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time and money supporting the Aboriginal health movement in its formative years. In 1980 he married one of his
field assistants, Gabi O’Sullivan. In the mid-1980s the national program, by then well established, was split up
into state-based services.
In the early 1980s Hollows set up eye health programs, based on his Australian experience, in Mexico, Burma,
Thailand, Vietnam and Nepal. In 1986, while attending the World Health Organisation World Blindness Program
Conference in Alexandria, Egypt, Hollows was urged to visit Eritrea where civil war and poor health facilities
had created appalling eye problems. Eritrea became the ground for Hollows’ final crusade. In Sydney he launched
into a training program for Eritrean doctors to perform eye operations, and fund-raising to provide the capital for
setting up factories in Eritrea to produce inexpensive intraocular lenses. In 1990, despite having been diagnosed
as having cancer in 1989, Hollows returned to Eritrea with equipment for eye health centres and factories. He had
had an affected kidney removed, and underwent extensive radiation therapy, but the cancer persisted. In mid-1991
secondary cancer in the brain was diagnosed. He made a last visit to Eritrea that year.
In 1985 Hollows had turned down an Order of Australia award in protest over the state of Aboriginal health.
In 1990 he was honoured with the highest rank in the Order of Australia, that of Companion (AC). He was also
named Australian of the Year. This time Hollows accepted, and threw himself into publicising the plight of Eritrea
and raising funds through the newly formed Fred Hollows Foundation. He was awarded the Australian Human
Rights Medal in 1990, and received the Rotary International Award for Human Understanding in 1993. As part of
his Australian tour as Australian of the Year in 1990, Hollows returned to the Northern Territory. Despite his cancer
he set a hectic pace, and ill health did nothing to curb his blunt approach to matters that offended him. Speaking
at a luncheon held in his honour in Darwin, he discomforted many of the white dignitaries present by his scathing
denunciation of the fact that only a couple of Aborigines were present. What most delighted him during his tour of
the Territory was meeting again with Father Flynn, and revisiting the Tiwi Islands. At Nguiu, Hollows caused great
consternation when he insisted on swimming in the crocodile infested waters off Melville Island. His response to
warnings by the Aborigines was that he was ‘going soon enough’, and may as well enjoy himself.
Shortly before his death on 10 February 1993, Hollows made a compact disc recording of readings of his
favourite Australian poets for his young children. He was survived by his wife Gabi, their five children, Cam,
Emma, Anna, three year old twins Ruth and Rosa, and two of Hollows’ older children, Tanya and Ben.
Hollows was accorded a State funeral, an unusual privilege for a private citizen. A memorial service was held
at St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney on Monday 16 February, with Frank Hardy reading the eulogy. The following
day family and close friends travelled to Bourke in New South Wales, where Hollows was laid to rest between
two coolibah trees in the cemetery there. The Aboriginal people of nearby Enngonia had made a special banner
for the coffin, which depicted the story of the white serpent and how the white man had come to help and heal the
Aborigines. At Hollows’ request, a wake was held at a claypan about 60 kilometres north of Bourke.
J Arnold & D Morris (eds), Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Australia, 1994; The Australian, 11 & 16 February 1993,
17 July 1995; G Brisco, ‘Obituary for Professor Fred Cossom Hollows 1929–1993’, Aboriginal History, vol 17, 1993; F Hollows with P Corris,
Fred Hollows, 1992; ‘National Trachoma and Eye Health Program’, The Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists, Sydney, 1980; personal
interviews with F Hollows, 1990.
EVE GIBSON, Vol 3.HOLMES, CECIL WILLIAM (1921–1994), film director, author and journalist, was born on 23 June 1921
at Waipukarau, New Zealand, a son of Alan Holmes, a Lieutenant in the New Zealand Army and Ivy Marion
Holmes, nee Watt. He was educated in New Zealand and saw service in the European and African theatres during
the Second World War. As a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy he was torpedoed in the North Atlantic on board a
destroyer in the convoys taking supplies from Liverpool to Murmansk, Russia. He was badly wounded and was
later mentioned in dispatches and served a total of four years in overseas theatres of war. His decorations included
the Atlantic Star, the Africa Star with 1942–1943 clasp, the Defence Medal, the War medal 1939–1943 and the
New Zealand War Service Medal.
At war’s end Holmes began the filming which was to become his life’s work. He visited to Japan and at
Hiroshima photographed the aftermath of the dropping of the atom bomb on that city. In 1947 he was in Surabaya,
Indonesia when the Dutch left. He also visited Saigon and filmed French forces fighting Vietnamese guerrillas.
Between 1947 and 1952 he made documentaries for the New Zealand Film Unit and in 1953 made his first
feature film in Australia, the well-known Captain Thunderbolt. His next film Three in One made in 1956 won
prizes at several international film festivals. The Australian film industry had difficulty re-establishing itself in the
immediate post-war period, partly because largely United States interests controlled distribution. Those with the
funds shunned often talented filmmakers like Holmes as their views were considered to be out of touch with the
establishment.
Cecil Holmes, a tall well-built, handsome man, was a humanist who once said that ‘the family to which he
belonged was that of mankind’. During the 1960s he made a number of films for the Methodist Overseas Mission
in the Northern Territory on aspects of Aboriginal culture. During these years he also recorded Aboriginal sacred
and mortuary ceremonies for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Between 1971 and 1975 he wrote
and directed a number of television documentaries set in the Northern Territory, the last of which was Cyclone
Approaching. At the 1964 Australian Film Institute Awards I, the Aboriginal won a gold medal for its dramatic
expression and strong narrative appeal. The following year Faces in the Sun won a similar award.
In 1964 Holmes with his wife and family moved to the Northern Territory. He had been appointed editor of the
Murdoch owned Territorian. The magazine reflected life in the Territory at the time and was mostly concerned