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After five operations, doctors gave up trying to save the eye
and he has worn prostheses ever since, first glass ones, then
acrylic. Do people notice the fake eye “No, not at all,” Howlett
says. Not even the optometrist he visited recently. “He was
saying ‘read with your left eye, now read with your right’. And
I said, ‘I am blind in the right eye. I do have an artificial eye’.”
Howlett’s prosthesis was more noticeable when he was
headmaster of a school in Papua New Guinea. After waking
one morning to find his blue eye had vanished from the
bedside table, he was given a brown replacement by the Port
Moresby Hospital, the only colour they had. “I spent the last
two or three months with one brown eye and one blue eye, as
headmaster of this school,” he recalls. “I must have frightened
the crap out of anyone who walked in.”
For the oldest known artificial eye, awe, if not fear, was the
desired effect. The 5000-year-old semisphere of bitumen paste
was covered in a fine layer of gold, the iris emanating lines like
sun rays. It was found in the body of a 180cm-tall woman,
either a priestess or a soothsayer, in the ruins of Iran’s Burnt
City, a major archaeological site.
The mummies of ancient Egypt were given eyes of copper,
bronze, obsidian, gold, alabaster and electrum. It was not until
the 16th century in France that glass and porcelain eyes were
pioneered, as well as the modern shell shapes. Shakespeare’s
King Lear referred to the new models, commanding
Gloucester: “get thee glass eyes/ and like a scurvy politician
seem/to see the things thou dost not.” In the 19th century,
Germans refined the use of glass and gained a stranglehold
on production, which lasted until World War II. The disrupted
supply from Germany forced ocularists to experiment with the
plastics and acrylics used today.
In Australia, a hand painted, hand crafted artificial eye costs
about $2000, lasting an adult at least five years. Young children
need their eye modified every three months and a new one
made yearly.
“A lot of our clients really become friends because we get to
know them well,” says Paul Geelen, a Perth ocularist for 23
years. He says a large part of his job is dealing with patients’
grief and anxiety after eye loss. “Although we’re not trained
as psychologists, a lot of the counseling that people require
happens while we’re painting someone’s eye, or making them
up a cup of coffee.”
For Geelen, making eyes is the family trade. He and his sister
Jenny took over their mother’s business and now his 19-yearold
daughter Emily is training full-time to be an ocularist. “I
like the creativity,” says Emily, whose favourite task is painting.
“You can’t get the right colour straight away. You’ve got to layer
it thirty times to get the right striations in the eye.”
While ocularists create eyes as cosmetic objects, others are
developing prostheses to restore sight. Australian engineers,
doctors and scientists are working on a bionic eye that
incorporates a camera and a microchip. And in the US,
researchers are developing an eye which will not only receive
light signals but encode them for better communication to the
brain. Cosmetics and technology will inevitably entwine.
For now, though, Trevor Dorahy toils at a small workbench
with his paintbrushes, his silver hairdryer and his red cotton
thread, waiting for an eye to stare back. s
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