Univ Record 2017

1965
JOHN RAINES-SMITH (Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School) died on 4 December 2015
aged 80. John read Modern Languages at Univ, before taking up a career in business. He
first worked as a Technical Sales representative with Fibreglass, Ltd., and later became
Managing Director of UKAE Ltd., based in Birmingham.
GRAHAM MAYRHOFER (Kent Street High School and the University of Western Australia)
died suddenly when on holiday in Turkey on 9 October 2016 aged 72. He came up to Univ to
read Physiology, and then stayed on to do a D. Phil. here. This photograph has been supplied
by the University of Adelaide. Graham’s former colleague, Professor Gary Hoffman, has
kindly provided this obituary:
Graham was born in a remote rural town where his father was a primary school
principal, a post which entailed many rural postings before being promoted to coveted
senior city postings. The family was of Bavarian origin, but had moved to Naples before
migrating to Australia in the 1880s. Three of his uncles were medical practitioners.
Graham completed three years of medical studies at the
University of Western Australia before winning a University
of Oxford Commonwealth Medical Scholarship in 1965.
He completed Honours Schools Animal Physiology before
undertaking D.Phil. studies with Professor Henry Harris,
FRS, followed by clinical training and house jobs in
Oxford. Along the way he won the Prizes in General and
Special Pathology.
Rather than practising, Graham then embarked on a
life-long research career which included a return to the Sir
William Dunn School, where he worked with Professor
James Gowans, a leader in British immunology. This was
followed by a research post at the Children’s Hospital
Research Centre in Perth and finally appointment to the University of Adelaide where he
was a teacher, researcher and administrator for 32 years. His research was concerned with
immunology, primarily how the intestinal tract, one of the body’s portals to the outside
world, protects itself from attack by foreign substances and organisms, especially parasites.
He also collaborated widely, and published over 70 scientific papers. His work was
characteristically elegant, careful and significant. He continued to teach after retirement.
The high esteem in which he was held by a wide range of colleagues, evident in the many
contributions to the eulogy at his funeral, was based on his modest, gentle and generous
personality combined with a rigorously logical intelligence.
In addition to his science, Graham was a dedicated runner, a gardener with a profound
interest in, and knowledge of, native Australian plants, and also a devoted family man.
He is survived by his widow, Adele, their two children Sarah and Michael, as well as
children, Marshall and Tamsin, from a previous marriage. He is sadly missed by many,
including his surviving sister, Maxine.
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1966
RICHARD JAMES MCKANE (Marlborough) died on 17 September 2016 aged 68. He
read Modern Languages at Univ. We include here a shortened version of a tribute by his
friend Ksenia Afonina, which she has kindly allowed us to
use:
Richard McKane was born on 31 October 1947 in
Melbourne, Australia. From early childhood he was exposed
to different cultures and languages. He became fluent in
French as a young boy and he travelled extensively across
the Middle East, and spent several years in Turkey, where he
became proficient in Turkish. He could read Greek, Persian,
Uzbek, Hungarian, but of all, Russian became his greatest
passion.
Richard first started learning Russian at the age of
thirteen, and then went on to read it at Oxford. Since he
was not able to travel freely to the Soviet Union during the
Cold War, his ultimate Russian companion was Prince Dmitri Obolensky’s Penguin Book
of Russian Verse. During his last year at Oxford, Richard completed his first translation
of Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems, which was published soon after his graduation.
Unfortunately, that year was also marked by Richard’s first ‘catastrophic breakdown’, as
he described it. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he bravely managed with
miraculous strength and exceptional humour.
In 1978, Richard was awarded the Hoddar Fellowship in the Humanities at
Princeton University and moved to the US, where he met Joseph Brodsky, and his future
wife Elizabeth. They were married a year later in Oxford and worked together on Osip
Mandelstam’s Moscow Notebooks (1990). In 1979, their daughter Juliet was born, and soon
after Richard returned to England. In 1989, to mark Akhmatova’s 100th anniversary, his
extended volume of her poems was published. Peter Levi noted:
‘McKane’s Akhmatova versions are unparalleled, and a great advance on his
admittedly brilliant early work on that wonderful poet. They have a restrained brilliance
and an extraordinary personal power’.
That year Richard travelled to the Soviet Union for the first time. He had many
friends in Russia, especially in literary circles. His favourite Russian poet was Leonid
Aronzon, and Richard dedicated several years of his life opening up Leonid’s world to
the English public.
Richard McKane translated Osip Mandelsham and many other poets, but also wrote
poetry himself from when he was in college until his last days. Once a squash school
champion and golf player, he was confined to a wheelchair after a severe injury, but he
never gave up his love and passion for poetry, people and justice.
For over eighteen years, he worked as an interpreter from, and into, Turkish and
Russian at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. He acted as
co-chair at The Pushkin Club in London for twenty years. After retirement from his
translating career, he continued writing and reciting poetry.
Richard loved the world, its people, its beauty and tried his best in his own way to
make it a better and happier place for us all.
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