He was born in Ballarat to engineer Alfred Gordon Fry and Edith Elizabeth Andrews.
From 1940 to 1945 he served in the Australian Imperial Force, commanding the 47th Battalion in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
He attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel and was mentioned in dispatches, and subsequently headed a commission investigating war crimes in the Pacific.
He was elected President of the Council in 1976, and retired from politics in 1979; he was knighted the following year, by which time he was living in Beaumaris.
[3] It is located near the intersection of Nepean Highway and Bay Road in the Melbourne suburb of Highett.