BLIND SCHOLARS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22064, 21 September 1933, Page 11

BLIND SCHOLARS

SURMOUNTING OF DIFFICULTIES NEW ZEALAND ER ? S TRIUMPH. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, September 9. The surmounting of the tremendous difficulties of blindness by two scholars —one a Presbyterian clergyman and the other a university graduate—-has recently aroused the great interest of the Australian public. The clergyman is the Rev, John Sinclair, a New Zealander by birth, who has just been appointed to the charge of the Presbyterian Church at Hornsby, near Sydney, and he provides a striking example of how a man of indomitable spirit overcame a difficulty which most people would have regarded as constituting an insurmountable barrier to one’s training for a career. From early infancy Mr Sinclair has Been almost entirely deprived of sight, arid was compelled to do all his work with the Braille system. His primary and secondary education was carried out at the New Zealand Institute for the Blind in Auckland. At the beginning of his university course he went to Canterbury College, Christchurch, where he carried out his three years’ university training and at the same time worked under the Presbyterian Church as home missionary at Hornby. At the close of his university course, Mr Sinclair went to. Dunedin, where he fulfilled the prescribed course in the Theological College of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. Despite his apparent handicap, Mr Sinclair makes light of his duties. He is a great visitor, and keeps a complete record of his parishioners by card system, in Braille. Remarkable as it may seem, he is also an expert touch typist and does all his own correspondence. He is an eloquent preacher, and, being a young man, should prove a great asset to the Presbyterian Church in Australia. “My own great belief,” he says, “is that the greatest thing in life is to keep a sunny, smiling face, and to have a strong unmovable faith in God.”

Mr Sinclair’s achievements are no doubt an inspiration to a young Melbourne man, Mr Neil R. West, who is taking an arts course at the university in that city. His greatest difficulty is to cover the lectures in the four subjects he is studying. He has become so efficient in writing Braille that in several of his lectures he sits with his writing frame on his knees, and with the style, a pointed instrument like a bootmaker’s awl, he indents special sheets of thick brown paper with Braille characters. In other instances' he relies on friends to dictate notes to him - after lectures. His case containing his notes is much larger than that of the . ordinary student, because it contains many sheets of paper covered with Braille. His deft fingers will have to peruse hundreds of pages before the end of the year. His essential text books have been written in Braille. To study a book which other students find in one volume of 400 pages, Mr West requires half a dozen volumes, all much larger. Braille libraries conducted by the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind have been of great assistance to him. Many of the books necessary to his study are . read to him, and, as in the lectures, he has to rely on a well-trained memory. When the examinations comes he will answer his questions with the aid of a typewriter. He will be allowed time to translate his question paper into Braille beforehand, and he will also be allowed slightly longer than ordinary « students to answer the questions.