Ken Moran

Kenneth James Moran, MBE, was an Australian Paralympic lawn bowler, born on 27 February 1925 in Beaudesert, Queensland, and died on 6 August 2009. He was the sixth of eight children and left school at fourteen to work on the family farm during the Great Depression. In 1945 he was diagnosed with polio and spent two years in a polio ward at the Royal Brisbane Hospital, after which he managed his own rehabilitation and lived using a wheelchair. He studied accounting by correspondence and worked in that field alongside a lifelong commitment to community work. He took up table tennis and lawn bowls to stay active, winning a table tennis bronze medal at the 1974 Commonwealth Paraplegic Games in Dunedin and a silver medal in the men's lawn bowls pairs with Wayne Lewis at the 1984 Paralympics held in New York and Stoke Mandeville. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours, and the Ken Moran Life Centre in Beaudesert was officially opened in 2010.