Peter Staer was a general surgeon and gynaecologist at Fremantle Hospital, Western Australia (WA). Born in Loxton, WA on 12 June 1935, he was the son of Alfred Lansell Staer, a farmer, and his wife Gladys Amy née Dolling. After primary education in Leederville he won a scholarship to Perth Modern School. He did national service with the Royal Australian Navy in 1954 and then attended the University of Adelaide, graduating MB, BS in 1958. For two years he did house jobs at the Fremantle Hospital before travelling to the UK, where he worked at the hospital in Western-Super-Mare in 1961 and the City General in Southend-on-Sea from 1963 to 1964. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1963. On his return to Australia in 1964 he commenced work at the Fremantle Hospital as a senior registrar. In 1966 he took up the post of surgical superintendent in Nigeria, working as a medical missionary. Back in WA in 1969, he continued to work at the Fremantle until 1985 and combined this with a successful private practice from 1970 to 2003. The Christian faith he adopted at the age of 23 was central to his life. This had a profound effect on him and throughout his career he often spent from two to four months a year working on short assignments in developing countries – in all he estimated that he had done 22 such trips He wrote that he found contact with people of the greatest importance and found it essential to examine the whole person in their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual states. Outside medicine he enjoyed playing tennis, gardening and studying family history. He married Merle Allison, a nurse, on 24 March 1958 and they had five sons: Lance Roylan (born 1958 or ’59) an accountant; Mark Rohan (born 1960 or ‘61) a computer engineer; John Keiran (born 1962 or ‘63) a teacher; Paul Nigel (born 1964 or ‘65) a mechanical engineer and Karl Bradley (born 1967 or ‘68) a medical practitioner. He died on 12 March 2018, aged 82.