By JESSE GRAHAM
IN the last week, Healesville’s Peter Low has been remembered as a wickedly funny dad, a keen chef and an expert in his field, with tributes from friends and family coming in their hundreds.
But most of all, Peter has been remembered as a generous and kind-hearted man who helped whoever he could.
On Monday 9 November, Peter Low was killed in an industrial accident, when an explosive detonated at a housing development site in Harkaway.
He was 64 years old, a husband to Jenny Low for more than 40 years and a father to Rien, 37, and Brooke, 35.
Rien told the Mail that Peter was an expert explosives technician, who started his blasting company, Ribro Blasting (named after his children), in 1984, before moving to Healesville in 1986.
“There’s only a couple of people in Victoria who do what he did, and he was extremely well-respected within the industry,” he said.
Rien said that his father had trained him as an explosives technician, and that though he had career changes since, his dad always made sure he had a fall-back if things got tough.
“I’ve been very lucky that dad has always had a job for me,” he said.
“It wouldn’t matter what I wanted, wouldn’t matter what my sister wanted to do – if I came home and said ‘I want to be a dolphin trainer’, whatever it was … whatever you wanted to do, he’d support you.
“He made things easy, he was extremely understanding.”
That support was a common theme running through Peter’s life in the community, and his interactions with others – Rien said his father did all he could to help others.
“At any one time, when we grew up, there’d be someone staying in the house, whether it was someone disadvantaged, or on a bit of a rough road in life, or someone just genuinely needing help – absolutely anything, he just took them in, no questions asked,” he said.
A keen sportsman, Peter sponsored local footballers and was involved in the Healesville Swimming Club, as well as assisting families in Healesville financially.
A passionate cook who loved making pies and pasties, which he branded as “Pete’s perfect pies and pasties”, he used what he could to help others, including in the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires.
“In 2009, obviously we weren’t as affected as other people, and a lot of our close friends had been affected, so Dad just got in the kitchen and baked, and baked, and baked, and baked, and made so many pies and pasties,” Rien said.
“We drove them out to people we knew, just to make sure that, if they had a fridge, there was something.”
Though, like many cooks, Peter wasn’t keen on cleaning up his work, Rien said it was a “small price to pay” to experience his food.
For his family, Peter put in the extra mile – such as with a camping trip at Big River, where Peter travelled there the night before to set up a “mini-town”, with kitchen tents, sleeping tents, and even a bath that he dug into the ground.
In the week following Peter’s death, friends, family and community members have expressed their grief about unexpectedly losing such a treasured person.
One Facebook post about the incident remembered a “grin more genuine than any I’d seen before”.
“The world is a darker place without your generosity, your kindness and your spirit,” the post read.
That outpouring of grief has also come in the form of support for the family, with “hundreds” of people making contact in the wake of Peter’s death.
“The outpouring of support has been overwhelming,” Rien said.
“Like hundreds of calls, and messages, texts – our house is filled with beautiful flowers.
“It still doesn’t seem real – it’s only been a week today.”
WorkSafe and the Coroner are investigating the circumstances of the accident, and the Low family expect to farewell Peter in a ceremony in the coming week.
