The very first time I met Ray was in my then - best friend's kitchen in late 1988. He was giving us a nifty demonstration of how to make the perfect custard for a berry trifle. His trick: whip the leftover egg-whites with a sprinkle of caster sugar until they form a glossy meringue and then fold this mixture through the still-warm custard before pouring it over the sponge and fruit. It's a recipe I have used for my never-fail trifle ever since, and for which my friends and family will remain forever grateful.
Ray was always full of cool, practical advice. He had an engineer's brain, a gift for problem-solving and generations of ingrained Teutonic efficiency that he applied to all kinds of indoor and outdoor projects - he could knock up a kitchen from a few stray bits of wood and a couple of nails and then cook you a three-course meal in it. He could skin a deer and smoke a salmon effortlessly. With that name and those gifts, he should have been an Arctic explorer, traversing the ice on a pair of wooden skis with just a couple of huskies for company, and he might well have been had he been born two centuries ago. Ray had a long and varied career as a soldier, chef, engineer and military instructor instead.
He arrived in Australia as a child migrant from Germany in 1956, accompanied by his parents Karl and Luise. His father Karl took great pains to emphasise the family arrived by plane, not boat and that they were not 'assisted migrants'. The family settled in Wangaratta in regional Victoria. This was where Ray grew up, and it would fuel his passion for self-sufficiency and all things outdoors - hunting, fishing, camping and cooking - before he moved to the city in his late teens. He joined the Australian Air Force in the 1960s and served in the Air Defence Guard during the Vietnam war. His stories of American cluelessness (Hot pizzas delivered to military bases by helicopter? Like, WTF?) versus Australian inventiveness were hysterical.
After leaving the military in the early 1970s, Ray travelled extensively throughout Africa and Australia, and over the next few years worked in mining exploration and then for Victoria's State Electricity Commission.
In 1996, he and my sister (the Other Venetian Girl) moved to the Huon Valley in southern Tasmania and they married in December 2000. They lived the kind of rural life that truly suited them, surrounded by lots of land and water, with their beloved Akitas - Konna, Bear, Ruffy and Koda - for company. They loved each other deeply, passionately and remained inseparable until his death.
Although Ray had been sick in recent years, he approached diabetes and heart failure with the same rugged and indomitable attitude he applied to everything else in his life. The heart attack that killed him was sudden, swift and shocking. But like the man himself, was unforgiving and made no apologies.
I miss him.
Vale Ray.
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