While every trip had a bad day, Frankie told her son this trip had gone perfectly.

“If we had known their last week had have been just that, I don’t think I would have done anything different,” recalled Sam.

The only solace for their loved ones was that Liam and Frankie, a “perfect match”, were together “for the end of time”, their daughter, Milly, said.

The Victorian couple were returning home on doomed Malaysia Airlines flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kual Lumpur on July 17. They were among the 298 people – including 38 Australians – killed when the plane was shot out of the sky above Ukraine.

More than 1000 people gathered yesterday afternoon for a memorial service for the couple at Toorak College in Mount Eliza, where 54-yearold Frankie was a devoted and beloved teacher for 28 years.

Her husband, Liam, 57, was an award-winning novelist, a teacher and keen cyclist whose 1993 novel Soundings won the National Book Council’s Banjo Award for Fiction, and was nominated for The Age’s Book of the Year Award.

The crowd of family and friends, colleagues, current and former students heard how Frankie grew up on the Peninsula, and met Liam surfing one idyllic summer.

Passionate, creative, cultured and kind, the couple lived their whole life in Mount Eliza, but shared a love of travel – living in France, and England, travelling to Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam and Nepal.

On one such trip in 2011, the couple visited an orphanage in Pokhara, Nepal and were touched by the work being done there.

Yesterday, in honour of their memory, the Davisons’ families asked that their loved ones make donations to the orphanage, in lieu of sending flowers.