Later Life
Rowell retired from the Army on 15 December 1954, following a ceremony at Duntroon, where his career had begun over 43 years before. He turned to gardening, cricket, horse-racing, reading, and crossword puzzles. He became a director of Smith, Elder & Co. in 1954 and of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in 1956, serving as its chairman from 1957 to 1968. From 1958 to 1968 he was chairman of the Australian Boy Scouts' Association and a member of the Rhodes Scholarships Selection Committee for Victoria. He was offered but declined the post of Australian consul general in New York. In 1974 he published his memoirs, entitled Full Circle — the only Chief of the General Staff to have done so. Rowell died at his South Yarra home, twelve days before Lady Rowell, and was cremated. They were survived by their daughter. Sir Ivor Hele's portrait of Rowell is held by the Australian War Memorial, as are his papers.
Read more about this topic: Sydney Rowell
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Ordinary time is “quality time” too. Everyday activities are not just necessities that keep you from serious child rearing: they are the best opportunities for learning you can give your child...because her chief task in her first three years is precisely to gain command of the day-to-day life you take for granted.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)