus Nossal says. "She was determined to see it and not the slightest bit embarrassed."

On this trip, she met the then Minister for Health, Chen Min Zhang. "I casually invited him to Australia," she recalls. "And he accepted. I took him to the Caulfield Cup and he presented the Quit Smoking Cup (which, due to VicHealth's efforts, had replaced the Benson and Hedges Caulfield Cup)."

Even now we're just seeing the fruits of her work with smoking being banned from many public places, including restaurants. But when Galbally heard a heart surgeon suggest on television that he and his colleagues should not treat heart patients who smoked, she thought that was going too far

Galbally was aware that the '90s had been disastrous for community organisations, with many struggling to survive. It worried her that they might disappear all together, forcing people to join much bigger organisations where they wouldn't have a voice.

She found an ally in Denis Moriarty, who'd worked for the government in marketing tourism and then joined VicHealth in a similar role.

They became close friends. "Every Saturday, Denis and I talked about this drinking coffee and having breakfast in Brunswick Street," Galbally says. "We thought we could set up an organisation that would really help the groups get strong and help them do the things they want to do. So, www.ourcommunity.com.au was devised."

The aim is to help the groups find money. "There's a lot of government money," Galbally points out. "But the same people get it. And all the new little groups need to learn how to find it."

Moriarty probably knows Galbally better than anyone else - with the exception of her family - and is still amazed at the number of things she's passionate about. This doesn't make life easy for either of them.

"I constantly disagree with her over issues," he says. "The thing I love about Rhonda is she can monster people. She'll hate me for saying that. But she says herself that she's got the loudest mouth of all. But what you get is the honest facts of life. It's not couched in some sort of political doublespeak."

Galbally admits she gets very intense when trying to make a point. She remembers kicking one of her colleagues under the table during a meeting, "forgetting that my caliper weighed a lot and could do serious damage to a man's knee".

So, what's the other side of Galbally away from all the social activism?

She's lived in the same house in the inner city for over 20 years, a "cluttered hippie house" filled with candles, fringed velvet throwovers, various musical instruments, including a piano, and thousands of books that are "gradually taking us over".

"I live with my partner, George (an academic), and our two gorgeous dogs, Fang and Piggy," she says. "We went to the Lost Dogs Home and they only had a chihuahua. George said, 'I'm not having a rat'. Anyway, the next week we rang up and Fang was about to get the needle so we took her. And we got another chihuahua from a litter to keep her company."

And all that worrying about how to change our bad habits hasn't turned her into a boring health nut. Moriarty often sees her socially. "She's certainly not a zealot," he says. "She'll have a drink with the rest of us. When she was working with VicHealth, most of her fights were with the zealots. She doesn't believe in the madness of cutting out everything."

It's a cold, wet evening in Melbourne but Galbally's day isn't over yet. She pulls up in her Mazda Metro in Swan Street, Richmond, and laboriously makes her way up two flights of stairs to a physiotherapy and pilates studio to do an hour's exercise. "I find it wonderful because it's completely integrated," she says. "It's funny because although it's using different equipment, it's almost like back to the physio (of her childhood), when I was running around with Pat Cosh chasing after me. Now here I am doing it myself but with other people around. You can sing out and people laugh and enjoy it. My whole body feels like it's really strengthened. I love it."