Sir Edward 'Weary' Dunlop AC CMG OBE (1907 - 1993)
1976 Award

Surgeon

Dunlop studied medicine at the University of Melbourne. Enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force in 1939, in 1942 he was posted to Java just before it fell to Japanese forces. His war diaries record the harrowing years in which he was a medical officer in prison camps and on the Burma - Thailand railway. With no medical supplies or instruments, the prisoners manufactured needles from bamboo and artificial eyes from mah jong tiles. One of his men wrote: 'When despair and death reached for us Weary stood fast, his only thought for our wellbeing... he was a lighthouse of sanity in a universe of madness and suffering'.

Returning to Australia in 1945, Dunlop held honorary surgical posts at a number of Melbourne hospitals and received many awards. President of the International Society of Surgeons, he pioneered surgery on the oesophagus, mouth and throat. He made the care and welfare of former prisioners of war his life-long mission, and was also deeply involved in many areas of community service. His guiding philosophy he drew from George Bernard Shaw: 'Life is no brief candle but a splendid torch to be made burn ever more brightly.'