Nick Miller; 26/5/08
Three decades ago when they first met, Hugh Taylor and Jilpia Jones were part of the Fred Hollows dream to cure the failing eyesight of indigenous Australia. They met again yesterday, the grand vision still blurred, to rejoin the fight. Professor Taylor, now the foundation chairman of Indigenous Eye Health at the University of Melbourne, says he is regularly shocked to return to communities he first visited in the 1970s to find no change in the rates of the curable, preventable disease trachoma. “I was in one just last week in South Australia,” he said. “Australia really has got to do better. It doesn’t seem that anything has changed in the last 30 years.” Ms Jones is more sanguine. “I don’t get shocked,” she said. “Being a blackfella, you learn to accept.”
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, health