Going Blind

"Going Blind" is a poignant collection of short stories and essays by Australian writer Henry Lawson, reflecting on themes of vision, perception, and the challenges faced by individuals in a rapidly changing society. Through his distinctive voice and keen observations, Lawson explores the struggles of the blind and the metaphorical blindness of society towards issues of poverty, hardship, and human connection. The work captures the essence of early 20th-century Australia, combining realism with deep emotional resonance, ultimately encouraging readers to see beyond the surface of their everyday lives.

• Short story

								
I met him in the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms. It was a cheap place in
the city, with good beds upstairs let at one shilling per night--“Board
and residence for respectable single men, fifteen shillings per week.”
 I was a respectable single man then. I boarded and resided there. I
boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy little corner under the
fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy little dining-room or
restaurant downstairs. They called it dining-rooms, but it was only one
room, and them wasn't half enough room in it to work your elbows when
the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied. There was
not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the
tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man--he was a living
skeleton in miniature. We handed the soup, and the “roast beef one,” and
“roast lamb one,” “corn beef and cabbage one,” “veal and stuffing one,”
 and the “veal and pickled pork,” one--or two, or three, as the case
might be--and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of puddings--we
handed them over each other, and dodged the drops as well as we could.
The very hot and very greasy little kitchen was adjacent, and it
contained the bathroom and other conveniences, behind screens of
whitewashed boards.

I resided upstairs in a room where there were five beds and one
wash-stand; one candle-stick, with a very short bit of soft yellow
candle in it; the back of a hair-brush, with about a dozen bristles in
it; and half a comb--the big-tooth end--with nine and a half teeth at
irregular distances apart.

He was a typical bushman, not one of those tall, straight, wiry, brown
men of the West, but from the old Selection Districts, where many
drovers came from, and of the old bush school; one of those slight
active little fellows whom we used to see in cabbage-tree hats, Crimean
shirts, strapped trousers, and elastic-side boots--“larstins,” they
called them. They could dance well; sing indifferently, and mostly
through their noses, the old bush songs; play the concertina horribly;
and ride like--like--well, they could ride.

He seemed as if he had forgotten to grow old and die out with this old
colonial school to which he belonged. They had careless and forgetful
ways about them. His name was Jack Gunther, he said, and he'd come to
Sydney to try to get something done to his eyes. He had a portmanteau,
a carpet bag, some things in a three-bushel bag, and a tin bog. I sat
beside him on his bed, and struck up an acquaintance, and he told me
all about it. First he asked me would I mind shifting round to the other
side, as he was rather deaf in that ear. He'd been kicked by a horse, he
said, and had been a little dull o' hearing on that side ever since.

He was as good as blind. “I can see the people near me,” he said, “but
I can't make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the
houses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur.” He
looked up: “That ceiling is a kind of white, ain't it? And this,”
 tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, “is a sort of green,
ain't it?” The ceiling might have been whiter. The prevalent tints of
the wall-paper had originally been blue and red, but it was mostly green
enough now--a damp, rotten green; but I was ready to swear that the
ceiling was snow and that the walls were as green as grass if it would
have made him feel more comfortable. His sight began to get bad about
six years before, he said; he didn't take much notice of it at first,
and then he saw a quack, who made his eyes worse. He had already the
manner of the blind--the touch of every finger, and even the gentleness
in his speech. He had a boy down with him--a “sorter cousin of his,” and
the boy saw him round. “I'll have to be sending that youngster back,”
 he said, “I think I'll send him home next week. He'll be picking up and
learning too much down here.”

I happened to know the district he came from, and we would sit by the
hour and talk about the country, and chaps by the name of this and chaps
by the name of that--drovers mostly, whom we had met or had heard of.
He asked me if I'd ever heard of a chap by the name of Joe Scott--a big
sandy-complexioned chap, who might be droving; he was his brother, or,
at least, his half-brother, but he hadn't heard of him for years;
he'd last heard of him at Blackall, in Queensland; he might have gone
overland to Western Australia with Tyson's cattle to the new country.

We talked about grubbing and fencing and digging and droving and
shearing--all about the bush--and it all came back to me as we talked.
“I can see it all now,” he said once, in an abstracted tone, seeming to
fix his helpless eyes on the wall opposite. But he didn't see the dirty
blind wall, nor the dingy window, nor the skimpy little bed, nor the
greasy wash-stand; he saw the dark blue ridges in the sunlight, the
grassy sidings and flats, the creek with clumps of she-oak here and
there, the course of the willow-fringed river below, the distant peaks
and ranges fading away into a lighter azure, the granite ridge in
the middle distance, and the rocky rises, the stringy-bark and the
apple-tree flats, the scrubs, and the sunlit plains--and all. I could
see it, too--plainer than ever I did.

He had done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about
timber. He didn't believe in having fencing-posts with big butts; he
reckoned it was a mistake. “You see,” he said, “the top of the butt
catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I'd back posts
without any butt at all to last as long or longer than posts with
'em--that's if the fence is well put up and well rammed.” He had
supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, and--well, you can get
more posts without butts out of a tree than posts with them. He also
objected to charring the butts. He said it only made more work--and
wasted time--the butts lasted longer without being charred.

I asked him if he'd ever got stringy-bark palings or shingles out of
mountain ash, and he smiled a smile that did my heart good to see, and
said he had. He had also got them out of various other kinds of trees.

We talked about soil and grass, and gold-digging, and many other things
which came back to one like a revelation as we yarned.

He had been to the hospital several times. “The doctors don't say they
can cure me,” he said, “they say they might, be able to improve my sight
and hearing, but it would take a long time--anyway, the treatment would
improve my general health. They know what's the matter with my eyes,”
 and he explained it as well as he could. “I wish I'd seen a good
doctor when my eyes first began to get weak; but young chaps are always
careless over things. It's harder to get cured of anything when you're
done growing.”

He was always hopeful and cheerful. “If the worst comes to the worst,”
 he said, “there's things I can do where I come from. I might do a bit
o' wool-sorting, for instance. I'm a pretty fair expert. Or else when

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