Doctor David Moore has spent 44 years restoring and preserving sight.
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Based in Tamworth for 31 years, Dr Moore has also helped heal tens or hundreds of thousands of eyes in India and North Korea, to no personal benefit.
He was today announced as one of just 428 Australians, nationwide to receive the order of Australia medial (OAM).
Dr Moore isn't in Australia to receive his Queen's Birthday honour "for service to ophthalmology" - but spoke to the Leader from his hotel room in Italy, where his daughter was recently married.
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"I find it incredibly humbling and it reminds me of just how many people were behind me all that time, that allowed me to achieve what I have," he said.
"And that includes my wife Gay, my staff at practice, and the staff that I work with overseas when I do a lot of overseas eye work."
Dr Moore has been a fixture of the Tamworth community since he first started working in the city in 1991, before founding North West Eyes.
Charitable work has always been a big part of the former Royal Flying Doctors' Service medic, but in the last decades that part of his practice has expanded literally exponentially.
Since 2006 he has worked to aid a clinic he co-founded which helps more than 50,000 people a year in India. Since 2015, he's been a director of Go Medical, in the secretive totalitarian state of North Korea - until COVID-19 he travelled there twice yearly.
Dictatorship or democracy, rich or poor, everyone deserves proper medical care, he said.
He believes in treating "each person as if they're your mother or your brother."
"What underlines it I guess is my Christians faith. I really believe that I've been blessed so much by God. Part of that is to try and bless as many people as I can and as opportunity arises do so, both in this country and overseas.
"A person with an eye problem, it doesn't matter who they are. They get treated the same.
"That's been my underlying philosophy since I started medicine."
Dr Moore used to donate money for Eye Openers International, based in Andhra Pradesh, India, but it has proven such a success it's now essentially self-funding.
The surgery has just nine staff, two of them doctors, in a very poor region by Australian standards.
Nonetheless, the tiny team provides free eye medicine for a gigantic area, everything from very simple glasses fittings to about 2000 operations a year. Due to the burden of need it is geared to achieve quantity, rather than resolving complex optometry issues.
Dr Moore will travel back to Australia for the formal investiture of the award in September or October, at an event in Government House in Sydney. The date has yet to be confirmed.
The Medal of the Order of Australia is awarded for "service worthy of particular recognition" and is granted by the Governor General of Australia on behalf of the Queen.
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Andrew Messenger
Politics, environment and energy journalist at the Northern Daily Leader. I also write about health, bushfires and occasionally music. I'm a Brisbane boy by way of Charleville and Hobart who now lives in in beautiful New England. Get me at andrew.messenger@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Politics, environment and energy journalist at the Northern Daily Leader. I also write about health, bushfires and occasionally music. I'm a Brisbane boy by way of Charleville and Hobart who now lives in in beautiful New England. Get me at andrew.messenger@austcommunitymedia.com.au
