John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak for 20 minutes in this adjournment debate, although I will not speak for 20 minutes.

Leave granted.

I thank the Senate. Twenty years ago Australia lost a talented physician and dedicated humanitarian, Frederick Cossom Hollows. Hollows's brusque demeanour concealed a deep commitment to social justice. He once wrote:

… care and concern for others is the highest of human qualities. It distinguishes us from the animals and deserves to be paid more attention and to be more exercised.

Tonight, I want to remember Hollows's life and legacy. Fred Hollows was born on 9 April 1929 in Dunedin, New Zealand. His great-grandfather, James Hollows, came to New Zealand from Lancashire, England. He came south seeking a better life. He left the Old World and became a coal miner in the new. Hollows's father, John, was a train driver. His father left the railways when modernisation finally severed the tie between man and machine. Reading Fred Hollows's biography, one gets the sense that he admired and respected his father. According to Hollows he was 'a kind of radical, a sort of Christian Marxist'. Fred inherited his father's fierce individualism and much of his politics but not his reverence for religion.

After leaving school Hollows enrolled at the University of Otago as a student of divinity. His intention was to go into the church, but he became disenchanted by the piety and insularity of his classmates. He cast aside the last vestiges of religious belief while working at Porirua mental hospital where he witnessed the care and commitment of the hospital's secular staff. He was, in his own words, 'very impressed by those men, by their goodness, I suppose'. He said:

Before that, I had assumed that life outside the church, away from the comforts and discipline of religion, was the slippery path to perdition … I thought the only real joy in life was in the church but I found out differently at the hospital. Those men were good and religion had nothing to do with it.

Hollows lost his religion but retained some of its most endearing qualities—its commitment to social justice and to others.

He shunned the church and instead enrolled at medical school. After graduating he worked at public hospitals in Auckland and Wellington where he was increasingly drawn to ophthalmology. In 1961 Hollows's curiosity and ambition led him to England, where he studied at the Moorfields Eye Hospital. In a precursor to the rest of his career, he collaborated on a survey of glaucoma in Wales, amongst the gritty, dim valleys of the mining towns there.

He moved to Australia in 1965 to take up a position as an associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of New South Wales. In this position he was responsible for the teaching program at the university and at the Prince of Wales and Prince Henry hospitals. After treating two Gurindji elders at the Prince of Wales Hospital he was invited to visit the Gurindji in the Northern Territory. In country where Vincent Lingiari's colleagues and kin led one of the first protests for land rights, Professor Hollows was confronted with shocking living and health conditions. Many of the Gurindji were suffering from the effects of blinding trachoma—a disease that had been eradicated from the non-Indigenous community decades earlier. It is a disease about which I have spoken many times in this Senate chamber.

At a press conference organised for his return he described the disparity in medical services between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as 'a scandal' and the conditions he found in these communities as 'something out of the medical history books'. In response, he helped establish the National Trachoma and Eye Health program—a team of over 80 people, who travelled to hundreds of remote communities to both research and treat the scandal, under Fred's rallying cry of 'no survey without service'. This experience and the Aboriginal workers on the trachoma team deepened Hollows's commitment to Indigenous health. In 1971, along with activists like Mum Shirl and Elsa Dixon, he helped establish the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, Sydney.

Hollows combined this national attention with international concerns. He worked extensively in Nepal, Eritrea and Vietnam. In each country he helped survey the level of avoidable blindness before developing local programs that trained local eye surgeons in modern cataract surgery—surgeons like Sandak Ruit in Nepal and Desbele Ghebreghergis in Eritrea. Conscious of the high cost of the intraocular lenses used in cataract surgery, he helped establish lens laboratories in Nepal and Eritrea. This brilliant approach drove down the price worldwide and made modern surgery affordable in developing countries.

The Fred Hollows laboratories are still producing low-cost lenses and selling them on the global market.

Hollows's vocation was an expression of his political beliefs. He was at heart a radical, and his surgery provided him with a practical outlet for this inward inflection. He joined the Communist Party during the 1960s reasoning that, 'If everyone's against them then they must have some of the right ideas.' He was a member of the Steve Biko society, and he made national headlines during the infamous 1971 Springboks tour when he was arrested for taking part in the anti-apartheid protests in Sydney.

In 1993, aged 63, Hollows finally succumbed to cancer after years of struggle. Having captured the hearts of the nation by his passion and blunt talk, he was made Australian of the Year in 1990. The Order of Australia, the Human Rights Medal and many other accolades came his way. His legacy continues through the ongoing work of the Fred Hollows Foundation and through the programs and people he influenced in Nepal, Eritrea and Vietnam.

The Fred Hollows Foundation continues to work on the prevention and treatment of blindness in 19 countries on three continents—in Australia, Asia and Africa. To date the foundation has helped restore the sight of over one million patients worldwide. In 2011 the foundation helped deliver $3.38 million worth of optical equipment for use in the developed world.

In Australia, the Fred Hollows Foundation continues to collaborate with both Indigenous organisations and communities, working on both prevention and cure, treating the symptoms and conditions of eye disease. For instance, in 2011 the foundation assessed the sight of 416 people in remote communities in the Northern Territory and handed out over 1,000 pairs of affordable spectacles. The foundation continues to work on closing the gap in eye health between Indigenous and mainstream Australians.

Fred Hollows was direct, uncompromising, difficult. His lack of tact can be seen as a function of his impatient anticipation of change. In the closing passages of his autobiography he wrote:

I am a humanist. I don't believe in any higher power than the best expressions of the human spirit, and those are to be found in personal and social relationships. Evaluating my own life in those terms, I've had some mixed results. I've hurt some people and disappointed others but I hope that, on balance, I've given more than I've taken. I believe that my view of what 'a redeemed social condition' is has been consistent—equity between people—and I've tried always to work to that end.

Even if some could question Hollows's means, none should question his ends. We should remember such a life, animated by such ambitions, that achieves such ends—Frederick Cossom Hollows's.