While most industries have a standard “golden couple” (think JLo and Ben Affleck, or Beyoncé and Jay Z), Australia’s media industry has Peter Overton and Jessica Rowe.
WATCH: Jessica Rowe films TikTok embarrassing her kids.
From meeting in a newsroom many moons ago to a first date in a Thai restaurant, to more than 20 years of marriage and two daughters later, the couple have seen each other through it all.
Nowadays, they’re just two talented members of a beautiful family, which includes their daughters Allegra, 17, and Giselle, 15, – who are regularly embarrassed by their mother on TikTok.
Get to know the Overton-Rowe family below!
While Jess and Pete probably were aware of each other prior to meeting, given that they both worked in the Australian media industry, it turns out that their paths crossed long before they struck up a romance.
Peter doesn’t remember the first time he met Jess as she was an intern and he was a newly established journalist.
At 19, she was doing work experience at Nine, and they were both sent out to cover a story on a Russian boxer visiting Australia.
While Pete clearly left an impression on Jess, it wasn’t until more than a decade later that Pete received a phone call from a friend, telling him to “ask out Jessica Rowe”, but Peter declined, citing his recent divorce and new gig at 60 Minutes.
However, he posed an ultimatum – if Jess were to ring him within 10 minutes and ask him out on a date, he’d do it.
“And she rang,” he told 9Honey in 2018. “And I said, ‘I like your style’.”
“We went out on a Sunday night to a Thai restaurant in Balmain. That was in June 2001 and it’s now July 2018, and we’ve never been apart,” he said.
While the couple seemed to fall in love very quickly, not everything has been smooth sailing for the couple over the years.
After tying the knot in 2004, Jess and Pete looked forward to starting a family but they soon realised Jess was facing issues with her fertility.
A trip to the doctor saw her diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which interferes with a woman’s ovulation schedule and egg production.
“So, I thought, yeah OK, we’ll do IVF and it will be an inconvenience, but at the end we will have a baby,” she wrote in her memoir Is This My Beautiful Life?
But the couple weren’t reassured instantly. Instead, it took three rounds of IVF before Jess became pregnant with their firstborn.
“I was shocked at how hard it was to become pregnant,” Jess wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2021.
She also recalls struggling with seeing the women around her conceive so easily at the time.
“I wanted to scream, ‘I’m on IVF and I don’t know if I can be a mum. I have just come from having a blood test to see if my body is responding to the hormones I’m pumping through my body. Don’t tell me how wonderful it is to be a mother! And don’t you dare complain about how tired you are.’”
Fortunately, Jess gave birth to her daughter, Allegra, on January 18, 2007.
“We are overjoyed by the arrival of our little miracle. It was the happiest day of our lives and we feel blessed to be a family,” Jess and Peter said in a statement at the time.
Jess refers to Allegra as her ‘wish upon a star’.
“This daughter of mine towers over me, is full of bravery, kindness, and persistence,” she wrote of Allegra in 2021.
Luckily, Jess didn’t have to endure IVF again. She fell pregnant with her second daughter, Giselle, naturally – much to her surprise.
She gave birth to her and Peter’s second daughter, Giselle, on April 9, 2009 – interrupting Peter while he was filming 60 Minutes to alert him that labour had begun.
In what seems to be the blink of an eye, Giselle has now grown up and started high school.
“That’s a massive thing for her and for us. And I know she’s ready, but she is anxious, she’s got the butterflies,” Jess told our sister publication Now to Love.
Jess is super-dedicated to her kids, and even left her job at Studio 10, a morning show, in 2018 in order to focus on them more.
“I could feel at the end of each show on most days I would be close to tears. I’d feel that behind my eyes and was just about keeping it together. And I thought ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’,” she told Kidspot about her decision to quit.
At the time, Allegra was setting an early alarm in order to wake up and catch her mother before she hurried out the door for the show.
“Now my daughters were getting older, I realised they needed me more than ever. I couldn’t ignore my life’s greatest work – being the best mother for them,” she confirmed.
These days, Jess keeps herself busy hosting The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show, her podcast with the LiSTNR network, and making her TikTok followers laugh with videos that make her daughters cringe.
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