Jack Rutherford is an Aboriginal boy, who is also an autistic savant, Jack presented with hyperlexia at 2 years 5 months, just after learning to talk and has been described as having an eidetic memory. He is fluent in Spanish and can translate conversational Spanish in real time and is now challenging himself to learn Mandarin to catch up to his new classmates. Jack has wanted to travel to China since he was 4 years old to see the Terracotta Soldiers (Army), the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Giant Pandas in their natural habitat and Disneyland in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Jack told Link languages with alphabets are easier to work out but languages with characters are harder.He loves science, history, words and grammar and has read every Horrible History, Horrible Science and Horrible Geography. And he also loves FACTS. Nothing beats a fact for him and not surprisingly has read the Guinness Book Of Records and Ripley’s Believe It or Not books. He especially likes that his school cares about how he feels and wants him to do everything everyone else does and help him to do it. He also likes his new classmates, teachers and that his brother goes to the same school. Jack enjoys watching TV series and his favorite shows are Avatar: The Last Airbender and Pokémon The Series: Sun & Moon but he’s also watching season one of Tales By Light on Netflix. He gets ideas for short stories and types them up on his iPad, ‘The Child Within The Shadows’ (see box) was his last story and he is currently working on one called ‘Opposites Attract While Worlds Collide’. He does not like theme park rides because he needs to hold on and it hurts his hands. Jack wants people to know that some people have bad anxiety, and they need to understand that anxiety can make normal things that everyone one does each day can be hard for people with anxiety to do, and he is one of those people. Having to be brave every day is something he has to do and some days it’s very hard and these are the days he has to be “extra brave”. Jack’s ambition is to be a gaming software developer, but he also wants to see change in the world. “I don’t understand why we live in a world where people should just listen to the science and stop harming the earth, stop animal farming, stop mining, stop polluting but they shouldn’t need science to say it, they should just feel connected to it and not want to hurt the earth. All schools should ban glitter, these are micro plastics and harm our marine and bird life. Little steps change the world; like not eating meat once a week has a big impact on climate change”.
Jack’s story
