Gordon Reid (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to acknowledge the amazing life of Ralph Podolski, aged 96, who lives in Killcare Heights in my electorate of Robertson. Ralph is a highly accomplished artist whose paintings have been accepted into the Archibald Prize and the Sulman prize competitions. Ralph was born in 1927 in the polish town of Lublin, before moving to Warsaw in 1939, where he started high school. He only spent two days there before it closed because of the Second World War.

At the age of 14 he helped print newsletters for the Polish resistance and was recruited at age 15 and given a rifle because of his excellent marksmanship skills. Ralph was assigned to a unit which was tasked with disrupting the German railway supply line between Lublin and Kyiv, Ukraine. Their mission was to sabotage German supplies to slow the invasion of Russia. In 1944, Ralph and his family were captured by the Germans and put to labour. He was liberated by the British army in Belsen at a weight of just 29 kilos.

After the war, Ralph spent many years working and studying in Paris before migrating to Australia, where he married Rhonda Coogan in 1959 and had one daughter, Yolanda. In 1959, Ralph and Rhonda moved to Canada, where he studied at the prestigious Ontario college of Art & Design and scored an average of 97.5 per cent over 11 subjects. They returned to Australia in 1964, where they lived in several locations before settling on the central coast at Killcare Heights. Ralph now devotes much of his time to his painting, and I look forward to seeing his works on show at the Gosford Regional Gallery in early 2024.