An expert in Indigenous eye health has said some Aboriginal people in outback Australia have vision that can be more than four times better than non-Indigenous people.
They can see things that are four times smaller than what is assumed most people can see, making their vision the best in the world.
In times of peace NORFORCE spotters are used to find asylum seeker vessels or illegal fishing ships in Australian waters that may otherwise go unnoticed.
"The super sight is the way their retina and brain is wired, and they are probably like that from childhood," said Professor Hugh Taylor, who pioneered studies into super sight.
"There may well be a number of the Aboriginal soldiers in NORFORCE who have much better vision than mainstream Australians or regular soldiers," he said.
Good vision is considered 6:6 vision, which means someone standing six metres away from an eye chart can see it as clearly as an average person at six metres away.
But in Aboriginal people it was much better than that.
In fact Professor Taylor's studies have shown that some Aboriginal people in the NT, WA and SA had 6:1.4 vision, meaning they could see things from six metres away that an average non-Indigenous person could see only from 1.4m away.
"The vision of the Aboriginal people, the fineness of their vision, is better than has been reported anywhere else in the world," he said.
As an example of how extraordinary the vision can be, Professor Taylor recounted how astronomers were looking at records from the 1840s into Aboriginal descriptions of constellations of stars.
"The astronomers just couldn't work out how these constellations worked," he said.
"They talked to me then they went back with binoculars and suddenly they could pick out all the missing stars that the Aboriginal people could see just with the naked eye."
abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-struggle-to-keep-up-with-aboriginal-super-sight/6378066
