Celebrating Betty’s 100 Years
Recently, Woodport resident, Betty, celebrated her 100th birthday which, she says, “has been going on for months and months!” It took her friends, family, and Woodport’s team two months to get everything done – to organise a roaring 1920’s themed party with the theme chosen because she was born in 1926.
“We were dressed up in that style,” she says. “We all had a good time. All I wanted was a morning tea, but my daughter said, ‘no – Mum, you’re having a big bash!’ So that was that.” Betty’s family joined in the celebrations from Queensland, where they live. “We had heaps and heaps of photos taken,” Betty states. “I thought that paparazzi was after me! For a while, I had about twelve people taking photos in front of me.”
Life when Betty was growing up in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra was very different. “My mother died when I was fourteen years old, when she was 34, and I left school that day to look after my siblings,” Betty states of her two brothers and her sister. “It was full on after that. I had to learn how to do the washing and chop the wood. It wasn’t like it is now.”
She goes on to explain how copper pots or “coppers” were used to boil water for washing clothes, because washing machines didn’t exist at the time. “I boiled jumpers with sheets and the jumpers ended up like jelly,” she explains with a laugh. A neighbour then helped me a lot.”
Betty was introduced to her husband by a friend in Sydney’s Hyde Park. “It was love at first sight,” she says. After living in Woollahra for a while after getting married, they moved to Coogee with their two children. “Life hasn’t been easy,” she explains of her husband later getting Alzheimer’s and her father passing away from cancer.
After her husband moved into a nursing home some time after they’d moved to the New South Wales Central Coast, she moved to Woodport’s retirement village, only stopping driving when she was ninety-seven. “I lived in the village for fourteen years and then decided that I’d go downstairs to the nursing home and get waited on,” she says with a laugh. “Everybody is lovely here.”
When she casts her mind back to her younger years, she acknowledges how times have changed. She used to use an axe and a chopping block to chop the wood and her dad had chickens. “One night, I thought, ‘we’re going to have roast chook for dinner.’ So, I had to chop the chicken’s head off. But I missed and he was running around the yard bleeding. It was just one of those things! When he finished up dying, I plucked him and cleaned him; things you wouldn’t think of doing today.”
Betty didn’t have a telephone in her younger years. “We didn’t even have a TV,” she states. “Me and my two children walked to a comic store every night and we’d watch everyone watching their TV through their windows.” In terms of her advice to others? “Keep busy and don’t think of unhappy things all the time,” she advises.
