KEY POINTS:
Fred Hollows' efforts to tackle the crippling eye disease trachoma among Australia's indigenous people was blind-sided by the Queensland government.
The book Beyond Sandy Blight, launched in Canberra, gives an inside account of how, in the 1970s, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, then premier of Queensland, had Professor Hollows and his team expelled from the state.
Their crime? They were helping Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders get on the electoral roll so they could vote.
Between 1976 and 1979, Professor Hollows and his team toured indigenous communities across the continent, bringing relief and good eyesight to thousands.
The programme ran for three years and visited more than 465 communities, screening about 100,000 people.
About 27,000 people were treated for trachoma and more than 1000 operations performed.
Sandy blight is a colloquial name for trachoma, an eye disease endemic in the indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans, noted by William Dampier during his 1688 exploration of northwestern Australia.
One of the book's five authors, Jilpia Nappaljari Jones, was a registered nurse on the Hollows team in Queensland in 1977.
"On Thursday Island, our team encountered political discrimination and harassment against two Aboriginal liaison officers, Mick Miller, a Kalkadoon man, and Clarrie Grogan, a Kukuyalangi man," she writes.
"At this time, the Queensland government did not encourage the inclusion of Aboriginal and islander people on the electoral roll (a right they gained only after the 1967 referendum), and both incurred the government's wrath when it was alleged that they helped their people to sign on to the electoral roll."
Jones said the then director-general of the Queensland Department for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Pat Killoran, quickly passed the information on to the premier.
"Joh Bjelke-Petersen came to hear any such news very quickly," she wrote.
Killoran encouraged tips from remote communities about "which political dissidents intended to enter communities, or which disaffected Aborigines might need to be discredited by the government propaganda apparatus", Jones said.
"Such troublemakers could be shadowed by the police, or be named in parliament," she wrote.
"It was a remarkably efficient espionage system. With this sort of surveillance, it was no surprise that it was not long before the premier knew of Mick and Clarrie's activities.
"So-called political dissidence like this was not tolerated in Queensland."
Despite Professor Hollows' defence of them, Grogan and Miller were dismissed.
Shortly after, the eye work in Queensland was stopped.
"In a state where freedom of expression was becoming seriously circumscribed, the Queensland government saw us as dangerous radicals, and so he used his power to act," Jones said.
Both Professor Hollows and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen were born in New Zealand. Hollows died in 1993 and the former premier in 2005.
- AAP