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Finally, the system looked at Joel's plight, not the cost
Picture: ANDREW CAMPBELL It is certainly happy times for Julia Rollings and her adopted Taiwanese-born son Joel, who is blind, but it was not always the case. Help
Picture: ANDREW CAMPBELL
It is certainly happy times for Julia Rollings and her adopted Taiwanese-born son Joel, who is blind, but it was not always the case.
Immigration Tribunal last
hope for would-be parents
By VERONA BURGESS,
Public Sector Reporter
For some of the people who ap-
pealed to the Immigration Review
Tribunal last year it was third time
lucky.
One was the Rollings family of
Kambah, who had been trying for 16
months to adopt a tiny blind boy, Lu
Yun Chen (now Joel), from an or-
phanage in Taiwan.
Nobody else wanted him, and the
Department of Immigration knock-
ed them back twice although the
adoption had been approved by Aus-
tralian authorities.
"When we rang up the nun in Tai-
wan to tell her we'd failed the de-
partment's internal review her
answer was 'But Australia is such a
big country and this is only one little
boy' ", Julia Rollings says.
"The tribunal was really our last
chance. And I also feel they were the
only ones that looked at our family
circumstances and those of the child
as well. Immigration was looking at
it solely in terms of cost."
Because of his blindness, they had
to win a waiver of the health require-
ment of the Immigration Act, which
they hope will help the handful of
other parents wanting to bring in
children with disabilities.
They didn't see him during the 16
months of fighting the case.
"We would have dearly loved to
but I don't think I could have stood
the heartache of going overseas, see-
ing him and walking out".
When she collected him in Tai-
wan, he was 2½ years old.
He looked younger than a year; he
was as thin as a rake; he couldn't
suck; he couldn't hold his head up;
he had only one word in Chinese —
which meant "yummy" — and he
whimpered like a hurt puppy.
He had been born premature, at
only two pounds, was blind because
of an overdose of oxygen and had
always lived in the orphanage.
"They were very caring with the
facilities they had; but not even the
best orphanage could make up for
the attention and love of a family.
Children just don't thrive in those
circumstances. What he needed
more than anything else was love
and affection and constant holding. I
couldn't put him down at all."
Now he is 3½ and he has a vocabu-
lary of 160 English words.
"When I get frustrated about him
not doing something I look back at
the journal I keep and remember
what he wasn't doing a year ago.
Sometimes you get caught up in
what's ahead, rather than how far
you've gone".
Joel, who now has two older sis-
ters, Alix and Briony, and a brother
Haden (now four, who was adopted
from Korea as a baby), is now fully
toilet trained; he feeds himself; he
knows some action songs (Twinkle,
Twinkle Little Star and Insy Winsy
Spider) — and he's a terror round
the house, says his father, Barry.
"He loves banging the kitchen
cupboard doors and has sprung two
off the hinges."
They have exchanged letters with
his birth mother and plan to meet.
"The first letter was heart-break-
ing," Mrs Rollings says. "She was
just overwhelmed that he was some
where in the world being loved and
she begged us to let him know how
much she loved him and that she just
couldn't cope with his disability".
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