i have memories going back thirty years, of being in the upstairs sunroom of uncle rowan’s potts point flat, overlooking the majesty of elizabeth bay. when i say “flat”, i really mean palatial early 20th century apartment with lofty ceilings and windows to match, the window panes made of the kind of glass you don’t see anymore: spotted with little air bubbles and perfect imperfections. there was a formal bedroom, meticulously curated though never used, and a formal sitting room with big puffy couches and a shrine (not creepy: life-sized oil-painted portrait and fresh flowers) to a dear and long-ago departed wife.

there was a library with tidy — labelled — shelves. throughout my childhood, he presented me with compendiums of children’s verse, or volumes of australian literature populated with muddleheaded wombats or plump bush babies. i have them, still. there was an old piano. there was the kitchen, which until more recently than you might imagine, housed one of those old fridges whose door handle operates a latch that holds the door shut. there was the time, when i visited with my aunt, and she discovered a block of coon that had met its end in the pantry cupboard. it had turned a most unearthly shade of brackish blackish green, but rowan insisted that it was fine and refused to allow her to chuck it out.

there was the formal dining room, where over a few years, the meals served became subtly though increasingly rancid, so that eventually my mother firmly insisted that we would be taking rowan out for luncheon or dinner, and returning for tea and coffee after.

tea and coffee was always taken in the sunroom — a complete service, with an assortment of little dishes and cups. there was no television, in that room, or any other, and we sat surrounded by sunlight, books and papers, and the assorted tchotchkes of a lifetime of travel. in lesser hands it might have all been a big kitsch overload, but at rowan’s it was a fascinating trove of treasures.

what happens when you’ve been away for a while, say six months or so with a lapse in regular communications, is that you might be nattering away on an interstate skype with your aunt, and she will mention in passing that she’d been to the westfield food court in the city on the way to rowan’s funeral. a month ago. the email your cousin sent with the news was apparently lost in the ether.

rowan. the last time i saw him was at lunch in october last year, at sopra across the road, when it seemed like he had mostly forgotten who i was, or at best, thought that i may have been my sister. he was 97, after all. had lived through the war as a surgeon in the navy, and then through a series of unfortunate events in more recent years that progressed from driving the wrong way down one-way streets to falling off a seaside cliff, and stepping through a rotted bathroom floor and spending the long night with a leg poking through a hole in the downstairs neighbour’s ceiling. he was tough: he was one of those old folk who took a regular ocean swim in the wintertime.

much of his life he spent training and bequeathing scholarships to younger doctors from far-flung dusty lands. a lesser-known but no less significant legacy is the appreciation i now have of a well-considered afternoon tea served on mismatched china. thank you, uncle rowan. i raise my pinkie in a farewell salute.