Precious acceptance

BY: DAVID GADD AND SCOTT MORGAN

From a street kid sleeping rough, Ray Avery has charted a movie script life capped with being honoured as New Zealander of the Year.

The scientist and inventor, 62, dedicates himself to fighting poverty and ill health in the Third World through his health care charity Medicine Mondiale.

"I was surprised and delighted to win. There were a lot of supporters in the room who helped get the job done," says the Mt Eden resident.

"I was pleased to win for them as much as myself. It's also given us the opportunity to expand the type of work we do."

But Mr Avery's start to life was very different to the glory of Wednesday night's win.

"I got put into an orphanage for the first 14 years and moved around southern England in a kind of Dickensian labyrinth of bad stuff.

"Then I decided to take my life in my own hands and ran away and lived on the streets of London for about a year before I was picked up in a police raid and invited to go back into the education system.''

That invitation was the making of him, taken under the wing of a group of Oxbridge professors who taught him science and how to dress, eat, speak, play bridge, tennis and dance.

Science soaked into his DNA and with a healthy dose of entrepreneurship by age 26 he owned a string of laboratories, drove a vintage MGA car and loathed himself.

"I thought if I had money and I had a position that all of the orphanage debris would wash away and I would be accepted and I would have it made and that would make me happy."

But it didn't.

So he left England to find himself and in 1972 ended up in New Zealand which with its can-do attitude seemed like "instant home''.

In 1993 he faced his defining moment lying in a hotel room in Eritrea in the wake of Fred Hollows' death, having teamed up with him to build laboratories to make lenses to help with eye surgery.

After contemplating calling the project off, he turned the situation around, eventually producing a lens that sold for $5 compared to $360 charged elsewhere.

He collapsed the price globally, revolutionising Third World eye care. Now 16 million people use his lens implants.

"Winning the award washes away the last vestiges of all that bad stuff. I've been accepted by the country that I love."

Chief judge and former prime minister Jim Bolger says: "This is just one example of the difference the work of this brilliant New Zealander is having on the world."

Otago businessman and former New Zealand Olympic Committee president Sir Eion Edgar is Senior New Zealander of the Year.

Young New Zealander of the Year is Aucklander Divya Dhar, a 24-year-old doctor and a campaigner for policy change.

Sam Chapman of Otara was given the Local Hero Award.

- © Fairfax NZ News