Tilly Aston

Matilda Ann Aston (11 December 1873 – 1 November 1947), better known as Tilly Aston, was a blind Australian writer and teacher, who founded the Victorian Association of Braille Writers, and later went on to establish the Association for the Advancement of the Blind, with herself as secretary. She is remembered for her achievements in promoting the rights of vision-impaired people.

Life

Tilly was born in the town of Carisbrook, Victoria in 1873, the youngest of eight children born to Edward Aston, a bootmaker, and his wife, Ann. Vision-impaired from birth, she was totally blind by the age of 7. Her father died in 1881. Six months later, through a chance meeting, she met Thomas James, a miner who had lost his sight in an industrial accident and who had become an itinerant blind missionary. He taught her to read braille and, soon after, the Rev. W. Moss, who visited Carisbrook with the choir of the Victorian Asylum and School for the Blind, persuaded her to attend the school in St Kilda, Melbourne, to further her education. She enrolled as a boarder on 29 June 1882. A cairn was erected in her honour, a year after her death, by Carisbrook Primary School and the Midlands Historical Society, and there is a sculpture in her honour in Kings Domain, Melbourne.

Career

With the assistance of friends and the Australian Natives' Association, Aston established the Victorian Association of Braille Writers in 1894. This organisation would eventually become the Victorian Braille Library. In 1895 a meeting called by Tilly Aston founded the Association for the Advancement of the Blind (now Vision Australia) to fight for greater independence, social change and new laws for blind people. They quickly won voting rights for blind people; free postage for Braille material in 1899 (a world first for Australia); and transport concessions for the blind.

In 1913 Tilly Aston did teaching training and become head of the Victorian Education Department's School for the Blind, the first blind woman to do so. Her appointment was not without criticism from staff and officials of the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind because of her disability and she was required to "sever her connexion with the blind societies she had helped to found".

Works Poetry Maiden Verses (1901) The Austral Year (191-?) Singable Songs (1924) Songs of Light (1935) The Inner Garden (1940)

Fiction The Woolinappers, or Some Tales from the By-ways of Methodism (1905) The Straight Goer (in Spectator, serialised from Sept 1908) Gold from Old Diggings (in Bendigo Advertiser, serialised from Aug 1937) Old Timers: Sketches and Word Pictures of the Old Pioneers (1938)

Non-fiction The Memoirs of Tilly Aston: Australia's Blind Poet, Author and Philanthropist (1935)