ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the life story of John, a young man who is legally blind and lives in a regional town two and a half hours from a major city. It focuses on how rural, bush and regional neighbourhood spaces allow John to enact very different forms of masculinity. John's interviews showed him experimenting with different kinds of masculinity. Literature on rural/regional youth in high-income countries reflects a modern discursive dichotomy between, on the one hand, being 'modern and proactive' and making something out of one's life by moving out of rural areas and, on the other, the perceptions of passivity and settling for less associated with staying in rural areas. In contemporary rural Australia young people in rural areas describe themselves as being 'brought up with the fact that you are going to move out as soon as possible'.
