Derek Farrar was one of the few who brought ENT surgery to Tasmania. He was born in Southsea, England, on 27 December 1921, the son of a naval officer. He was educated in Hong Kong and Plymouth, before going to St Bartholomew’s Hospital to study medicine. After graduating, he did six months as an orthopaedic house surgeon at Bart’s, before joining the RNVR, where he served mainly on the destroyers Velox, Meteor (on Russian convoys, for which he was mentioned in despatches) and Sole Bay. After the war, he returned to Bart’s as a demonstrator of anatomy and was then in Birmingham under Sir Solly Zuckerman. He then did general and thoracic surgical jobs and was a casualty officer and deputy resident surgical officer at Queen Mary’s Hospital in the East End, where he was influenced by Alan Small. Having passed the final FRCS, he returned to Bart’s as a registrar to Rupert Corbett, Alec Badenoch and Geoffrey Keynes. After another year as a registrar in Halifax, he decided to specialise in ENT at the Royal Free, Hampstead General and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospitals, and then returned to Bart’s as a senior registrar to Capps, Jory and Cecil Hogg. In 1956 he emigrated to Tasmania to join the private ENT practice of Mills Bates in Launceston, and became an honorary ENT surgeon to Launceston Hospital, later moving to Hobart, where he worked at the Royal Hobart and Repatriation hospitals, and served in the Hobart and Launceston branches of the Peter MacCallum clinic. He was an enthusiastic teacher of medical students and registrars and published on otological subjects. Derek was an enthusiastic sailor. He was commodore of the Cruising Yacht Club of Tasmania and was a co-author of D’Entrecasteaux waterways, a book of maps and local guidance for cruising yachts. After he retired he continued to sail, usually to northern Queensland, until 1997, when his yacht sank under him, probably due to hitting a submerged container. He died of pneumonia on 14 February 2007 leaving his widow Rhonwen and two sons, Alan and Nigel.