The man behind Mandeni, Rob High, passed away peacefully in his home last week and his family held a memorial service for the community to remember and celebrate his life. 

Read more for an obituary written by Rob High’s eldest daughter Hilda. 

Robert Edward High was the youngest son of Charles and Margot High. He grew up at Greg’s Flat and went to school locally.

He was fond of telling his daughters, Hilda, Jennifer and Vicki, stories of how he was the brightest child in his year (he was the ONLY child in his year) or classic bush stories such as when, aged 4 and chopping wood with an axe, he cut his foot very badly and had to be transported “Miles” down the road in a wheelbarrow by his mother Margot to the nearest house with a phone, Mrs Mac.

But Rob always had big plans and it wasn’t long before he moved to Sydney to study chemical engineering. His decision to take a job with Shell was motivated by his desire to travel and see the world.

He was posted to Holland for a year and, having learnt Dutch, was the ideal candidate to send to South Africa where he met Juleen Marais, his wife of 47 years and the daughter of a prominent, high society doctor.

The Newly-weds moved to England, where they lived for the next 4 years and where his 3 daughters were born. Rob was working “behind the curtain” in Russia.  

Another language was added to his repertoire but in the early days he made a grammatical error when discussing Australian’s fish eating habits with his driver.

He later found out that when his driver has stated “your prime minster, he eats shark” and Rob had assured that yes “in Australia many people eat shark. I too eat shark”, that the exchange had be provoked the disappearance of Harold Holt and Rob had confused “to eat” with “to be eaten by”.

Returning to Australia, Rob began working with Sharple Stokes selling industrial centrifuges and later formed his own company: Decanter Centrifuges. The company grew and prospered and one of Rob’s proudest business moment was when his small Aussie company beat huge national conglomerates to win a multi-million dollar contract to supply New York with machines to deal with its waste water and yet, when talking about it, in typical Rob style, his response was “S*#t HEY”.

As one of his employees, Eric Retter said: “Rob gave me the gift of his trust to follow my intuition and to take risks. He didn’t always agree with my decisions but always stood by them.”

Rob was generous but hated to be taken advantage of: if he felt an employee was taking liberties, the relationship would be terminated, suddenly and completely.

Rob was not a rebel but he refused to be bound by “just because” or “you can’t” kind of rules. So when he created North Eden Timber to promote local Australian hardwoods he designed and built not just a solar kiln but the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.

Rob always played to win, whether it was playing Monopole with his young daughters in the rumpus room at St Ives, canasta on a family holiday or golf, snooker, tennis or squash. But he was never mean and didn’t play politics.

Although Rob was a very successful businessman, he rarely spent money on himself, outside of travelling. He gave generously and usually anonymously to many causes, including hosting the Chernobyl children at Mandeni or billeting newly arrived Afghan refugees at Manna Park. 

In the 80s he could run Decanter without day to day involvement and following his parents Charles and Margot’s lead, he purchased a property in the area where he’d grown up. Dams and lakes were built. Firebreaks became fairways. Log cabins and a manager’s residence followed, then The Needlecraft, The Golf Centre and a beautiful home in the bush.

He didn’t retire from Decanter though and when a call came to the cabin he was living in, in the middle of the night, he said, “Just give me 5 mins to start the generator and then you can send the fax”: he won that large order too!

Rob was very hard working and never afraid to get his hands dirty. He was often seen in the mud of the lake or dam or travelling around the golf course moving sprinklers.

Rob loved golf. Rob used to say he had a 56 hole course (counting the mini gold, pitch and putt and the putting green).

When he invited Australia’s top female golfers to play at Mandeni’s 9 hole course, it became, with local sponsorship, the richest Women’s Pro Am in Australia (perhaps also a social comment about the money to be made in women’s golf). I think these were some of his happiest times.

Many of the people here today have benefited from Rob’s community vision and his energy, hard work and infectious enthusiasm for his many schemes and projects.

Using his engineering skills, he sunk bores to supply locals with water. He bought an adjoining property, Manna Park and in the era of “work for the dole” created a community project out of building the hostel style buildings out of mud bricks.

Nearby he cleared a plot of land for a Community Garden.

The carpentry centre was another venture designed to provide local youth with work and skills. I have a beautiful hardwood wine rack built from locally sourced, kiln dried hardwood, but the most popular item was the bunk-desk- wardrobe.

When the red tape became too onerous he converted the project into The Men’s Shed.

Rob was a keen naturalist, cataloguing the local flora and fauna, raising endangered marsupials in The Bettong Project, nurturing the small patch of rainforest on the property and encouraging the local birding group to visit.

While Rob touched many hearts, he did not seek out a large group of friends and was comfortable in his own company. He was not by nature a demonstrative person and yet he did care deeply about his family and friends.

I was a teenager when Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer the first time. It was too large to operate on and things looked grim. When Rob, a man who rarely swore let alone cried broke down with me and sobbed “ I can’t lose her”, it was the first time I saw him as a man, a person rather than just as my father.

Rob took his health and fitness seriously and loved keeping physically active. Some of my favourite memories are hiking with him: in the local national park as a child (ostensibly to give mum a break), in New Guinea when I was 19 and completing the last leg of Shackleton’s walk into Grytviken in Antarctica together.

When he went hiking in the Himalayas in his 50s his gait was already getting worse and it wasn’t long before he was diagnosed with Hereditary Spastic Paraparesis. Walking first with a stick, then crutches and finally reliant on a wheelchair, he never complained or played the victim.

Instead he bought a modified van and continued to live life to the full – even if that meant being rescued when his chair overturned due to the steep ramp into the van or when he accidently drove his wheelchair into a wombat burrow while working in “the rainforest”. Perhaps there would have been fewer accidents and less damage to walls if he’d read the manual and discovered that there were alternatives to the chair’s super speedy“fun” setting!

But as time went on Rob knew that something else was wrong. He was sleeping poorly and his usually astute mind was having difficultly processing complex “executive” tasks.

I was with Rob when we finally got a diagnosis in November 2014: Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. The control centres in his brain were being progressively damaged. The relief Rob felt when told that he would not lose his short or long term memory was enormous. This was not dementia. The diagnosis had been so difficult and delayed for so long in part because Rob’s high level of intelligence and because a cardinal sign, falls, was masked by his spastic paraparesis and wheelchair dependence.

Although Rob accepted help, he never stopped being active on the property, travelling in his golf buggy, and he never stopped learning. When the PSP robbed him of his ability to move his eyes and therefore to read his beloved Scientific Americans and non fiction science books he turned to audio books (hundreds and hundreds of them!). And even when he started losing the ability to speak, he never lost his sense of humour or sense of self.

Whether PSP played a role in Rob’s decision to divorce Juleen in September 2012 we will never know. But, as everyone did know, when Rob made up his mind, there was no point in arguing.

Companions and then carers came to assist and my sisters and I took over as guardians and powers-of-attorney. Fortunately, I had already convinced Rob to spend money “just in case” modifying the house with ceiling hoists and wet areas and Rob was able to stay in his own home, in the bush setting he loved.

As Rob’s needs became greater, Jennifer returned home, first to live in a cabin, then moving into the house and finally, in his last days, to a mattress on the floor of his room.

Although Rob’s astute business acumen provided the finances, he would not have been able to remain in his home without the support of his family, friends and employees.

There are too many people to thank individually but to the staff at Mandeni, his carers, his GPs and specialists, the community nurses and the ambos and my sisters and the people that supported us, I would like to say thank you for helping Rob to die as he lived – independent and engaged.

Rob will be sorely missed by Juleen, his daughters Hilda, Jennifer and Vicki, his older brother’s Chiffa and Mike and his extended family and friends.

Hilda High, eldest daughter.