Vale Fritz Loewe

Those words were spoken almost 14 years ago by Dr Fritz Loewe when he gave his retirement address at Melbourne University. Yet for the unassuming German-born scientist who breathed life into the study of meteorology and who taught so many of Australia's most Prominent met. men, it was far from the end of his travels or his work. That end came quietly and quickly on a cool Wednesday night late last month, appropriately enough after a full day's work at the doctor's beloved university.

To most people who knew him in Australia, it was Dr Loewe's connection with the Melbourne campus and in particular its department of meteorology that first came to mind. Yet even before he first set foot in Australia 37 years ago, he had reached out to explore a dimension few other men have had the courage to face—the polar regions, where "the small fiery ball of the sun shines from a dark blue sky and the rime crystals on the snow surface sparkle like millions of diamonds". Indeed, it was singularly appropriate that on the Friday following his death, the 79-year-old doctor was to have addressed Melbourne University's mountaineering club. The title of that address, "Sixty-five Years With Ice", captures a measure of one man's determination and devotion to his science.

Fritz Loewe was born in Berlin in 1895, the son of a Jewish judge. As a young man, he followed the fashionable an rather debonair trend of wanting to be a pilot, but his eyesight failed him and he had to be content with sitting in the rear cockpit, taking the measurements and readings that were to be such a passion of his life.

At the age of 18 he first became enamoured of ice and snow when he spent six months studying in France. He decided geography and physics would provide best for his interest in the elements and his judgement was vindicated in 1924 when he gained his doctorate in these two subjects, despite the intervention of World War I and four years as a radio operator with an artillery unit.

In 1925 he met his wife-to-be, Else, also a geography student. They were married two years later and in 1933 and 1934 Else gave birth to daughters Ruth and Susanne. Both now are married and living in the United States, while Mrs. Loewe is living in the Balwyn (Melbourne) home that was the base for so many of the Loewes' later adventures and trips. She is 72, intensely proud of her late husband's work, determined that she will not move again, and grateful for the respect shown her husband by colleagues and past students.

Bureau of Meteorology