Photographs of students in the graduating class of the Victorian College of Optometry 1962

Historical Significance: The class of 1962 was a celebrated class in the four-year optometry course of the Victorian College of Optometry. After nearly 5 years of very few students in the course the graduating class of 1962 was a welcome change. Ten students entered the second year of the course in 1959. Three were Colombo plan students from Malaysia and Burma who did not survive second year. Six completed the course in 1962. They were Anthony J Adams, who became professor of optometry and Dean of the School of Optometry at the University of California Berkeley; Ian L Bailey who was to become famous for his invention of the LogMar visual acuity chart when he was a researcher in the National Vision Research Institute (NVRI) and later became Professor of Optometry also at the University of California Berkeley, and Donald E Mitchell, who achieved high recognition as a vision scientist and, after serving as the foundation Director of the NVRI, became Professor of Pyschology and Head of Department at Dalhousie University, Halifax Canada. Also in the class was Peter Skeates from New Zealand who returned to NZ and was a member of staff in optometry at Auckland University, initially full time but later part time. The sixth graduate was Stan Elwood who practised optometry in Melbourne after serving some time in the Salvation Army. Ken Hamer (second from left in the photograph) withdrew from the course in third year. While these students were in the course it was upgraded to a degree course to be among the first to graduate with a BAppSc (Optometry). See profiles of Adams and Bailey published in Clin Exp Optom (2002; 85: 315-319 and 2009; 87; 37-41). In the first of these the significance of the student sofa in one of the pictures is explained.