"Darkness and Silence."
Extracts from an article in the Lone Hand by C. A. Jeffries, by kind permission.)
One would expect that children who are afflicted with blindness or are unable to speak because they cannot hear would receive all the assistance the State could give them. One would think that the State would enable them to acquire the special kind of education they need to make them fit to earn their own living in this world. But, as a matter of horrible fact, this rich State of New South Wales does nothing for its Children of Silence and Darkness. Even when they are left on its hands as State children it gets rid of them as quickly as possible by passing them on to a private charity known as the N.S.W. Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and Blind, a humane charity founded and supported practically by private people on the voluntary system. So indifferent is the State towards the welfare of those afflicted little ones, that there is no law compelling parents to educate them, as there is with children who are better able to fight their way in the world without education.
The "Official Year Book of N.S.W. for 1908-9" gives the figures only up to 1901, when there were 390 deaf and dumb and 884 blind people in the State; but it is stated that it is feared that the full number has not been returned. . . .
. . . The Darlington Institution in Sydney was founded in 1861 "for the education and maintenance, and, as far as practicable, the advancement in life of deaf and dumb and blind children." The only other institution in the State of the sort is the Catholic institution at Waratah, conducted by the Order of St. Dominic, "for the instruction on the principles of Catholic education of deaf and dumb children, and the preparation of them for a useful life."
. . . The deaf and dumb child finds himself in a world of fearful stillness—one everlasting silence, through which comes no word to explain anything. He must learn to talk on his fingers, that a certain set of signals is this thing and another that thing. Always he has to be not only told of a thing, but to be shown it, or shown how it is done. When he has learned to talk on his fingers, and mastered the alphabet, the teachers at Darlington commence on the task of teaching him to read what people say by the movements of their lips, and to articulate in return in n voice that he himself cannot hear. It is a fearsome task; for the child has to be shown over and over and over again how to express various letters of the alphabet by shaping the mouth and forcing the air through.
Now, all that is pitiful enough. But think of the other horrible possibilities. Think of the child that is both blind and deaf! And there are such children. Imagination reels in the effort to grasp the full horror of that awful tragedy. The blind babes live in a world of unrelieved darkness; but the little one who can neither hear nor see finds himself alone in a desert of darkness surrounded by an ocean of silence. He feels something beneath his feet; out of the void ghostly hands touch him; but there is no sound, no glimpse, no hint of what it all means.
The blind babe can cling to his father's shoulder, and go out to explore among sounds, and shiver and thrill as fresh notes boom into his reverberating universe; for him there is romance and adventure and sensation among the tumbling waves of sound. He lives and feels; and, as long as his creature comfort are supplied by the unseen father and mother, can be happy and live a life that has at least variety to spice it.
But that other babe, clinging to his little rock in the midst of eternal silence and darkness, living helplessly amidst utter stagnation, finds himself in a place without form, a void of which he is not a part. He knows not anything, only wants and yearnings that torment him. His is a living death, out of which the helpless baby soul cannot even cry, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
. . . At Darlington they have a little eight-year-old girl who is both deaf and blind. Up to the age of three little Alice Betteridge was a bright little baby, who could see as clearly as any other child,
