Leonid Trett graduated in Law from the University of Tartu, and then worked as a lawyer and as a manager of a building firm. After 1940, he became Head of the Finance Department and legal advisor to the State Building trust. In 1944 he transferred to Germany and, to escape mobilisation into the SS, fled with his family to Augsburg. After World War II, he became a deputy director of the Haunstetten Augsburg Baltic refugee camp. In Australia he worked first in factories and then, from 1955, in the Land Titles Office and, from 1960, with the Crown Law Department until his retirement in 1972. Strongly involved in community work, he was President of both the Estonian Society and of the Baltic Council of South Australia and also Vice-Chair of the Nationalities Advisory Council of the Good Neighbour Council.
Trett began writing early, and in Australia he wrote on philosophical and political themes, in various Estonian periodicals and newspapers in different countries of the free world, and was a regular contributor to News Digest International. His other writing included plays, poems, short stories and epigrams. In 1989 two of his plays won an award in Estonia, and some of his fairytales were broadcast on Estonian State Radio in 1943.
Husband of Lydia Trett (q.v.).
