The ones that got away
Following our coverage last week, The AJN has since learnt that three other members of the community were recognised.
If you thought 25 Jews receiving Australia Day Honours last week was impressive, think again.
Following our coverage last week, The AJN has since learnt that three other members of the community were recognised.
Robert Pataki from Victoria received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to the design industry.
The son of Holocaust survivors, who fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution and spent a year in a displaced persons’ camp before arriving in Australia, got his industrial design degree at night school.
Pataki either created or was involved with over 3000 designs that have solved problems across myriad aspects of daily life, including the first power board for appliances, fibreglass truck bodies, the bottle made famous by IXL jams, medical equipment, hair dryers, stereos and the life-saving car baby capsule.
He said that building a successful multi-disciplinary, multi-national design and manufacturing consultancy was something he “never dreamed of achieving as a refugee arriving from Hungary in 1957”.
His greatest challenge, he said, was “leaving a safe and secure job at Phillips to start my own design consulting company” and named his career highlight as “the ability to work beside my wife Jackie for 35 years”.
As to his advice for aspiring designers, he said, “Follow your dreams. Product design is the most satisfying career as no two projects and therefore no two days are ever the same. There is great satisfaction in seeing your solutions come to fruition.”
Meanwhile, Emeritus Professor Leslie Michael Irwig was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to tertiary education, and to medicine.
His research centres on using epidemiological methods to generate evidence that can inform clinical and public health decisions. He holds a Personal Chair in Epidemiology at Sydney Medical School.
Among his many projects are studies assessing the risk and impact of over-diagnosis in cancer. “All interventions have benefits and harms,” he stated, “and the benefit–harm tradeoff has been understudied in medicine.”
Our other honouree is Wing Commander Howard Roby who was awarded the Conspicuous Service Medal (CSM) in the Military Honours for his “swift provision of superb aeromedical evacuation of critically ill and injured people in highly demanding services” and his “outstanding devotion to duty, clinical excellence, and utter commitment to world class patient care”.
His citation said Roby achieved all of these “while advancing the excellence of the Australian Defence Force’s sovereign strategic aeromedical evacuation capability”.
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