Thursday Lunch Club: Henry Lew

Dr. Henry R. (Harry) Lew OAM MBBS FRACS FRANZCO is a retired Ophthalmic surgeon with more than 40 years’ experience. He was trained at the Royal Victorian Eye & Ear Hospital (1975-1977), where Professor Gerard Crock was his principal mentor; was Senior Registrar in Ophthalmology at Leeds General Infirmary UK (1978-1979) where he did Retinal and Paediatric Fellowships; took over from Professor Crock as Visiting Senior Surgeon, Repatriation General Hospital (or Veterans’ Hospital), Heidelberg (late 1979-2007), and was also a Visiting Surgeon at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital (1980-1984).

In addition to his medical publications he has also authored nine non-fiction books; “Horace Brodzky (1987)” formed the basis of a Commonwealth Government funded exhibition as part of Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary celebrations at the Jewish Museum of Australia and the Benalla Art Gallery; “In Search of Derwent Lees (1996)”, helped raise in excess of $100,000 for Schizophrenia Australia with a four-state exhibition, which travelled from Adelaide to Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane in 1997; “The Five Walking Sticks (2000)” was pick of the week in Melbourne’s Age newspaper; “The Stories Our Parents Found Too Painful To Tell (2008)”, which had an ABC telemovie made  about it, and “Lion Hearts (2012)” are Holocaust sagas; “Smitten by Catherine (2016) tells the incredible story of Catherine Rachel Mendes da Costa (1678-1756), the first ever female Jewish painter in recorded history; “Imaging the World (2018)” explains how to use the principles of the neurophysiological engineering of human vision to examine paintings in order to help detect possible sleepers, which are works by well-known artists that art experts are unlikely to recognise; “Patterson of Israel (2020)” carries the subtitle of ‘The most amazing Jewish story of Gallipoli and the Anzac Light Horsemen ever published in Australia’; and “Australian Genesis and Exodus (2023)” recreates the stories of Australia’s first two great yet highly neglected, modernist, 20th century artists, Derwent Lees and Horace Brodzky, who during their lifetimes and also afterwards, have had their works exhibited on numerous occasions in mixed exhibitions with the veritable “who’s who of modern art” – names such as Manet, Monet and Pissarro; Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne; Picasso, Braque, Modigliani and Dali; and also some of America’s best known artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, John Sloan, Max Weber and even, would you believe, Jackson Pollock to mention but a few. And it is also worth mentioning that few other Australian artists have had their works so widely represented in the collections of public art galleries all over the world.