PROFESSOR FRED HOLLOWS
at work overseas


THIS REPRESENTS THE RETINA OF THE EYE

THIS ONE IS BEFORE THE GRANITE BLOCK WAS ADDED

AND A SPEECH MADE WHEN IT WAS ADDED --NOTICE MENTION OF BLANKET ON
The Fred Hollows Foundation
Cam introduces Phillip Sullivan for traditional welcome –

Phillip ‘I think he might be telling us something – he might be to hot with that blanket on.’
Minute silence
‘Got to watch ourselves because we have the Captain of the nsw fire brigade here’
‘We are here to celebrate the life of a wonderful man.’
It’s a big stone hey, a beautiful stone? It represents something doesn’t it? Give it 200 years and I reckon it will still be here. What a legacy to leave behind. You can some see what a man like Fred done. We all know what he done – he was an eye doctor. He come fix up eyes and I can see my old aunties here in the front – and know doubt he fixed up there eyes.’
‘But I don’t think that was the real deal about Fred. It was, but … it was good for him to go and show people that you can do things practical, you can give a person the ability to see with their own physical eye – to see colour, to see things moving, actually see it with their physical eyes. But I think the deal about our old mate, and that is what he was to us, he still is our old mate, is the unseen thing, the spiritual eye. Because as the world is today, it is all about what we see with our eye and what we can gain with it. It never was with Fred. Because he went amongst our mob and he didn’t see an old black woman sitting down, or an old African woman sitting down or an old white woman sitting down he would just see an old woman sitting down, or an old man sitting down and that is why persons like myself, young people who don’t know much about him but still talk a lot about him because he had this awesome thing about him, about seeing people with his spiritual eye. And that he’d fix up the natural eye. And what captivated a person like me that never met him is that he cared for people. There is no law in the world that you can’t care for people. No law in the world is written that you can’t love anybody, there is no law in this whole wide universe to say that you can’t give respect to somebody. And that is exactly what he gave to us, he showed us that black and white fellas, young and old them attributes. And I believe they only come from one place – that’s where it comes from – up there. Values that are passed down through the ages, and he just grabbed onto them. Us mob do the same, that’s our attributes, we care, we share, we respect eachother. We don’t see things with our natural eye, we see them with our spiritual eye, with our heart. And I think that if we are to leave here with anything today it is that yes, he was an eye doctor but he was a very special eye doctor because he saw things with his spiritual eye, and that is why he went out and done his work. He did it, he didn’t sit back and write a paper about it, he went out and did it. And so today we honour him for that, we come from all over the place – us mob here, we come under an old coolabah tree – and that was his wish.
Bourke has done a great Australian proud in remembrance.

Early in the 1970s, Hollows worked with the [[Gurindji people]] at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory and then with the people around Bourke, and other isolated New South Wales towns, stations and Aboriginal communities. He became especially concerned with the high number of Aboriginals who had eye disorders, particularly trachoma. In July 1971, with Mum (Shirl) Smith and others, he set up the Aboriginal Medical Service in suburban Redfern, New South Wales and subsequently assisted in the establishment of medical services for Aboriginal People throughout Australia.

He is responsible for organising the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists to establish the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program with funding by the FederalGovernment. improving eye health in remote communities'', Hollows himself spent three years visiting Aboriginal communities to provide eye care and carry out a survey of eye defects. More than 460 Aboriginal communities were visited, and 62,000 Aboriginal People were examined, leading to 27,000 being treated for trachoma and 1,000 operations being carried out.

===Overseas work===
His visits to [[Nepal]] in 1985, [[Eritrea]] in 1987, and [[Vietnam]] in 1991 resulted in training programs to train local technicians to perform eye surgery. ''On the practicalities of eye camp cataract extraction and intraocular lens implantation in Nepal'',
Hollows organized [[intraocular lens]] laboratories in Eritrea and Nepal to manufacture and provide lenses at cost, which was about A$10 (approximately US$9) each. Both laboratories started production after his death, in 1993.