Ophthalmologist Dr James Muecke AM named Australian of the Year
A Norwood doctor has become the second South Australian in as many years to claim the nation’s top honour and be named Australian of the Year.
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Ophthalmologist Dr James Muecke AM has been crowned the 2020 Australian of the Year.
Dr Muecke, 56, of Norwood, is the second consecutive South Australian winner following anaesthetist and Thai cave hero Dr Richard Harris in 2019.
It is also the second time an ophthalmologist has been named Australian of the Year after Dr Fred Hollows in 1990.
World No. 1 ranked women’s tennis player Ash Barty was announced as the Young Australian of the Year and obstetrics Professor John Newnham was named Senior Australian of the Year. Rural youth advocate Bernie Shakeshaft was named Local Hero.
Dr Muecke’s work combating blindness has taken him from Kenya and Myanmar to remote Aboriginal communities. He co-founded the organisation Vision Myanmar in 2000 and another not-for-profit, Sight For All, in 2007.
Sight For All deploys volunteer Australian and New Zealand eye specialists to combat preventable blindness in nine Asian countries and one in Africa. More than 120 eye health specialists donate more than 10,000 hours of their time each year, the organisation states on its website. Dr Muecke’s recent research focus has been on type 2 diabetes, the leading cause of blindness in adults.
As a young man, Dr Muecke almost gave away medicine. After completing his year’s internship in 1988, he was going to quit, frustrated with “dealing with patients with chronic debilitating diseases, often self-inflicted from smoking’’.
“Patients were on this downward spiral and to me, as a doctor, I found that quite unsatisfying and I think I needed something more,” he said in 2014.
He found that something more in Kenya. He went to that country’s Aberdare Mountains and worked as a doctor for a year and was inspired that he could treat people and you “could see the patients getting better in front of your face”.
“It really appealed to my positive nature,” he said.
It set him on a path that would result in him working with and treating patients in some of the poorest places in the world.
Dr Muecke graduated with honours from Adelaide University and met wife Mena, an interior architect, while both were living in Jerusalem. They have two sons, Nicholas and Thomas.
Dr Muecke is also an author. In 2001, bored with taking his young kids to the same old playground he came up with a list of other fun things for children to do in Adelaide.
The list would grow and become a book called Adelaide for Kids, which included 400 ideas to keep children entertained and was a bestseller.
He is also passionate about music and released a CD of his own music, in collaboration with his brother Andrew.