Ernst Ibach was a vascular surgeon in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Freiberg, Germany on 14 May 1931, the first son of Richard Paul Ibach, a mining engineer, and Liselotte Ibach née Schwien, the daughter of a German naval officer. He attended schools in Germany and then in Johannesburg, South Africa. He studied medicine at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and qualified in 1955. He held junior posts at the General Hospital in Johannesburg and also at Germiston Hospital. In the late 1950s he went to the UK for further training, where he worked at Ashford Hospital and was a senior registrar to Ian Aird at Hammersmith Hospital. He gained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1960 and of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1961. He emigrated to Perth in Western Australia, where he was a vascular surgeon at the Royal Perth and Sir Charles Gairdner hospitals and a senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Western Australia. Outside medicine he enjoyed golf, chess, astronomy and reading science fiction. In 1962 he married Hanne Knudsen, a physiotherapist from Copenhagen. They had two sons, Martin Peter and Hans Peter. Predeceased by his son Hans, Ibach died on 10 September 2017 in Balcatta, Western Australia. He was 86.