Fred Hollows

Fred Hollows grew up in Dunedin and Palmerston North in New Zealand and briefly considered becoming a minister before training in medicine. He specialised in ophthalmology in Britain and in 1965 moved to Sydney to run the eye department at the University of New South Wales. He was a communist for a time, a mountaineer, a heavy smoker and a man who swore freely at ministers and bureaucrats.

In 1971 he visited an Aboriginal settlement in New South Wales and found levels of eye disease he had only read about, including trachoma, which had been eliminated among white Australians decades earlier. He helped found the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern that year, and from 1976 led the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program, which took teams to 465 Aboriginal communities across the outback, examining a hundred thousand people and treating thousands.

He then turned to the wider world. In Eritrea, then fighting a war of independence, and in Nepal and Vietnam, he found that people were blind from cataracts because the lens implants used to fix them cost hundreds of dollars. His answer was to help build factories in Eritrea and Nepal that made them for a few dollars each, and to train local surgeons.

He was diagnosed with cancer in 1989 and named Australian of the Year in 1990. He set up the Fred Hollows Foundation in 1992, a few months before he died. He was buried in Bourke, in the outback, where he had worked.