Fred Hollows

Frederick Cossom Hollows was born on April 9, 1929, in Dunedin, a university city on New Zealand's South Island. He was one of four sons of Joseph Hollows, an engine driver on the railways, and Clarice Hollows. The family later moved to Palmerston North in the North Island, where Fred spent most of his childhood ^[1].

The household was shaped by his parents' Christian convictions and a strong sense of social duty. As a young man Hollows considered the ministry and enrolled at a divinity school, but a period of work at a psychiatric hospital changed his direction. The experience of practical care for vulnerable people convinced him that medicine, not the pulpit, was where he could be useful ^[2].

He completed his medical degree at the University of Otago, graduating in the mid 1950s. During his student years he was an enthusiastic mountaineer, a passion that stayed with him for life, and he was drawn to left wing politics, joining the Communist Party of New Zealand for a time. Both the climbing and the politics fed the same trait: a bluntness and physical directness that colleagues would later describe as his defining quality ^[1][3].

After working as a junior doctor in New Zealand hospitals, Hollows travelled to the United Kingdom to specialise. He trained in ophthalmology at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and worked in Wales, where he took part in epidemiological research on glaucoma with the Medical Research Council unit in Cardiff. That research, which examined whole communities rather than just patients who presented at clinics, taught him to think about eye disease as a population problem ^[2][4].

In 1965 he moved to Australia to become associate professor of ophthalmology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he also headed the eye department at the Prince of Wales Hospital. He would hold the chair at UNSW for the next quarter of a century ^[1].

The turning point in the Fred Hollows biography came in 1968, when he examined Aboriginal patients from Wattie Creek in the Northern Territory and later visited communities in western New South Wales. He found rates of trachoma, cataract, and other treatable eye conditions that had scarcely been documented in a wealthy country. Angered by what he saw as official neglect, he helped establish the Aboriginal Medical Service in the Sydney suburb of Redfern in 1971, the first community controlled Aboriginal health service in Australia ^[3][5].

Among the most significant Fred Hollows achievements was the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program, which he led for the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists from 1976 to 1978. Teams travelled by truck and light aircraft to hundreds of Aboriginal communities and country towns, screening roughly 100,000 people, treating tens of thousands, and performing sight restoring surgery in makeshift outback settings. The program produced the first comprehensive picture of Aboriginal eye health and forced trachoma, a blinding infection long eliminated from Australian cities, onto the national agenda ^[4][5].

From the mid 1980s Hollows turned to avoidable blindness in the developing world, initially through work with the World Health Organization. Visits to Nepal, Eritrea, and Vietnam convinced him that the main barrier to cataract surgery in poor countries was not skill but cost. Intraocular lenses, the small plastic implants that replace a clouded natural lens, were priced far beyond the reach of most patients ^[2][6].

His answer was characteristically practical: build lens factories in the countries that needed them. Hollows campaigned and raised funds so that laboratories could be established in Asmara in Eritrea and Kathmandu in Nepal, producing high quality intraocular lenses for a few dollars each. Both factories opened after his death but were the direct result of his planning and fundraising. Alongside the factories he pushed for training local surgeons rather than flying in foreign specialists, arguing that sustainable eye care had to be owned by the countries themselves ^[6][7].

Hollows married twice. His first wife, Mary Skiller, worked alongside him in his early Australian years; she died of cancer in 1975. In 1980 he married Gabi O'Sullivan, an orthoptist who had joined the trachoma program teams. Fred and Gabi Hollows had five children together, and he had two daughters from his first marriage ^[1][3].

He was famously gruff, profane, and impatient with bureaucracy, a chain of traits that made him enemies in official circles and devoted friends everywhere else. He rolled his own cigarettes, quoted poetry from memory, and kept climbing and fishing whenever work allowed. Interviewers often noted the contrast between his abrasive manner and the gentleness he showed patients ^[3].

For all his radical politics in youth, Hollows described his later outlook in simple terms: the test of any society was how it treated its poorest members, and medicine was a tool for meeting that test. He remained a public critic of governments of both political stripes when he judged that Aboriginal health was being neglected ^[5].

In 1989 Hollows was diagnosed with renal cancer, and the disease later spread to his lungs and brain. He responded not by retiring but by accelerating his international work, making repeated trips to Eritrea, then in the final years of its independence war, and to Vietnam, where he helped train dozens of eye surgeons in modern cataract techniques ^[2][6].

Public recognition arrived in the same period. He was named Australian of the Year in 1990, an award he used as a platform to talk about blindness in the developing world rather than about himself. Having earlier declined other honours, he accepted appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1991 ^[1][8].

In 1992, knowing he was dying, Fred and Gabi Hollows launched the Fred Hollows Foundation in Sydney to carry the work forward. He died at his home in Randwick, Sydney, on February 10, 1993, aged 63. At his own request he was buried in Bourke, the outback New South Wales town where his Aboriginal eye work had begun, after a state funeral service in Sydney ^[1][7].

Anyone asking who was Fred Hollows soon meets the statistic that defines his afterlife: the Fred Hollows Foundation reports that it has restored sight to millions of people across more than twenty five countries since 1992, largely through low cost cataract surgery of the kind he championed ^[7]. The lens laboratories he planned in Eritrea and Nepal began production in the mid 1990s, cutting the price of intraocular lenses in those regions dramatically and supplying surgeons across the developing world ^[6][7].

In Australia his influence runs through Aboriginal health policy. The Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service became the model for a national network of community controlled health organisations, and the trachoma program's data shaped decades of subsequent screening and treatment efforts in remote communities ^[4][5].

Among the Fred Hollows facts that endure in public memory are the honours that followed his death: streets, scholarships, an electoral division in the Northern Territory named Fred's Pass area landmarks aside, the federal seat of a humanitarian award in his name, and repeated polling that placed him among the most admired Australians. More durable than any of it is the working principle he repeated to trainees: every eye is an eye, whether it belongs to a prime minister or a shepherd, and it deserves the same standard of care ^[3][7].