Mary was born into a poor family in West London. She was the seventh surviving child, born with a cleft palate, and her mother had to feed her with a medicine dropper. This was the start of Mary's lifelong struggle with hearing loss. Her father survived four years in the trenches in the First World War, but the gassing he received killed him only a few years later. Mary was only three. Her mother died of cancer when she was seven, and she went to live with her mother's younger sister and her husband, who was dying of syphilis. But this poor, deaf orphan was pretty, clever, and above all, tough. What was then state-of-the-art surgery remedied her cleft palate, and she won a scholarship to a prestigious girls' school, Godolphin and Latymer in Hammersmith. Elocution lessons fixed both her speech defect and her Cockney accent, and gave her the upper class English accent Mary retained for the rest of her life.
Family circumstances prevented her from aiming for university, so Mary trained as a secretary. She managed to overcome her deafness and went on to become an excellent secretary, working with people such as Richard Crossman, Cabinet Minister and later editor of New Statesman; a future Archbishop of Canterbury; and the film-makers who founded Ealing Studios.
Shortly after leaving school, Mary went on a camping trip with some friends, one of whom brought his old friend Philip along. When they pulled up at Mary's house to pick her up and he saw her for the first time, Philip said to his friend: "That's the girl I'm going to marry". And so it turned out, although she didn't make it easy for him! He had plenty of competition and she would delight in telling the tale of how he saw off other admirers, including the father of Lord Coe, chairman of the London Olympics organising committee.,
They got married the day the Blitz broke out and hence spent their wedding night sharing an air-raid shelter with their grumpy old landlady, separated by only a sheet hanging up. Philip soon had to leave Mary to fight. Mary and Philip had one son, Christopher, born during the war, forcing Philip to go AWOL to see his new son. They also had one daughter, Linden, born six years later in the height of the baby boom.
Mary and Philip travelled around, living much of their life in Australia and eventually settling in Darwin, where she became President of the Deafness Association of the NT (now Deaf NT). It was in this position that she put 'the fear of Mary' into the local politicians, alternately charming and terrifying them into providing better services for the deaf and hearing impaired of the Territory and for the Aboriginal and migrant people who were most at risk of developing those conditions. She would put her deafness to very good use. It was said of Mary that she only understood the word "Yes".
As part of this campaign, she was responsible for creating an informational video, published in multiple languages, about vaccination and rubella. This disease can cause severe birth defects such as deafness, blindness and brain damage. This education campaign was one of the reasons that Mary was made a Member of the Order of Australia, although she swears she was only nominated because people thought she was about to drop off her perch. In fact, people were so convinced of this that the Deafness Unit at Stuart Park Primary School dedicated a sensory garden to her. Mary is probably the only person to officiate at the opening of her own Memorial Garden. After Philip died, when Mary was well into her eighties, she decided that she was getting too old for all this activism and she moved with the rest of the family to Melbourne. However, she was still indomitable. In 2007, she was visiting the UK for the wedding of one of her grandchildren when the London train system was bombed. The next day, amidst all the panic, she cried: "Four bombs? I survived the Blitz! I'm not going to be stopped by four piffling little bombs! I'm going shopping!" So she went to Harrods, and she bought a hat. Note however the comma in that sentence. After visiting Harrods she actually bought the hat from the op shop next door, but don't tell anybody. Mary was a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, and even survived to become a great-great-grandmother. But more than this, she welcomed everyone into the family. When we tried to count how many adopted grandkids she had, we lost count. Every single one of us, nieces, nephews, cousins, kids, grandkids and great-grands, biological or adopted, adored her. Mary was famously tight-fisted when it came to herself, but expansively generous with everybody else, with money but more importantly with her time, her love and herself.
Source: Salter-Duke, Linden. "Obituary for Former Deaf NT President Mary Eileen Salter AM"
Deaf Children Australia. http://www.deafchildrenaustralia.org.au/node/2217 (Accessed September 7, 2012).,