Aubrey Charles Bowring, known as ‘Toby’, was head of paediatric surgery at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick, New South Wales. He was born in Sydney on 10 January 1924 to Clarence Bowring, a railway conductor, and Ella Bowring née Ryan. The family later moved to Albury, New South Wales. At kindergarten he announced he was there ‘to learn to be a doctor’. From Albury he went on to the University of Sydney, where he completed the accelerated medical course during the Second World War, qualifying in 1948. At university he boxed and competed in intervarsity shooting. He held a junior post at South Sydney Hospital in 1948. During a short placement at St Joseph’s Hospital, Auburn, he met Patricia Stoney, a nurse. They married in 1950. With his wife and first child, Bowring worked his passage to the UK to continue his training. He gained his FRCS in 1956 and also became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He returned to Australia, and took rooms in Macquarie Street, Sydney. By the early 1950s he had joined the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Camperdown. In 1964 he moved to the new Sydney Children’s Hospital, as the founding head of paediatric surgery. Ten years later, he helped establish what is now Kidsafe, which works to prevent childhood accidents, and in 1989 he was president of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Paediatric Surgeons. In 1984 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, and in 2009 the department of paediatric surgery at Sydney Children’s Hospital was named in his honour. Outside medicine he enjoyed fishing and shooting. Predeceased by his wife, who died in 1997, Toby Bowring died on 1 October 2011. He was 87 and was survived by his three sons and three daughters and their families. His gravestone in the cemetery at North Ryde, New South Wales reads: ‘…encyclopaedic poppa, gifted, infinitely patient teacher, pioneering and respected paediatric surgeon, talented sportsman.’