Both John and Judy Hinwood grew up in families that instilled a strong work ethic and where community involvement was important.
John had a very challenging childhood as he had a major orthopaedic problem with his legs in his early years, and a specialist told his parents he would be disabled and never be able to play sport. He was also a bad stutterer and very dyslexic and was prevented from going to a regular high school as the educational experts said he couldn’t be taught.
On becoming School Captain and Head Prefect at 15, he eventually stopped stuttering, was Dux of the School and also that year became Australian Open Junior Judo Champion. If your expectation is rock solid and you listen to your own positive self talk then you can create your own miracles.
As Henry Ford said, “If you think you can; if you think you can’t, you’re probably right.”
Judy comes from a small rural town in the heart of Australia’s dairy farming country, Bega, in New South Wales. John grew up in Australia’s largest and best-known city, Sydney.
They met while studying physical education in 1964 at Sydney Teachers’ College and married in 1967.
It was on their honeymoon in 1967 that they were introduced to chiropractic when Judy became paralysed from the waist down while they were camping at the beach. Several medical specialists had told her that she would be in a wheelchair soon, and others said her problems were all ‘in her head’.
John carried Judy into her first chiropractor and she gingerly hobbled out on her own two feet. Chiropractic was an absolute MIRACLE for Judy!
They spent the next two years teaching in rural Australia then went to Singapore in 1969 on an old cargo boat. From there they travelled overland throughout Asia and the Middle East before arriving in Europe in 1970.
Here they spent the next eighteen months teaching and travelling and camping in some very unusual places. A VW Beetle initially and then by Land Rover in the U.K., Ireland, Western and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the days of the ‘Cold War’. Two working spells, the first in Denmark and the second in England gave them enough money to move on. John was also the National Captain-Coach of the Danish Rugby team in 1970. In late 1971 they set out from England and drove through Africa from north to south in their Land Rover. After being lost in the Sahara Desert (a compass and maps finally helped out), being hijacked and held up at gun point in the Congo, climbing and being lost near the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro in a blizzard, enjoying weeks of remote game parks, and just avoiding being caught by one of Idi Amin’s Ugandan genocide squads on the Albert Nile, they made it as emigrants to South Africa in 1972 at the height of apartheid. This whole experience was all a truly fabulous life changing experience for them first hand. They were in need of a number of times a ‘miracle’, and on each occasion a miracle arrived to support them.
After some more teaching, and travelling in South Africa and across the Kalahari Desert in Botswana to Namibia and up to Angola, it was time to move on to South America. As John had been accepted as a freshman student at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC), they had seven months to backpack throughout South America, to arrive in Toronto in the fall of 1973. They left Cape Town, South Africa by ship in early February 1973 and arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil two weeks later.
Travelling by bus, train, truck, barge, foot and two very scary, short and very cheap aircraft flights in the Amazon and over the Andies, they finally made it to Port of Spain, Trinidad, where they emigrated to Canada.
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