Eye surgeon Peter Meagher completes 30 years' service

With more than 300000km of driving, 45000 consultations and 7500 operations completed over the past three decades, Dr Meagher said he had no plans to slow down.

‘‘I still enjoy the visits, there is always a buzz in the waiting room as patients catch up with long-lost acquaintances or relatives,’’ he said.

‘‘It is very different to the relative silence in my Melbourne rooms.’’

Starting work in Shepparton in April, 1989, Dr Meagher said his connection to the Goulburn Valley stemmed back much further than that.

As a child, he and his family used to visit his uncle and aunt, Fred and Margaret Barker, who lived at Radio Australia in Shepparton.

Dr Meagher said numerous Christmases were spent outside enjoying the warm weather or learning to waterski on Victoria Park Lake.

‘‘Margaret was a local radio identity,’’ Dr Meagher said.

‘‘Many hours were spent riding around the paddocks with my cousins on bicycles or one of Fred’s homemade motorbikes.’’

A junior eye doctor in the late 90s, Dr Meagher said he was invited to the town by the local eye specialist at the time, Dr Mark Roche.

‘‘Delightfully eccentric’’ and a ‘‘superb surgeon’’, Dr Roche invited new eye doctors in the field to help out with patient care in Shepparton with new techniques emerging and different options available for eye disease.

‘‘I was one of those; thus began a 30-year association with Shepparton and, of course, the surrounding districts as so many patients come from all corners of the compass,’’ Dr Meagher said.

Consulting from Dr Roche’s rooms in Skene St, Dr Meagher said he, his wife Anne and their 18-month-old child would sleep in the bedrooms at the back of the building each time they visited Shepparton.

He said many patients would remember his children running around the clinic across the years, with some still asked him how they were when they popped in for a visit.

‘‘My kids were born around the time I started coming up here so there would be little kids running around the waiting rooms, and some of the patients still 30 years later say ‘how are the kids going?’’’ Dr Meagher said.

‘‘Over the 30 years of doing this, the patients don’t change and the diseases don’t change but the patients become friends, really.’’

Alongside his work in Shepparton, Dr Meagher worked at The Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital for 33 years and still works at The Austin and Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne.

Working alongside the other optometric care specialists in Shepparton, Dr Meagher said he had witnessed many changes in the surgical procedures and treatment options available to patients.

With equipment developments and eye injections for macular degeneration introduced during the past 10 years, Dr Meagher said the changes had dramatically improved the outcome for patients.

‘‘The intraocular lens surgery for cataracts has been one of the great revolutions in medicine, by and large it’s one of the best operations in medicine, it restores people’s sight,’’ he said.

‘‘That gives everyone a good kick along, doctors and patients, when they have good results.’’

With no plans to stop commuting the 190km to and from Melbourne each fortnight, it is evident Dr Meagher has a true passion for helping the Greater Shepparton community.

With the conditions here similar to those he saw in Melbourne, he said the welcoming local faces kept him coming back each year.

‘‘Eye disease doesn’t change from Melbourne to here, what changes are the people, they’re different and they’re interesting and every one of them has their own little story,’’ Dr Meagher said.

‘‘So that to me is the highlight, I come up here to listen to them, chat about their lives, it is fun.’’