Two weekends ago we celebrated Rowan’s birthday. We brought a chocolate-passionfruit tart on the train – CC carried the tart and I carried the kid – and came up to the gate at his Potts Point apartment a little after noon. Ee-ee had just arrived, too, with our cousins and a car boot of homemade curries and salads.

Uncle Rowan – white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed Rowan; smiley-lined, liver-spotted Rowan; tall, charming, straight-nosed Rowan who has always sent us notes and letters in an illegible handwriting only my mother can decipher – is a family friend who’s been around for as long as I can remember. Two Sundays ago he turned 95, but the truth is, he’s also been old for as long as I can remember. For as long as I can remember, Uncle Rowan has been the parents’ friend we always visited when my family came to Sydney. He’d give me a book from the Macleay Bookshop each time we met: every book of fiction or non-fiction that came from his hands came with a sticker from the Macleay Bookshop. Once – I was already working as an editor in New York at the time – he brought me down the street to see the store and its rows of wooden shelves.

Legend has it a fortune teller in India once told him he would live to a ripe old age; throughout my childhood and well into my teens, Uncle Rowan was known to cross busy streets willy-nilly. For many years he apparently drove his car around town with the same blithe confidence, the seatbelt hanging loose and forlorn. Rowan fell off a cliff once while taking a stroll but clung on to surrounding weeds till a passer-by saw him and went off to get help. It wouldn’t surprise me if I learned that Uncle Rowan once wrestled a tiger in the jungles of Malaya.



There are always flowers in Rowan’s house. There are always modest blooms in vases and sleeping buds in small bowls and dishes.

There have also always been, in Uncle Rowan’s house, souvenirs of travels wide and far, and drawings, and cards, a piano, and chairs to sink into, and many, many books, but this Sunday two weekends ago – for it is not every day one turns 95 – there were also four other cakes in Rowan’s house.

I understand Rowan is a renowned cardiac surgeon in some part of his life, but I realise, now, that he is also the BFG. Somewhere in Uncle Rowan, in his white hair and long legs and large nose, in his chin and kind eyes, is Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Two Sundays ago, despite not having seen me in some years, he welcomed me with a strong hand on my shoulder. He leaned in to kiss me hello on the cheek and he smelled as he has always smelled, of Rowan and of the light in his apartment and of Elizabeth Bay winking and twinkling just past his bay windows.



A birth celebrated and a life quietly remembered. Early this week I learned that Barbara Seaman died. I met Barbara when I was just starting out in book publishing in New York. I had been despatched to her Upper West Side apartment to work with her on a massive tome on women’s health. She had glasses and a big mouth. She was a muckraker and an activist. She was a feminist. I didn’t know all of this – well, I had some vague idea of this: they’d briefed me before I left the office. Mostly I was new to New York and new to publishing and I did what I was told.

We worked together for some weeks in her apartment full of books and paintings and photographs and wall hangings, going through files of papers – newspaper clippings, magazine and journal articles, scribblings, thoughts. She let me edit and she encouraged me to write. She sprang for lunch. We had thick, mayonnaisey sandwiches from the deli downstairs, or we ordered in off the one-colour Chinese take-out menu. She said to me once, opening a box of matzoh crackers, “Jews love Chinese food, so you will probably like Jewish food.” There was a grin in her eyes. We didn’t quite make it to the jar of gefilte fish.

Barbara always referred to my then-boyfriend as “your handsome boyfriend”. “How is your handsome boyfriend?” she would ask, teasingly, but when he and I eventually broke up she said he wouldn’t have been good enough for me anyway.

Because of Barbara and because of Uncle Rowan and because it’s been too long I’ve been saying I’m going to do it, I finally set up a monthly donation to ActionAid. Chin-chin to ye’ an’ ye’ an’ ye’.