By closing this banner, scrolling this page, clicking a link or continuing to browse otherwise, you agree to the use of cookies. Login Sign Up. Gabi Hollows. Cite this Page: Citation. Related Authors Fred Hollows Ophthalmologist.
Jill Ker Conway Author. James Crawford Jurist. Fred Hollows died from metastatic cancer. Fred Hollows studied Ophthalmology, which is studding diseases of the eyes. Clarice and Joseph hollows. Fred Hollows was born in New Zealand in and died in Fred hollows the ophthalmologist who became known for restoring eyesight for countless people. Fred Hollows was a great man! He did amazing things he campaign for blindness and needlessly cateract. Fred hollows lived in australiass nsw he had a daughter and wife but unfortunally he died of cancer.
Fred Hollows fixed vision impairment, especially with children, in third world countries. Fred Hollows was born on the ninth of April Fred Hollows was born in New Zealand. His work restoring eyesight to aboriginals in that country is renowned. Log in. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Exercise 20 cards. What is the effect of exercise on your flexibility.
He was later asked to go to Bourke, km from Sydney, where he found the same shocking conditions. Fred and Gabi first met in the early 70s during her training as an orthoptist. A few years later, they worked together on the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program a journey that took them to over Indigenous communities in outback Australia. These experiences had a huge effect on Fred, motivating him to find a way to reduce the cost of eye care and treatment in developing countries. Fred saw the need for factories to produce affordable intraocular lenses.
These lenses were used to treat cataract and significantly cut the cost of restoring sight. He sought to empower local communities by founding these factories in Nepal and Eritrea. The lenses were expensive when made in Australia, but cheap and accessible when made locally.
Despite being diagnosed with cancer, Fred was determined to keep pushing for change in the countries he cared deeply about. In the last few months of his life, he discharged himself from hospital to fly to Vietnam to train over Vietnamese eye specialists in modern surgery techniques. But I have a real soft spot for the Kiwis as well.
I think they're a little ahead of us on so many levels. Gabi Hollows : And we actually have a Fred Hollows Foundation in New Zealand as well that was established at the same time as Fred Hollows Foundation here in Australia, because for tax purposes you have to have an independent way of doing that in each country.
But Fred and I kind of have this crazy link too, because the hobby of Fred when he was a Kiwi, when he was a young medical student his favourite thing he loved to do was go mountaineering and climb up through the hills in New Zealand. I don't know whether people know my date of birth, but I was born on the 21st May , which was the same week that Tensing and Ed Hillary summited Mount Everest…and I don't want to talk about what's happening there at the moment because there's some tragic stuff that's been going on recently.
So I was always obviously connected to Nepal without me even knowing that. I had no idea that my destiny was going to be so linked to Nepal…. In a little room and I was only just in there a few weeks ago, up in the Eye Clinic, in the same clinic. And one of our new registrars was starting. I said, 'This is a very special corner, that's where Fred used to see all his patients.
So he was kind of the go-to guy that people came for a second opinion or a last opinion. They'd all end up in Fred's clinic. Sandra Sully : One of the more signature moments in Fred's career was the establishment of the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern in , ' The first such service in Australia.
Was it that radical at the time? Gabi Hollows : Oh yes, there was no medical service. Aboriginal people that Fred first saw were struggling really in so many remote areas. You'd go into a country town and there would be a whole lot of Indigenous people having all sorts of problems, and very shy and embarrassed about fronting up to the hospital or to the local GP or wherever we had rural communities there was always some Indigenous people. And that was very, very sort of active.
And of course when our Indigenous people came into Sydney, I caught the train from the Central Coast and from Newcastle where I was from; what happened was country people they came to Sydney, the Indigenous people, where do they hop off the train? They didn't hop off at Central Station, they hopped off at Redfern, because that's where the community was, in Redfern, and we all know the history of Redfern and how things are changing now.
So there was a struggle there and Fred was made aware of that and so they went, okay, we'll lobby for that, and Fred thought he was going to a meeting about establishing the first legal service, but it was actually about establishing the first medical service.
And Gordon Bristow, who was one of Fred's mentors, who's the godfather to one of my twins, Rosa, and Jilipia who's the Aboriginal nurse you'll see in some of that footage, today you'll see some of that, they were the two people that were some of the very, very founding directors.
And in fact Naomi Myers was the original director, who's my son Cam's godmother. So we've got a very strong link to the AMS, and that was established in those old days in Regent Street. It's around the corner now of course in the old church where Ted Kennedy used to be, it's where the front door of the…and Regent Street in Redfern as you know is now a very famous, trendy kind of place to go, but in those days it was pretty rough and pretty ready, and so there's a lot of history there.
We don't have enough time to talk about that, but it was my greatest privilege and my greatest honour to have worked so much with our wonderful Australians, and I pay my respects to all the amazing people that I met on the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program.
But I want you to tell us about…I mean Fred was always known to be quite gnarly, quite blunt. And as legend would have it he browbeat his medical colleagues to help establish the AMS and contribute to his success. Do you recall any of those moments where…? I felt really cheated as an Australian student who'd been educated here, because I never, ever, ever thought that I would not be able to communicate. I did not know there was so much Indigenous languages; hundreds and hundreds of languages.
And when we got to Indulkana, which is in the central Australian area in the Pindara area, in our first month of working, there we were with all these old, beautiful, beautiful old people, and I just went around behind the vehicles that we had parked in a row—it was windy, it was cold, it was right up on the ridge, Indulkana's a pretty rough place, I can tell you now—and I just sobbed. I was so angry because I was so ignorant about what the history of our Indigenous people was…. Sandra Sully : And how denied they'd been to the everyday accesses that white Australia had been given privilege to.
And the legend is that Fred went off to Prince of Wales and backed the truck up and knocked off all the drugs from the pharmacy. He was very naughty, but it wasn't him…. Gabi Hollows : And in fact Dr Grundseit, who I met only two weeks ago, Ferry was there and he was in the Hearing Clinic and I was there with my son's mother-in-law who was having a few problems.
She'd been flying and her hearing's a bit blocked up and I said, 'I've got to go and give this man in the corner a cuddle. And I often go up the hill near where we live in Randwick and I toot the horn and I wave and Ferry says, 'I'm trying so hard not to sort of fall in front of the bus that I don't wave to anybody. Sandra Sully : The Indigenous Australians' plight became stuck in your heart and in Fred's heart, largely directed his future, didn't it, it was a personal passion.
Gabi Hollows : Absolutely. My mother always said to me, 'Gabriel,' that's my full name, it's actually Gabriel Beryl O'Sullivan, that's my real name she said, 'Just make sure, before you go travelling overseas, you should go and have a look at your own country first. I'm a horse person, I spent my whole life with horses and riding and country stuff. I love the country. Little did I know that I would be in more communities than probably anybody's ever been in this country— communities is a pretty amazing place to go, and we were always on the ground, we drove everywhere.
We never went on the flying team that went on the trachoma program. We had a couple of road teams and sometimes they had to fly. I've never been to Mornington Island. I've never been to Croker Island and I've never been to Melville Island, but I think I've been to just about every other place in this country, and down every road and every stock route and every place you could ever imagine where there was an Aboriginal community. Sandra Sully : And every ditch and every humpy you visited.
Are those three still on your bucket list? Gabi Hollows : Well, of course, yes. I was actually in Elko Island only just 18 months ago, you know. Those places in the Torres Strait were very, very magical places, and I was just looking up at Eddie Mabo and all the people, like…the history that we have had, the blessings that I have had to meet so many of our beautiful, beautiful Indigenous and rural people, country people. I'm a real bushy so I just love our history, and I just watched the last show on Sunday of Insiders , Barrie Cassidy and his wife Heather Ewart, who goes around and has these amazing times.
I'm so jealous of the work that Heather did, and I think yeah, gee, you know if we could all hop in that truck together…we'd be off tomorrow, I tell you now. Sandra Sully : Well, we talked about the very early years, but let's leap through to and a critical point in the trajectory of Fred's work was the development of the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program. That was established in '75, financed by the federal government.
You were an integral part of that program, as you say, travelling across communities. One of the largest public health studies ever done in the world at the time. Fred was…I just want to go back a little bit into Fred's history, because he was an ophthalmologist who…he trained, he did medicine in New Zealand and then went to the UK and studied his ophthalmology. But he trained with a very famous man called Archie Cochrane.
Dr Archie Cochrane was a medical epidemiologist and Fred studied, and he did the first glaucoma studies when he was a medical student, on glaucoma.
And unless you understand about counting things in epidemiology, if you can't count it you should be doing it, if you can't prove it you shouldn't be talking about it, and if you don't do it properly, the right way is what Fred's father always taught him, you may as well not even start. So Fred had these really strong morals grounded into him, and so that's why he wanted to go and have a look in Bourke to see, okay, do we have trachoma? Yes, we did have trachoma in Northern New South Wales, and yes, they had the first treatment program they ever, ever did with one of Fred's mountaineering mates in New Zealand, a guy called Johnny Glasgow.
They had the first treatment at Enngonia, which is right on the border, near Cullamulla and when you come into Northern New South Wales, north of Bourke where Fred is now buried. That's what Archie taught Fred, to learn to measure, to do it properly and, you know, the rest is history.
So on the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program in I had no idea what I was heading up for and a little bit later you'll see a little bit of that footage.
But it was just the most amazing, incredible time. And Fred said, 'I want my mates to help me. So we had over 80 ophthalmologists that came out on the road with us. Some of them came for weeks, some of them came for longer than that time. Some of them came several times backwards and forwards, where they were absolutely immersed in the work that we were doing.
It was one of the most amazing studies. And it hadn't been done like that before. And we had a very famous Sri Lankan ophthalmologist, Dr Pararajah Seagram, and he and his wife Ruby were both ophthalmologists. Para came for a whole year, Ruby came for…God bless her she's off to the angels now, but she came for six months.
So Para was the one who worked with us very intensively, and he was really the mentor as well to Fred and the work that we were doing about measuring and studying and looking at people's eyes properly.
Sandra Sully : Well, clearly you were confronted about the scale of work that needed to be done, what needed to be accomplished, and he managed to convince so many colleagues to travel with you to make a start, and as you say, for him to educate them about how this program could be expanded.
But can you paint a picture for us about the environments that you found yourself in? Those great images of Fred driving along in the red dirt and the dust…literally throwing a bit of canvas and a slapstick table became the operating theatre?
Gabi Hollows : Absolutely, yeah. We actually rolled out our swags, you know, the best motel to stay in those days, and in fact I gave the first ever, ever talk when Fred was so well he could go to Vietnam, but I gave the first talk in the Four Seasons Hotel just up here near Hyde Park, as the Hotels Association Australia they had their very first function there, and I said, 'I'm sorry that Fred can't be here.
I'm so excited he's well enough to be travelling overseas. And it was an amazing experience. So we really, really, really had an immersion into that culture of being on the road. We worked for days and days and weeks and weeks. And I think the first month we were working, one of our staff said, 'When are we going to get a day off?
We went up through the Centre, as I said. We ended up in Alice Springs at another base camp. We had several places along the way, and as you can see on this brochure here, Charlie Perkins, you know very famously from Central Australia, Gordon Briscoe, one of the first directors of the first Medical Service—those guys came from Central Australia and that's where we were immersed in that early, early history.
The very first time we'd ever, ever had a mass treatment program, Sandra. We talked and they said, 'We don't want to talk about eyes, we want to talk about stuff down here. And Indigenous people in those days were just starting to have, in by that stage there was the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, and they wanted to talk about venereal diseases and problems that were in some of the communities.
So we were really, really leading the way in many, many areas. And on that trachoma program in it so challenging about Indigenous health. And Fred was one of those very, very feisty people—no nonsense, you just get on and you did it. And the first treatment program we ever had for trachoma in Central Australia and we involved a lot of our Australian medical students. In fact I'm about to go to Hobart in a few weeks time and talk at the Australian Medical Students Association conference.
The very first time any of us spoke in Tasmania was back in…we flew from Broome to Hobart in an overnight trip. We came down from 40 degrees to Perth, I bought myself a leather jacket; I never took it off when I got to Hobart.
But that was many, many, many years ago, and I think that was about And we had a lot of medical students that came and dosed the patients…in those days they had to have 10 days of Septran, which was the drug that they used to treat trachoma with. These days it's a very different drug where you have different doses, and we'd do a huge, huge mass treatment in Ethiopia now and Eritrea and other places.
Sandra Sully : But you and the team, and Fred, must have had to be really innovative, because this is all mobile operating theatres. I mean how did you ensure that the sterilisation techniques, everything that you had to develop for something that was portable?
And many of the registrars that Fred trained and many other doctors that have gone to other places in Northern New South Wales or Western New South Wales, and other people in Victoria have done the same. But in Alice Springs Fred said okay, we're going to have our first cataract surgery on the first trachoma stuff.
And he said, 'Right, we're going to put it in Alice Springs Hospital. The sheets might get dirty because we've got Indigenous people and…' So Fred said, 'Right, we'll stick it right up their noses and we'll put it in the car park at Alice Springs Hospital. That didn't actually happen, because the Australian army came on board. And they had a medical corp. And they were really, really wanting to sort of see real live patients. And so we actually had our very, very first surgical event was held at Amata, where the Royal Australian Army came along with engineers and we had the first surgical treatment done there.
And then later on a few other times in Utopia and up near Katherine the Australian Medical Department came and helped us do the surgery. So we didn't go around operating on people, because when we actually looked at people we actually referred them to surgery. We referred them for glasses, we referred them for GP actions. Kids who had candle stick noses and custard ears as we called it. Gabi Hollows : A custard ear is when kids have got perforated eardrums with pus coming out their ears.
I remember syringing—and this is not a very nice thing—with Jilipia, one of the nurses who'd been the first nurse at the Medical Service that came out on the bush with us and she's in that footage we once got 17 flies out of a young kid's ear that we syringed with an ear syringe.
Stuff like that was very, very…Professor Paul Torzillo now is a respiratory physician, he was out in the bush with us. We had so many amazing people that came with us, looking at general health. And in fact Jack Waterford who was the journalist from the Canberra Times , he met his wife Sue there and Jack now has…well we just saw him last week because we just had our AGM on the 28th.
He wrote some of those very first stories about 'If you were talking about the health of our Indigenous people…', Fred was comparing it to 'If these were animals not human beings they would be reported to the RSPCA.
So there was a lot of stuff that happened. He was there with his little typewriter on his knees, came to Ernabella with us. So much history going back there, Sandra, it's just amazing. Sandra Sully : We never overstated it in the introduction that Fred and you, everything that you've done, you were and are pioneers, not just in obviously all eye treatments, but in Indigenous health, yeah.
Gabi Hollows : So it's a long time ago now and I just had my birthday, as I said, on 21st May, and if you can do your sums, I always make kids do their sums and I was born , you can tell how old I am. I might be a little bit younger than some of our members in our room here, but seriously, how many of you have known people who had trachoma or sandy blight or that uncomfortable scratchy feeling. In fact my granddaughter this morning just got a tiny bit of grit, a little bit of sand in her eye, and I said, 'Now sit there, Matilda, sit still and just let your tears well up and blinky-blink…' She's going, 'Oww.
So I sat her on the table out the front and you know, you just don't think…and I always use the analogy of when I get into my car I'm not sure which car I'm driving, whether it's a European car or a Japanese car and I turn the windscreen wipers on and I put the wrong light switch on and I'm backing out of my driveway and we've got a big Jacaranda tree and a camellia bush and all that sprinkles down on my windscreen at home.
So when my windscreen wipers are going and my water squirters are going, and scratch, scratch, scratch—the first thing I've got to do is always run my finger along the windscreen wipers and flip them up and get all that off, because when I'm about to take off, I don't want that going scratch, scratch, scratch.
And in fact my daughter Anna, my middle daughter, who works in ICU at Don Hunter in Newcastle, she was overseas with the World Rugby Tour a couple of years ago and she was in Ireland; I was in Ethiopia at the time with that t-shirt you'll see in the footage, and she said, 'Mummy, I can't believe how I feel so bad, I had one eyelash in my eye and I nearly was demented, I couldn't get it out. How do you think those people with trachoma feel? Sandra Sully : All the work that you've done with Indigenous Australians emboldened you to carry it on, but I wonder how special it's been as well to be able to educate so many fellow specialists and medical staff who have then been able to continue on the work.
And at the time they didn't know what they were about to learn. Gabi Hollows : No, they didn't. And I think every person that Fred engaged with or talked to, he would want someone to teach him something that he didn't know, and if they were med students they'd have to ask a lot of questions.
We used to do a lot of GP quizzes and we used to do…of course the medical students if they were lucky enough studying medicine would be sneaky enough to come into ophthalmology lectures and some of them were too scared to come near Fred because he was a bit too scary.
And other people remember that. We had a lot of ophthalmologists who came as young medical students who were on that first treatment program who now are very famous ophthalmologists. But the registrars that Fred taught in his clinic are very famous ophthalmologists in not only this town here but in many other parts of the country.
But one of the things was, you know, if a journalist came along, Sandra, and they hadn't done their homework and you've done your homework today talking to me and they said, 'Okay, Fred, I want to talk about glaucoma.
Gabi Hollows : And it's a very, very big story, this one. It's been happening for a very long time and I'm so proud that you're here to listen to some of those early days. Sandra Sully : Well, I'm honoured to be able to help share the story and the remarkable work. I've been a fan, as I said, for as long as I can remember. And when I look through some of the notes I was given to prepare for today, I remembered seeing Fred's work all of a sudden, you know, word spread about how remarkable his work was, and such a pioneer.
And then before I knew it he was consulting to the World Health Organisation. Gabi Hollows : No, people sort of thought, where's Fred gone, his eye clinic was…we were three years out in the bush and all the other people kept the kettle boiling at Prince of Wales and Fred was out doing his stuff and we'd come and go and he'd come backwards and forwards and… I won't even talk about what happened in Queensland with Joh Bjelke-Petersen, because that's another story and that's too long.
His next job was then to go and be employed by the World Health Organisation, WHO, as a consultant ophthalmologist to study the prevention of blindness programs overseas. So he invited Fred to be one of his mentors, to come and have a look at some of the other countries.
Fred was invited of course to go to Thailand, to Myanmar, or Burma as we remember it, to go to Bangladesh, to go to Vietnam, to go to Nepal, to go up into some of the hardest places in the world to have a look and consult. And I tagged along with him. And the only place I didn't go was Myanmar because it was a little bit difficult at the time, but Fred was asked to go and have a look at those programs.
And of course the place that he really wanted to go to, where do you think that would be, where there's snow and mountains and high hills? Of course it was Nepal. So he thought he was just going to come cruising in float in there and have a bit of a gander and have a bit of a look around and then head for the hills, literally. But that's when he met the very famous Sanduk Ruit, who is our Nepalese surgeon, who came and lived at Farnham House with us in , who is the godfather to my daughter Anna Louise, who's now Fred and Ruit were bonded by the head of the eye hospital in Kathmandu, and he was way, way out in the desert when he first met Fred and I don't know whether you've seen just recently we had Dr Ruit's book launch here in Australia last year in July.
Of course Ruit now has done more surgeries than anyone else on this planet. He is the one who's pioneered them, teaching, and we've now got the lens laboratory in Eritrea, which we opened in after Fred passed away. And then the second one was done in Nepal. Those little intraocular lenses that Sandra might tell you about are very precious. But Ruit was learning how to do that. We used to call it the Prince of Wales technique, and then Fred called it the Ruit technique or the Nepali technique.
And Dr Ruit now, seriously, we just launched his book and it's called The Barefoot Surgeon , I don't know whether you saw any of it; did any of you get that book or know about that book?
Well, it's out there in the bookshops, you might have to order it in. It was in Dymocks, in a lot of the book stores right around the country. Dr Ruit did a speaking tour when we launched that book. He has done more surgeries than anyone else on this planet. He says he stopped counting at about , people, personally, seriously, and his assistant and some of the surgeons.
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