Ray Kolle was an Australian television writer and story editor whose career ran for more than four decades and took in many of the country's best loved serials, from Bellbird and Prisoner to Sons and Daughters, Return to Eden, Neighbours and Home and Away. As the man in charge of the Neighbours script department from 1986, during the years when the show became a ratings phenomenon in Australia and Britain, he helped shape characters such as Charlene, Harold Bishop, Mrs Mangel, Jane Harris and Dorothy Burke. He later created the long-running German soap Unter Uns. His death in Sydney, at the age of 85, was announced on 11 October 2026 by the soap news site Back to the Bay. The exact date and cause of death have not been made public.
Kolle was born in 1941. At the age of ten he asked his parents for a typewriter for Christmas, having already decided he wanted to be a writer. As a young man he worked as a bookshop salesperson while pursuing an ambition to become a playwright, and about a decade after that Christmas his first musical, a stage adaptation of Little Women for which he wrote the book and lyrics, was produced at the Arts Theatre in Melbourne.
His television career began around 1967, when he and his friend Bill Dick, author of A Bunch of Ratbags, wrote comedy sketches for the variety show In Melbourne Tonight. When the ABC rural serial Bellbird began airing, Kolle watched a couple of weeks of it and submitted a script. He was invited onto the writing team, gave up bookselling, and stayed with the show for about seven years, rising from writer to script editor and eventually story editor. During that period he also wrote a one-off play for the ABC, And Mother Used to Sing, and had a second stage musical produced.
He then freelanced for Crawford Productions, writing for Homicide, Cop Shop, The Box, Bluestone Boys, Skyways and The Sullivans, and story editing or script editing on most of them. He won an AWGIE, the Australian Writers' Guild award, for his work on The Sullivans. An unexpectedly generous offer from Peter Pinne at Grundy Television, with weekly flights between Melbourne and Sydney and a place on the Sons and Daughters storylining team, drew him across to the rival company. He eventually moved to Sydney for good. At Grundy he wrote dozens of episodes of Prisoner and returned to Melbourne for a time to co-story edit it with Betty Quin, then became story editor of Sons and Daughters, where he particularly enjoyed writing for the villain Pat the Rat. He was also story editor across the 85 episode run of Starting Out.
In 1985 he became story and script editor on the McElroy and McElroy miniseries Return to Eden. After a holiday overseas he took a call from Reg Watson, the creator of Neighbours, inviting him to take over story editing on the serial, which had just been dropped by the Seven Network and picked up by Network Ten. Kolle agreed on the condition that he be given complete charge of the script department, a job that would later be called script producer. Under him the show reached its golden period, which he dated from 1986 to about 1992. He described the team's work by saying that Reg Watson had given them Scott and they had given him Charlene, and that Watson had given them Madge and they had given her Harold Bishop. With fellow writer Valda Marshall he co-wrote two Neighbours novels, and he wrote a third, Facing Tomorrow, on his own.
He stepped back from supervising Neighbours in 1992 but kept writing for it, and worked on Shortland Street, Paradise Beach and Pacific Drive. In 1994 Grundy sent him to Germany to work with UFA, where, with the help of UFA writer Jorg Brueckner, he created Unter Uns (Between Us) for RTL and served as its head writer. He then moved to France to develop a soap that was never produced. In 1996 he returned to Neighbours as story consultant to support the new script producer Scott Taylor. Together they lifted the ratings, brought back Harold and Madge Bishop, and wrote the departure of Helen Daniels. He continued writing scripts for the show until 2007, and is credited with about 194 episodes.
From 1998 he spent two years in the story department of Home and Away alongside Edwina Searle and later Scott Taylor, and in the mid 2000s he was a story consultant on the Seven Network drama Headland. He taught serial and series plotting and writing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School from 2003 to 2007, wrote stage musicals including Fetch Me a Fig-Leaf! and A Bit O' Petticoat, and co-wrote the play Nobody in Their Right Mind with Jill Kavalek, which was staged at the Mill at Sonning in England. In August 2026, two months before his death, he recorded a long conversation about his career for the From Set to Sofa with Lulu podcast.
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