From the Archives, 1992: Fred Hollows – a man of contradictions

He talks dispassionately, though friends say he is as fearful as any of death. He has had time enough to ponder mortality, sitting still for hours in darkness for radiation treatment, iridium, rods inserted through his nose and into the lungs.

He has undergone surgery to have the affected part of the kidney removed. A tumor since removed from the brain affected his balance. He is incensed at claims during the recent controversy sparked by his comments on AIDS that it affected his thinking as well.

Friends note that ever irascible, he now has little time for niceties, living what is left of his life as if written in shorthand.

Among those to detect a change, film-maker Pat Fiske wonders to what extent it is due to his illness. He is pushing himself hard, she says, has redoubled his efforts, knowing he has a shortened lifespan.

Now completing a documentary film on Hollows, she sees a man of contradictions, far-sighted in the work he does, yet “old-fashioned” in his approach to women and gays. “Sometimes I think: ‘I don’t believe this’. I find him harder to argue with, less tolerant, these days.”

At 62, Frederick Cossom Hollows reckons he might have another five years left then again, a friend, diagnosed with the same cancer six months after him, died more than a year ago.

IT is a crisp, sunny winter’s day when I call on him at his office overlooking Botany Bay. Beside the photos of the forger is an enlarged newspaper cartoon. ‘GAY LOBBY’ is written above 10 bowling pins; ‘HOLLOWS’ on the broad back of the bowler preparing to let loose his ball.

The eye surgeon told the first national Aboriginal AIDS-HIV conference in Alice Springs in March that people likely to introduce AIDS into Aboriginal communities should be monitored or controlled.

AIDS in Australia was mainly restricted to homosexual men and most often caused by unprotected anal sex. Hollows warned that a failure to act could result in a “selective depopulation”, likening it to the effect of smallpox in south-eastern Australia in 1789 and 1829.

At a Sydney lunch later that month, he was reported as speaking of “queers” and criticised the Federal Government and “bloody gay lobby” over the national strategy for dealing with AIDS. More than 700 male homosexuals became HIV-positive in Australia last year and there were “many wild, prurient, profligate aspects of the so-called gay scene and only male homosexuals can control that”.

Friends say that he is embarrassed by the outcry that followed and fears retaliation against his family.

Does he regret the debate? “No, not really. I’m just sort of appalled that I had to say these things that almost every doctor who’s had a look at AIDS knows.”

He has a way of speaking that might be termed colorful. “Ugly as a hat full of arseholes,” he says affectionately of a friend. Those who know him caution against being fazed by the way he speaks. Author Peter Corris, who co-wrote his autobiography, talks of the appeal in “a common man doing uncommon things”. He says Hollows straddles class, combining the aura of academic and doctor with a wharfie’s manner and speech.

The day I visit he is quizzed on his views on AIDS by a blue-tied Sydney University academic. Talking of sex, Fred Hollows pokes a forefinger in and out of an circled index finger and thumb. He stabs the air, saying: “For Christ’s sake, this isn’t just a wild Fred Hollows idea.”

Aboriginal historian Gordon Briscoe says it was at his insistence that his friend spoke out at Alice Springs. Hollows claims he was “emboldened” when the federal Health Minister, Mr Brian Howe, said at the conference it was time to break the old taboo and talk candidly about the issue.

“I thought old Howe was on the right track,” he says. “But then he got on his plane and he pissed off.” Hollows alleges a deliberate evasiveness in Government strategy on AIDS. He attributes this partly to the “proclivities” of some people of influence in Australia. He will not name names.

Wary of talk of safe sex, he says condoms have a failure rate around 20 per cent as a contraceptive. Why then should we suppose they will prevent sperm entering the rectum in anal sex?

HIS friend Mike Lynskey, a director of a foundation Hollows has set up to raise money to improve eye disease treatment in Eritrea, Nepal and Vietnam, recalls a meeting with Bob Hawke in the then Prime Minister’s offices in Canberra. He claims Hawke sat at his desk, hands folded behind his head, while the eye surgeon took him to task for the high rate of youth unemployment. Finally, says Lynskey, Hawke’s fist came down on his desk. Stick to your profession, he allegedly told Hollows. The ophthalmologist, says Lynskey, told Hawke this was not good enough.

Fred Hollows has heard much of the same from opponents in recent months. “You see what happens. As soon as you say something that offends this lobby, they say ‘Hollows is a f . . . . . g eye doctor’. Of course, I’m an eye doctor. But . . .”

Part of his work involves injecting an anti-viral agent into the eyes of people with AIDS, to stop blindness. “The thing to remember is that one of the reasons that other people aren’t doing it is because they’re afraid to be sticking needles into people with AIDS. We just roll our sleeves . . .”

AIDS has led to personal tragedy. A nephew who, he says, was “the only one I could ever say was an intellectual companion of mine”, committed suicide when he seemed certain to die of AIDS. Another nephew has AIDS.

It is not clear if his stance on homosexuality has undermined his large following. His autobiography co-written with Peter Corris and released last year, has sold an estimated 35,000 copies. Few books about Australians are this popular.

Hollows is donating all — and Peter Corris half — of the money received from the book to the foundation he has set up to raise enough money to build factories in Eritrea, Vietnam and Nepal where inter-ocular lenses can be made. Inserted surgically, these will enable people blinded by cataracts to see.

He says international eye health agencies all too often advocate inadequate treatment in the Third World. “If we can get three lens factories in the three poorest countries on earth before I die . . . we will have started something that will be absolutely unstoppable,” he says. (He agreed to do this interview on the condition it include the address of The Fred Hollows Foundation — Locked Bag 5021, Alexandria NSW 2015 Australia / [email protected]).

Long-time friend Dr Elizabeth Dax, director the HIV Reference Laboratory at Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne, explains his appeal to the public. “He’s real that’s why,” she says. “He has failings and he overcomes them. He has adversity and he overcomes it. That’s what is different. He is real.”

If Mahatma Gandhi was living here and announced he would fast to improve the world, says the independent publisher of the Hollows book, John Kerr, Australians would more than likely throw another shrimp on the barbie. Gandhi, says Kerr, is “not our kind of saint”. Implying that Hollows, though by no means saintly in a conventional sense, is our kind of saint.

Not that he has not made enemies. A chamber music group inserted a disclaimer into its program at a Fred Hollows Blindness Prevention benefit concert, dissociating himself from his views on AIDS. A Sydney bookshop cancelled an invitation to him to launch a book on East Timor.

Hollows seems unperturbed to be out of step with the times. His fondness for tobacco (“a great friend to me,” he has claimed) has not gone unnoticed in the Edmund Blackett Building at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, where he heads the ophthalmology department.

He has a deft, no-nonsense way of a filling his pipe. A way of walking pipe in mouth, white-coated along hospital corridors, seemingly oblivious to a sign warning that smoking is not permitted.

He is known for his blunt approach. “You’d be holding a full hand for a coronary occlusion, wouldn’t you?” were his first words to a then overweight John Kerr.

Among the first words to Elizabeth Dax, 20 years ago or so: “What’re you messing around with medicine for get home and have babies!”

The Hollows eyes twinkle at the centre of the storm he creates. “I speak with assertiveness that is often interpreted as aggression. I noticed that when I start to emphasise a point, some people sort of back off as though ‘He’s personally attacking me’.

“But what I’m trying to do is impart understanding about something that I feel strongly about, you know?”

APPROPRIATELY for a man with pictures of the forger on his wall, he reconsidered his priorities on sabbatical in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1973. Hobbling around the streets with a torn muscle in one leg, he had “a sudden insight into the nature of things as far as Fred Hollows was concerned”.

He decided then and there it did not matter if he did not publish any more scientific papers. He would not take part in academic and administrative politics or attend any meeting he considered unproductive.

“People say ‘Jesus, Fred, the university’s giving you these honorary degrees and that. You’ve worked your arse off and you deserve . . .’ That’s a pile of bullshit. I’ve only done what I’ve wanted to do. Not only that, I’ve very rarely found myself doing things I didn’t want to do. I’m the worst committee man . . .”

The son of a train driver who became a chrysanthemum grower, Fred Hollows was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, a “cold, hard, place,” near the tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

His first choice of vocation was clergyman and he would enrol for studies at Glenleith College, Dunedin, a Church of Christ theological school attached to Otago University.

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But a holiday stint as a mental hospital assistant convinced him otherwise. “Sex, alcohol and secular goodness are pretty keen instruments, and they surgically removed my Christianity, leaving no scars. I was an agnostic by the time I returned to Dunedin.”

He turned to an arts degree and later, medicine. Fred Hollows has worked as an alpine guide, bulldozer driver and sunk bores in outback Queensland. He did postgraduate ophthalmology work among Welsh mining families.

Returning to Australia in the mid-1960s he became involved in the struggle for Aboriginal rights. He was appalled by the extent of eye disease he encountered during a visit to the Gurindji people in Watti Creek, Northern Territory.

He set up the national Trachoma Program and took to the road with a mobile medical team, treating more than 105,000 rural Aborigines in two years, dispensing 10,000 spectacles performing 1000 operations at close to 500 locations, despite intermittent bureaucratic and political interference.

Fred Hollows’ subsequent work in the Third World is legend. He has held clinics in places such as Bangladesh, Burma and Latin America. He has visited Nepal and, despite cancer, continued to travel around the world, through the Sudan to war-torn Eritrea and recently Vietnam, where he plans to return soon.

Early in his career, Hollows vowed he would never use his profession to propel himself into the middle-class. Friends say he is the country’s poorest ophthalmologist.

Asked if he is materially comfortable, he admits: “I’m a bit worried about my kids. Not worried about me. I mean, I wouldn’t know what to do if I had a lot of money.”

Home to the Hollows family is six-bedroom, Victorian sandstone ‘Fernham House’, at Randwick, built in 1863 and, he says, used alternatively as a brothel, nunnery and gaming house over the years. It was seven flats when he took it over. The first thing he did was to remove locks from the doors.

There is space enough for five children and friends such as poet and ex-convict Max Williams or the writer Frank Hardy, who have stayed there. Hollows shows you a room used by some Aboriginal friends. “The resident boong’s room,” he announces blithely.

John Kerr claims a jazzman friend once lived there playing music to Hollows in lieu of rent. The publisher describes it as “the last surviving urban, hippy commune”.

Hollows is married to Gabi, 25 years his junior, and mother of five of his six children. The youngest, twins Ruth and Roma, are two and-a-half years old.

Gabi, an eye disease specialist, worked with him on the road before they married.

I put it to him that many people as ill as he might slow down and spend time with the family. What kept him at his work when he had already achieved so much? “People keep asking me what drives me. It’s a f. . . . g crazy question really. I can’t understand it. ”

“If you do eye surgery and you take out cataracts and you know what a good operation it is, and you know that five out of six people in the world are never going to get it, and you have a chance to be part of a program that at least’s going to be the leaven that’s’ going to start that program right throughout the Third World, then you’d bloody jump at it, wouldn’t you?”

Later, over a glass of whisky in his kitchen: “You keep asking me why I do this. It’s what a human being should do. Only an animal puts its self-interest before others.”

Hollows’ manner obscures the-depth of his book-learning. At the slightest prompting, the “wild colonial boy” of Australian surgery, as Tom Keneally has characterised him, will recite poetry.

A Marxist with a strong interest in South American liberation theology, he readily quotes from the Brazilian educationist Paolo Freire (“God is the force within us that strives for liberation”).

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Then he’s on about the Old Testament, alleging parallels between the fate of Sodom and AIDS. “Somebody says God threw balls of fire from the clouds or some f. . . . . g thing but that’s just a mythological way of talking, about it, isn’t it?” He talks of Hegel, Kant, Darwin and, of course old “Charley Marx”.

You sense that he would talk on endlessly, if he could. “I got home on Saturday, I was absolutely f. . . d. I had spent six out of seven nights talking to people and no two talks were in the same town. I felt physically exhausted. I used to be fit and strong, you know, and I’m weak as a kitten.”

This is the Fred Hollows who less than 20 years ago ran 48 kilometres across the Isthmus of Panama with an American acquaintance.

These days, says Peter Corris, he will leave a social event earlier than before. He complains that he just has not got the strength.

Fred Hollows plans a trip beyond Bourke later this year “with a couple of my black mates. Just poke around, camp at a different place every night. I’ll enjoy that. Or I hope I will.”

EARLY in his book, Fred Hollows notes his admiration for the attendants at the mental hospital he worked at briefly in his youth. “Good men. And no odour of sanctity about them. Ordinary citizens.”

He says: “They’d do incredibly brave things and react in a very, humane way … and never expected,, somebody to say ‘that was brave’ or ‘that was humane’. They just did it, right?”

I ask if in time to come he would have much the same said of him. “Yeah, I would like to have lived the sort of life for which those words would be appropriate, right?” he says. No odour of sanctity.

Fred Hollows tells friends the time of his death is no more certain than theirs. But he knows he has not long to live. “You know what they say,” he says of an ill-fated forger. “A woman’s time has arrived when she gives birth. A man’s time has arrived when he dies.”