Alan Cowan: a generous doctor, classical music enthusiast and keen bird watcher

Alan Cowan was fatally injured in a road accident near his home on July 22^nd, a tragedy for himself, for his family and for all who knew him. Alan was one of my closest friends and we went back a long way together.

He was born in London in 1929 and then completed his schooling in Surrey, where he and his family were evacuated because of the Blitz. In 1946, he entered Medical School at London University, qualified in 1951 and, that same year, married Anne Gammon. They had four children.

In those days, two years National Service in the Armed Forces was compulsory and he spent 1953-1955 at the British Military Hospital in Libya, where Britain still had a considerable military presence.

After the army, he continued hospital work obtaining his surgical specialist qualification, FRCS, in 1957. In 1966, he and his family moved to Australia. They settled in Canberra, where Alan worked for the rest of his medical career, both as a specialist surgeon and a general practitioner.

In 1969, I joined a party of 40 Bird Observer's Club members for a three-week camp on Cape York Peninsula. Alan and Ann were both there but Anne had volunteered to be one of the two camp cooks and, in open-air and primitive conditions, she had virtually no free time beyond her cooking duties.

It was not long before Alan and I met up and realised how much we had in common. We were both from England, both doctors and both with an eagerness to see and learn as much as we could about the remarkable birds around us, not just for the purpose of ticking them off on a list. The one thing that we did not have in common was pipe-smoking and I was happy to leave that to him.

We spent a lot of time together on that trip. One common interest was classical music and Alan's knowledge was clearly profound, particularly of the works of J.S. Bach. I had sung in Bach's B Minor Mass at school but Alan's knowledge went far beyond this, particularly with the sacred cantatas, of which I knew nothing. He waxed lyrical about them, talking about who had recorded them and which performances he thought were the best.

Then, on the flight back to Sydney, he drew up a comprehensive list of what he thought were the best fifty, together with notes about their vocal and instrumental features and why he thought various ones were the finest. He had nothing to refer to. It was all in his head. A remarkable intellect.

Alan was not only a Bach enthusiast. He had a fine voice and was a member of the Canberra Choral Society for many years. He loved almost all classical music and I remember sitting transfixed with him in Canberra at a marvellous concert of Haydn symphonies.

Another of his great loves was birdwatching, particularly seabirds. He went on a number of oceanic expeditions and it was seabirds behind his decision to go to the Antarctic, where he over-wintered as Medical Officer to Casey Station, returning to be awarded the Queen's Polar Medal.

The Antarctic is not for the faint-hearted and there were many hazardous situations there in inflatable boats but nothing to compare with the voyage of the Totorore. This was a tiny 11-metre yacht, being sailed by its owner around Cape Horn, and then up the western side of South America's tip, all in search of seabirds. He needed a crew to make the venture possible and Alan put his hand up, flying to the southerly tip of the continent to join the boat.

By all accounts, it was a successful but highly testing journey through some of the wildest seas in the world. Sometime later, I am not sure just how long, the Totorore and its master disappeared at sea without trace. Alan had been very fortunate.

Alan's marriage to Anne ended, and for some time, he was alone and not very happy. It was a source of great joy to him when he met and married Susan Poultney; the renewed vigour and enthusiasm which emerged was inspiring to all who knew him. They met through choral singing and continued to sing and to travel extensively.

In 1999, I was studying and photographing owls around the world and, high on the wanted list, was the Snowy Owl, the great white owl of the Arctic. I asked Alan if he would like to come and he eagerly accepted, saying that Susan would come too. This was particularly pleasing as Margaret, my wife, had an aversion to cold places and was not looking forward to being alone in an Eskimo village, while I sat in a hide on the tundra. The trip was a great success and I still have a photograph of Alan, dressed like an Eskimo, struggling against the wind to put up my bird hide in the snow.

Three years later, I called on Alan again. This time, the quarry was Blakiston's Fish Owl in Japan, the largest owl in the world and one of the rarest. Sumio Yamamoto, our host, had organised accommodation in a traditional Japanese guesthouse, an experience in itself. Conditions were very cold, with heavy frosts at night but Alan's Antarctic experience stood him in good stead and we both thoroughly enjoyed the experience of working together with this mythical bird.

In recent years, Alan was not in the best of health but, to talk to him, one would never have guessed it. He had cardiac problems and some major hip complications but made light of both and remained as positive and switched-on to the world as he had ever been. Over the years, he had been a regular contributor of letters to The Canberra Times and I gather that this tradition kept on to the end, with his final letter to that paper yet to be published.