MY LIFE WITH FRANK – by his partner, Alison Witcombe.

To me Frank Pranas Repsys was a remarkable man. Many of the tributes that I’ve received say that he was a lovely man. Vaya at the Store told me that he was a gentleman But, like all of us, he had his faults. On one occasion at Ford he was giving his staff a pep
talk and concluded by saying that if they didn’t lift their game, “I can become quite difficult” to which one of the staff quipped, “You already are!”
We met and fell in love in 1972. At the time Frank was setting up the Ford truck plant at Broadmeadows and I was the Daily organizer at my school. By 1974 we were living together in St Kilda and we have spent the past 40+ years, enjoying one another, sharingmany interests and passions, with Frank introducing me to the joys of camping in the bushand travelling around our beautiful countryside. We both love good food, good wine, the theatre, music, the arts and travelling both here and abroad – in the ’80’s in Italy and in France which we both love, then, when Lithuania gained its independence in 1990 we visited there . For Frank, this was marvellous. When I met him he never expected to see his homeland or family there again. In 1993, we were married in Lithuania and we returned in the Northern summer every 2nd year until 2008. During that time, we also visited Bavaria, Austria, Vietnam and New Caledonia. Within Australia we toured parts of South Australia, Tasmania, and parts of Queensland, Northern Territory and West Aust. in some cases camping, and others by train. Frank adored train travel. In recent times, we’ve been spending a part of late winter on our beloved Magnetic Island.
Frank was a doer, a man with many gifts which he used to help others. He had a passion for building which started in his youth on the family farm. In 1986 we bought land in Aireys and had a kit house built, which he tiled and painted, again with some help from Algis.
Then, over the time, he added rooms on the ground floor using, for the most part, recycled materials. His last project was a potting shed which he and Kaz built in the back yard here.

While he was a very practical man who could solve all sorts of design and construction problems, he also adored painting and the arts generally. In his 4 years as a D.P. in Freiburg, he studied painting at the Art school set up in the camp by former prominent
artists from Lithuania. He started painting seriously again in Lower Plenty, where he was befriended by artists, Lindsay Edward, David Newbury and David Keys. He also learned pottery and built his own potting shed. Once we began weekending at Aireys, he was out painting “en plein air” with the 2 Davids and others. He continued producing canvasses which he stretched and framed himself until 2018. At Aireys, he also enjoyed making mosaics from the boxes of bin end tiles which Danute salvaged from the Eltham store where she worked.
He was not one for organized team sport, but he loved hiking in the bush. He took the children to places like Wilson’s Prom, and here on the coast he loved going on Angair walks. He also loved canoeing and rowing on the Barwon. But best of all, he loved
fishing. In the early days in Geelong he and Victor Pranscunas used to fish Lake Connewarre for eels which they then smoked. We have even smoked fish here in our wood fired BBQ at Aireys. And he was quite successful at spearing flounder at Sandy Gully beach near our house. We never went on holidays here or abroad without packing some fishing gear and his collapsable rod. His other sporting interest was Petanque which we learned to play through Alliance Francaise.
He enjoyed growing vegetables, again a skill he learned on the family farm. One year when he was living at Highton, he and Neil Davidson decided to grow a commercial crop of cucumbers, and produced a bumper crop. but so did everyone else that season.
Not only did Frank love to eat good food, he loved cooking. I don’t think his kids liked his cabbage, but for me he made the best buckwheat pancakes, and, in my opinion he is the best BBQ chef I know. In the ’90’s we enjoyed a number of George Biron’s cooking classes at Sunnybrae, where Frank learned to make gravlax. He made his last lot only a fortnight ago. He was a dab hand at pickles too, especially pickled cucumbers and wild mushrooms which we used to gather in autumn in the pine forests out Bambra way. In 2000 he learned to make cheese at Lara and he taught his nephew in Lithuania, so Kestutis could make extra income for the farm. Sadly Frank couldn’t continue his efforts here because of the difficulty of obtaining raw unpasteurized milk. Another of Frank’s projects was beekeeping. His father had taught him how to look after the hives on the farm. In Australia, he had a beehive down by the river at Highton. He also set up a beehive in our backyard at Aireys with the help of Peter Morgan. That venture nearly
ended in disaster when he suffered multiple beestings, so the hive went, When I met Frank one of the first questions which he asked me was “Did I like red wine?” which I do. In the following years we spent many happy weekends with friends and holidays both here in Victoria and in South Australia visiting wineries to sample their products. He started bottling bulk wine in Lower Plenty and continued with me in the ’70’s and ’80’s. We attended a wine appreciation course run by Ian Hickenbotham, the great Australian wine making innovator. Frank subsequently learned winemaking with Ian, but Frank’s winemaking, like the beekeeping, ended badly. He was much more successful at distilling brandy and fruit schnapps, but that’s another story.

Completely dropping figurative and illustration, Vaičaitis immersed into the effects of coloured water crashing and interacting with each other. The local Lithuanian artists like Kubbos and Salkauskas were showing terrific works of abstraction and semi, and this may have been an influence on his new approach. The images were of a medium-size, on paper and were numerous. Action painting comes to mind with these mono-prints and washes, shapes balancing off on each other, Calderesque along with a Miró compostion, Abstract Expressionism in a smaller world, if the American Abstract Expressionists were New York in size, his was more village-sized. Fighting an urge to produce faces within the abstractions, he was more interested in a balance between a shape, its colour and its volume contrast.