Tracing his fingers across the ridges of the scrapbook, Vernon could imagine the colours of his stamp collection: dark empire reds, soft violets and bold, vibrant blues. All these were unchanged from the colours he knew from before the war. Or so his wife, Adelaide, assured him.

Acrylic eyes: Throughout his life Vernon enjoyed interests that could have been considered unconventional or too difficult for a blind man. His stamp collections were awarded national philatelic prizes, he built wireless sets and he loved to garden at his Malvern home. NAA: B73, M27111 courtsey National Archives of Australia.

Some evenings the couple would sit together in the parlour of their Malvern cottage. Adelaide would describe the newly printed stamps he’d bought, and guide his hands to paste them carefully on the clean pages. People thought it odd that a blind man collected stamps. How could he manage, they asked, and what possible joy could those intricate patterns bring him? Vernon didn’t care though. He had learned to deny his disability, defy its limitations.

Some blind men gave in to the darkness. They sat in the shadows, learnt by heart the contours of their homes, accepted their lives of confinement. Not Vernon. With his wife, he travelled the length and breadth of Australia. Vernon couldn’t see the landscape, but he could smell, hear and touch all the places they visited. Adelaide described each sight to him, all the beautiful photographs she took could not compete with the visions formed in Vernon’s blindness. ‘Even though he has no sight,’ she explained, ‘he forms pictures in his own mind – better ones than I can produce on paper.’1

But just as vivid in Vernon’s mind were the final moments he saw the world, the last sharp flash of battle that plunged everything around him into darkness.

Vernon was 21 when he sailed for Gallipoli. He arrived on the peninsula in the blistering heat of the August Offensive. He was shot and wounded during the Battle of Lone Pine. But for young Vernon, much worse was to come. Barely recovered, he was ordered to return to his unit and take up the fight in France.

Hazel eyes: Vernon’s discharge form differs greatly from his enlistment papers. Where previously he had noted hazel eyes, the detail later recorded ‘sockets only’ and his signature slants downward, written without the familiarity of vision. DA08630 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

August 1916, Pozières: shrapnel rained down from the sky. Amid the chaos of battle, Vernon saw a grenade hurtling towards a nearby officer. Instinctively he leapt at it and tried to hurl the ripe explosive back towards the enemy trenches. He was too late. Metal tore into a thousand pieces, blasting hot shards into his eyes. Vernon crawled into a nearby shell hole and drifted in and out of delirium.

The Germans found him. He was taken prisoner, sent to a field hospital and operated on by German surgeons. His eyes could not be saved, so they were completely excised. His head was bound with thin bandages and there was little post-surgery care. Vernon’s weeping sockets soaked their dressings and the empty holes went uncleaned. The smell of wounds was sickening, and Vernon and the other prisoners went hungry and cold. The Australian captives could hardly have expected more. Strangled of supplies by the Allied blockade, the German Army could not care for its own, let alone the mangled ranks of prisoners.

After months of captivity, Vernon was amongst the first Australian prisoners exchanged with Germany. Weak and blind, he was sent straight to England for further treatment.

Vernon’s new home was the blinded soldiers’ hostel, St Dunstan’s. Its founder, Sir Arthur Pearson, was a newspaper magnate whose own sight had been lost to glaucoma. He established St Dunstan’s to offer men a chance at a full life. Blind men could be taught to manage for themselves without demeaning charity. Here, Vernon was to be retrained and reskilled; learn to live with disability. Here, he would learn how to be blind.

Memories and When night sets in, the sun is down: Although Pearson garnered much support from other wealthy philanthropists, the hostel also appealed for public support. In 1916, St Dunstan’s issued fundraising postcards, these were part of a series of six. The charitable organisation St Dunstan’s, now known as Blind Veterans UK, continues to help vision impaired servicemen and women lead independent lives. Postcards by Richard Caton-Woodville courtesy State Library of Victoria.

Caring and patient tutors instructed Vernon in braille. Words conjured up worlds otherwise lost to blindness. And St Dunstan’s offered the blind practical, even professional, skills. Vernon was trained in typing, shorthand and telephoning. A switchboard was set up within the hostel, allowing the young apprentices to transfer calls between the estate’s rooms, practicing for the grand buildings they might one day work at in London, Melbourne, Auckland or Toronto. Other St Dunstaners chose to train in massage, basketry, mat and net making, or joinery. Each man sought the vocation that best suited him.

An ideal vocation: Sir Arthur Pearson explained, ‘the memory of the trained blind operator for numbers becomes astonishing, and I imagine is seldom equaled by those who can see.’4 Here Vernon works the switchboard at the Repatriation Commission office in Melbourne. Vernon was praised as an efficient and skilful operator. Mercury, 30 May 1928 courtesy National Library of Australia.

Arthur Pearson wrote to Mrs Mullin, as he did to all his men’s kin. He reassured a fretful mother that her Vernon was:

bearing the burden which has been placed upon him with great courage and fortitude, and has, I am pleased to say, already recognised the fact that there are many worse things that can befall a man than blindness.2

He convinced Mrs Mullin that her son could have a happy and useful life despite that fateful shrapnel.

When he was ready to go home, ready for his new life, Vernon travelled back to Australia with the gifts of a braille machine and a Remington typewriter – tokens of hope from St Dunstan’s.

St Dunstan’s trained men for work. It also equipped them for matrimony. Sir Arthur strongly believed that ‘marriage was clearly the happiest fate that could befall these young blinded soldiers’3 and acted as a kind of matchmaker for these surrogate sons, his sightless soldiers. Residents of St Dunstan’s (Pearson did not consider them patients) were introduced to a pool of eligible women. Some, no doubt, were lonely, some filled with pity for the blind, others yearned to give themselves – in an almost literal way – to the war effort. But Vernon met his Adelaide quite independently of St Dunstan’s. And when they married it was he that would support her. Not long after his return to Australia, Vernon secured a post as an operator in Melbourne’s Repatriation Department.

The couple had a happy married life. Though Vernon never actually saw his wife, he was convinced of her faultless beauty. Adelaide died almost twenty years before Vernon but he would always remember her as his inner light. She had revealed a beauty in life that many with the clearest vision would never see.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Vernon Mullin’s service dossier NAA: B2455, MULLIN VERNON ISAAC; his repatriation file NAA: B73, M27111; his Red Cross Missing and Wounded file AWM 1DRL/0428; and contemporary newspaper reports. For further reading on blind soldiers see Sir Arthur Pearson, Victory over Blindness: How it Was Won by the Men of St Dunstan’s and How Others May Win it (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919); and David Costello, The Mind’s Eye: The Blinded Veterans of St Dunstan’s (London: Pen and Sword, 2014).

1 Argus, 24 November 1950.

2 Sir Arthur Pearson to Mrs Mullin, letter printed in West Australian, 30 June 1917.

3 Sir Arthur Pearson, Victory over Blindness: How it Was Won by the Men of St Dunstan’s and How May Win It (New York: George H Doran Company, 1919), p. 246.

4 ibid, p. 116.