Associate Professor Kris Rallah-Baker – Australia’s first and, to date, only Indigenous ophthalmologist – is the subject of this week’s episode of ABC’s Australian Story.
The episode, titled “Eyes on the Prize”, airs Monday 21 September at 8pm on ABC TV and ABC iview. It is produced by Erin Semmler and presented by Leigh Sales. ABC News published an accompanying feature article on 17 September.
Kris’s path into ophthalmology is not the conventional one. Becoming a specialist eye surgeon is among the most competitive pursuits in Australian medicine, and he did it as the first Indigenous doctor ever to do so – navigating obstacles and racism that most of his colleagues never had to consider. The ABC describes him as being “on a mission to heal blindness and empower the next generation.”
That mission runs in two directions at once. In Noosa, he sees patients at Sunshine Coast Ophthalmologists for the full range of eye condition treatments – cataract, glaucoma and macular degeneration. Beyond the practice, he travels to remote communities where rates of preventable blindness among First Nations people remain many times higher than the national average, and where the barrier is rarely the medicine – it is whether a specialist ever arrives.
Indigenous Australians experience vision loss and blindness at substantially higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians, and much of it is avoidable. Cataract is treatable with a routine operation. Diabetic retinopathy is manageable when it is found early. The gap persists largely because screening and surgical services do not reach the communities that need them most.
Kris’s work – and a significant part of what Australian Story covers – is about closing that distance, and about making sure he is not the last Indigenous ophthalmologist this country produces. He is a founding member and past president of the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association and holds an honorary associate professorship with the Indigenous Eye Health Unit at the University of Melbourne.
Australian Story: “Eyes on the Prize” airs Monday 21 September, 8pm, on ABC TV, and is available on ABC iview afterwards. The ABC News feature article is available to read here.