Born as Helmut Boehk in the Austrian village of Drasenhofen during the Second World War, Lake was educated at a high school in Vienna. He travelled widely in Europe and worked as a trainee clerk until he and his family emigrated to Australian 1960. There his father was a worker on the Snowy Mountain Scheme and later opened a business in Cooma. Lake held a variety of jobs, for instance cleaner, dishwasher, builder's labourer; service station attendant in Cooma, then station assistant, railway clerk and taxi driver in Sydney. In 1977 he joined Australia Post as a mail officer and was retrenched as administration officer in 1988. He then moved to Burnie,Tasmania, where he worked as a part-time tutor in adult education and established and ran the publishing house Hamlet Publishing.
Lake was president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, NW Tasmania, 1990-1991 and 1995-1997, and he won several regional writers awards. Apart from his own imaginative works, he has written a number of writing guides, and booklets on basic philosophy, European literature and post-modern theory. He has also edited works by other Tasmanian authors, notably by his mentor Norman Talbot, and some regional anthologies.
Lake started writing at an early age, but his first published piece, a short story, was not to appear until 1976, in the periodical Aspect : Art and Literature, together with an interview by its editor, fellow Austrian-Australian Rudi Krausmann. In this interview Lake talks about post-war Europe, his family's migrant experiences, his views on Australian culture, politics and the land, and on differences between Europeans and Australians.
