A lifetime of compassion, empathy, and good works
BEFORE his disability advocacy was in full swing, J. B. Munro gave Dunedin’s teenagers a place to go.
Through his work as the YMCA’s Dunedin general secretary in the 1960s, Mr Munro DJed on 4ZB, organising dances with music young people wanted. Hundreds attended each week. His work in getting the city’s teenagers off the streets and into dance halls should not be understated, his biographer Dr Hilary Stace said.
He would book musicians, including the likes of John Grenell, to keep them up and dancing.
‘‘People talk about the ‘Dunedin Sound’ in the 1980s, but JB was playing local bands long before that. People just really weren’t doing that back then.’’
The dances were such a great distraction for the city’s youth, police would say that the crime rate went down during them.
In that role he showed his desire to connect with a wide range of people.
One day, JB noticed a young man with Down syndrome who was fascinated by the trampolines at the YMCA.
Trampolines were fairly new to New Zealand, and he had seen people jumping from the foyer.
JB welcomed him in and the next day the man came back with a group of his friends.
‘‘This is just one of many similar stories. People remembered him as someone who wasn’t patronising,’’ Dr
Stace said.
This simple act of inclusion mirrors a lifetime of disability advocacy work.
Mr Munro was born in Gore on August 16, 1936.
His mother was a teenager named Isobel Baldwin.
His passion for disability rights came from first hand experience, having contracted polio himself as a child.
As his mother could not look after him with the disease, he was fostered by Invercargill farmers William and Lily Munro.
Their biological children were a generation older.
The most famous, motorcycle racer Burt Munro, was more than 30 years his senior.
Polio left JB’s left leg twisted, and in 1944 he spent eight months in Dunedin and endured four operations that included the grafting in of a bullock bone to lengthen his leg.
When he returned to Invercargill, he was met by a child welfare officer at the railway station, who told the Munros they could not bring him back home with them as they were too old.
The Munros asked JB if he wanted them to adopt him, and he accepted.
He attended St George Primary, Tweedsmuir Intermediate and Southland Boys’ High School.
He left school at 17 to become an office clerk at the Vacuum Oil Company.
In 1960 Mr Munro left for a YMCA training programme in Sydney, returning at the end of 1961 to take a position at the Invercargill YMCA.
Mr Munro married Val Sharfe, whom he had known since he was a child, in 1962 at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Invercargill — the church in which they both grew up.
They had two children, Sharon and Tony.
The following year they moved to Dunedin so he could work as general secretary at the city’s YMCA. They lived in the city for five years.
Mr Munro’s outgoing personality made an impression on his wife, even when they were both at kindergarten together.
‘‘I can always remember, one day I came out of kindergarten and he was proclaiming about this new curbing on the road,’’ Mrs Munro said.
She remembered him standing up at Sunday school and reciting poems his mother taught him.
‘‘He was a leader, he was showing it even then. He was a very good father and a very good husband. We worked as a family in every way.’’
In 1968 the family moved back to Invercargill so he could start a long career with disability support organisation the IHC.
He combined that with being an Invercargill city councillor for several years.
He started as the IHC’s Southland administrator, and in 1977 moved to Wellington to become its national director.
He also cofounded what became the Fundraisers’ Institute of New Zealand.
From 1972 to 1975 he was a Labour MP in the Invercargill electorate, during which time he was a major figure in the passing of the Disabled Persons’ Community Welfare Act.
He was a natural fundraiser. The most famous example of this was in the early 1970s, when a circus came to Invercargill.
Mr Munro sat on a seesaw, with a lion on the other side, and had to grab a bag full of money before rushing out of the cage.
In 1981 he would help raise more than $6 million as vice chairman of the 1981 Telethon, during the International Year of Disabled Persons.
Years later Mr Munro received a letter from his halfbrother, introducing himself.
At the age of 50 Mr Munro and family travelled to Auckland to met his birth mother and other blood relatives.
He then heard how she saw him on occasions at Invercargill Airport when he travelled home from Parliament — she’d say ‘‘g’day’’ and he’d say ‘‘g’day’’ back, never knowing who she was.
Mrs Munro said from then on he had two full families and ‘‘loved them both dearly’’.
In 1990 JB was made a Companion of the Queen’s Service Order.
In 1997 he decided he wanted to return to a more ‘‘hands on’’ role within the IHC, working closely with people.
The next year he and Mrs Munro moved to Mosgiel.
MargyJean Malcolm, who was the chief executive of the New Zealand Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux while JB worked for the IHC, told the Otago Daily
in 2015 he was someone who had a practical ‘‘can do’’ attitude and a strategic mind.
‘‘JB would never be afraid to speak his mind and often brought a bold strategic vision to such conversations, ahead of what others around him might have been confident to advocate for.’’
When he moved to Mosgiel, Mr Munro stepped down as chief executive of IHC and became Otago administrator.
He was heavily involved with Inclusion International, which he worked full time for between 2000 and 2004.
He also kept busy as president of Rotary Mosgiel and serving on the organisation’s international service committee.
In the later years of his life, he was constantly travelling internationally in his roles, including as chairman of the international committee of seniors’ community housing organisation Abbeyfield.
He died in Christchurch on June 4, aged 81.
Tony Munro said his father was ‘‘always about the other guy’’.
‘‘He was a man who was difficult sometimes to tie down because of everything he was doing, but I’m very proud of my dad.
‘‘He put himself second. Adoption and polio framed his way of thinking about the world. It didn’t matter who you were, you were equal.’’ — Jono Edwards
Former Labour MP for Invercargill, J. B. Munro
was a passionate advocate for people with
disabilities and was ‘‘always about the other guy’’, his son Tony
says.
PHOTO: OTAGO DAILY TIMES