BAMOS August 2025
24 Article Obituary for Peter Bate
Ian Shepherd, Shaik Hakeem, Andrew Tupper, Sam Cleland, Rob Porteous
Peter at his desk working with climate monitoring products. Credit: Bureau of Meteorology
Peter Bate was a meteorologist, climatologist and passionate folk music advocate with a long career at the Bureau of Meteorology, mainly in the Northern Territory.
Peter was born in 1948 and spent his early childhood with a brother and three sisters in bushy Caringbah, on the southern edge of Sydney. His family moved to Bayswater in Melbourne when Peter was 11 years old.
He commenced a cadetship with the Bureau of Meteorology while completing his degree at the University of Melbourne, earning the Bureau ' s Diploma of Meteorology in 1968. His duties at his first posting in Alice Springs included manually plotting and drawing weather charts and providing aviation route and area forecasts to pilots.
After a brief assignment in Darwin, Peter met Helen, a widely travelled pharmacist, back in Alice Springs in 1970. They were married in Melbourne in 1972 while on a round Australia road trip in Peter ' s Land Rover.
Later the same year, Peter was posted to Port Moresby, PNG, where Helen found employment as a pharmacist. They toured Europe in 1974, then moved to Darwin that November, just before Cyclone Tracy destroyed the city. He described this as a " life-changing experience " after they sheltered with their cat in the hallway as the house fell apart around them. On Christmas Day, Peter used his Land Rover to navigate through mounds of debris as he assisted with police surveys looking for survivors in need of assistance.
Helen was pregnant with their first child, Sam, and was evacuated to Sydney, returning to Darwin in June 1975 after the baby was born. Another son, Michael, followed, and in the mid-1980s, they moved to the northern margin of the Darwin suburbs, adjacent to the Leanyer Swamp. There, Peter had room to accommodate a growing collection of Land Rovers.
Peter ' s career progressed through various roles, including shift supervisor and Regional Director, before settling into the Regional Climate Manager position in the early 1990s. He continued there until he retired in 2003 ' with no regrets '.