Dr John Lawrence Bignell, a leading ophthalmologist in Melbourne for many years, died on Monday 31 October 2005 after a long illness. John was born in Melbourne on 24 May 1917, the second son of Colonel and Mrs F Bignell; his father was also a doctor and served in France in the First World War. John's mother was a well-known teacher of piano with a degree in music, a fact which doubtless explains John's great interest in music and his dexterity on the violin which he loved to play until recent years when a stroke forced him to relinquish this pleasure. He won an RSL scholarship to Melbourne Grammar and subsequently to the University of Melbourne, graduating at the beginning of the Second World War and shortly thereafter enlisting in the Royal Australian Navy in which he served until he was demobilised in 1946. In 1946 he met Dorothy who at the time was a fifth-year medical student at the University of Sydney. As Dorothy wished to finish her medical course their meetings consisted of frequent flights between Sydney and Melbourne by one or the other depending on the state of their finances, and they finally married in 1948. John and Dorothy travelled to London where John was appointed a house surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital, the leading eye hospital in the Commonwealth. Whilst there he came under the influence of Mr (later Sir) Harold Ridley, the first surgeon in the world to successfully implant an artificial lens into the eye after the removal of cataract. On his return to Melbourne he was appointed to the Honorary Staff of the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital and the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and became one of the first in Australia to use this new technology, which at the time was looked upon by the majority of ophthalmologists as experimental at best and reprehensible at worst. As we all know, it is now only in the rarest of cases that cataract extraction is not followed by intra-ocular lens implantation, and John's pioneering work has been amply vindicated. He was also among the first in Australia to perform a significant number of corneal grafting procedures, pioneered in Melbourne by Sir Thomas Travers who was Senior Honorary Ophthalmologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital at the time, and whom John succeeded on Sir Thomas's retirement. John held this post until 1967 when he was succeeded by Dr J E K (Dick) Galbraith. As well as introducing new procedures at the Royal Melbourne, John also led several teams overseas to Thailand and India to perform surgery and to help train local ophthalmologists. These ventures were among the first Australian initiatives to reach out to our northern neighbours to provide medical assistance, and their importance was recognised by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Community Aid Abroad, who provided much of the funding. Unfortunately the war in Vietnam supervened and the "Mobile Eye Clinics International" only functioned for a relatively short time, but provided a wealth of experience to those young ophthalmologists, Australian, New Zealand and Asian who were fortunate to take part. After leaving the Royal Melbourne, John continued in private practice in Collins Street for a number of years; latterly he worked in association with Dr Christopher Buckley before finally retiring completely from practice. However he then embarked upon several years of study at the University of Melbourne, graduating as a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Geography. This achievement gave him immense satisfaction but came as no surprise to those who knew his eclectic tastes. Throughout his life John had multiple interests outside medicine. He took up flying in 1973 and acquired his private pilot's licence, enabling him and Dorothy to make trips together throughout Australia. Sailing was another passion; many overseas guests as well as friends and colleagues will remember braving Port Phillip Bay in his H.28 "Wanderer". John was a gregarious individual, and was a member of many clubs and societies. One of his special loves was the Wallaby Club, an organisation of like-minded individuals devoted to exploring the highways and byways of Melbourne and its environs. Unfortunately these activities were much curtailed in his latter years by illness, but his mind was sharp to the end, which came peacefully after a long battle with cancer. John Bignell lived life to the full. We honour his memory and extend our sympathy to Dorothy, Fiona, Rosemary, David and their families.