Do we like Fred Hollows?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decades of real, practical good for the world's poorest, held back by his 1992 comments about gay men and HIV.
Fred Hollows was born in New Zealand in 1929 and grew up in Palmerston North after the family moved from Dunedin. He studied divinity for a year before switching to medicine, and the Foundation says his father shaped his worldview and encouraged his social activism. After training in London and Cardiff he landed in Sydney, chairing ophthalmology at the Prince of Wales Hospital.
The thing he's remembered for is simple and enormous. He travelled to hundreds of remote communities to chase the gap in eye health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Later he pushed to make lenses locally in Eritrea and Nepal, and the Foundation says that took the cost from more than $150 to under $5 each. AAP reported in 2016 that more than eight million lenses had been made.
Now the bit that doesn't sit right with us. In 1992 he said HIV-positive gay men should be quarantined, and The Brag reports he called the epidemic “basically a homosexual problem”. A Goulburn Post letter-writer called the comments “hateful and bigoted” and says he held that position after researchers challenged him.
It came back to bite in 2016 when the Foundation launched Fred on the Fiver, a push to put him on the five-dollar note, with Bob Hawke and Cathy Freeman at the launch. LGBT critics argued the remarks ruled him out, while supporters said “everyone makes mistakes”. The Brag reported no direct Foundation response, and we found no apology from Hollows himself.
On the rest of the harm check, the record is thin rather than clean. Our searches turned up nothing from him on women, migrants or the planet, and no court cases or allegations. So this is one serious, well-documented misstep, not a pattern, but it is aimed squarely at people in our corner and it's fair to mark him down for it.
As a person, the portraits are warm. Writer Angela Griffen called him “frank, funny, genuine and user-friendly in a gruff sort of way”. His widow, Gabi, said the saddest thing was that he was buried before he got to hold a lens the labs produced. He set up the Foundation while dying, so the work would outlive him.