Edna Neubecker – “Turning 100 is a mere trifle these days”

22 March 2017

Edna Neubecker recommends stimulation and activity for a long life

Edna moved into the independent living units in Hawthorn at the age of 94 and still continues to live a full and independent life.

Bob Evans finds her philosophical about the ups and downs.

Edna Neubecker is surprisingly matter of fact about turning 100 in July this year.

“Turning 100 is a mere trifle these days,” Edna says. “They’re coming out of the woodwork, there’s that many of them.”

Edna is referring to the number of people she knows who are reaching this grand age. And as you’d expect from someone who has lived to be 99½, which is how Edna figures her age, she has amassed a wealth of experience. Her unit in Vasey RSL Care’s residence in Manningtree Road is packed with mementos and memories, including a photo of her son holding Hawthorn’s third Grand Final Cup, backed up with the memorial photo of the team on the wall. Edna has also pinned up the photo and newspaper report of Michelle Payne’s Melbourne Cup win from 2014.

Edna grew up in Bright in north-east Victoria, the fourth of five children. Her father was a builder and the son of an American from Pennsylvania, who’d migrated to Australia in the days of the gold rush. The family moved to Melbourne after her father died following an injury in a building accident when he was hit by a falling timber beam.

“But it took a long time to kill him and a month after he died our lovely, baby brother was born. I was 9½, then, and I didn’t know mum was pregnant,” Edna says.

A lifelong friend of Edna’s, Kath O’Donohue, is one of those who has ‘come out of the woodwork’ and already celebrated her 100^th birthday. “Oh, yes – she received a card from the Queen and congratulations from the Pope!”

Edna is pleased but also concerned for Kath. In Edna’s opinion, Kath needs stimulation and an activity – she has suggested getting Kath involved in a choir. “She’s almost exactly a year older than me and I saw her recently on a visit to Collingwood being wheeled around in a trundle bed. I told them she needs to do something,” Edna says.

In her younger days Edna was an active member of the choir in her Methodist church in Surrey Hills and was in the first choir recruited by radio broadcaster, Norman Banks, to sing at the inaugural Carols by Candlelight concert in the Alexandra Gardens in 1938. Tucked away in her kitchen, nearly 80 years later, Edna still has the original candleholder from that concert!

Kath and Edna have been friends since they were at school together at the City Road Girls’ School in what is now Southbank. Their friendship flourished despite the entrenched religious antagonisms of those days, when Catholics and Protestants didn’t mix – a fact of life that is still fresh in Edna’s mind. Kath is a Catholic and went on to become a nun, taking the name Sister Mary Angela. Edna is an ecumenical Protestant who worshipped in various churches with her father’s blessing. “He didn’t care which church we went to – Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican – anything as long as it wasn’t Catholic,” says Edna, who maintains her connection to the Uniting Church in Hawthorn to this day.

The City Road school building is still there, functioning now as the Boyd Community Hub. It was preserved thanks to the Heritage Council which describes it as “one of the most ornamental and distinctive of the Education Department schools of the 19th century”. Edna and Kath were students there around the time the school was amalgamated with the Eastern Road State School and received a bequest from a wealthy grazier named J H Boyd to become a college specialising in ‘domestic science’.

“This old boy had it in mind that every woman should know how to run a house and so we became the J H Boyd Domestic College,” Edna recalls. But it was the end of Kath’s enrollment at the school. “Her father thought she was brainy and he wasn’t going to have her trained to be a domestic servant. So, he sent her to a business college.”

Piecing together Edna’s recollections, it seems Kath did complete her secretarial studies, only to find herself working in the Collingwood convent laundry when she became a nun. Edna also aspired to an office job and enrolled in Short’s business college which was on the corner of Market and Collins Streets. “But I learned the wrong form of shorthand – it had to be Pitman or Bradshaw. My shorthand was too personal, not standard, so not everyone could read it. I couldn’t get a job,” Edna explains.

In fact, before she married, Edna had many jobs. Her first was as an apprentice dressmaker in the Block Arcade. She was paid eight shillings a week and would catch the train from home in Surrey Hills. But fate and family life conspired to cut short Edna’s apprenticeship. Alice, the dressmaker, relocated the shop from the Block Arcade to Glenferrie Road Hawthorn so she could accommodate her unmarried daughter and her baby. Alice lost clients in the move and since she couldn’t afford an apprentice, Edna lost her job.

Edna put her Boyd Domestic College education to work for a time as a cook in the household of the Mayor of Camberwell. Later, the mother of another of Edna’s girlfriends, Val, who worked as a cook in a Collins Street restaurant, offered to introduce her to someone who could help her get a job on the Victorian Railways.

Val was a champion breaststroke swimmer and Edna remembers swimming with her in an abandoned quarry dam near Box Hill which they called the ‘Surrey Dive’. Edna remembers being warned that dead quarry ponies had been consigned to the depths of the dam. “I told them we didn’t care because we were only swimming on top and the water was clean where we were,” she says.

“I thought I might end up as one of those girls on the station in their nice pink uniforms selling soft drinks,” Edna remembers, and then considers. “I should have dressed myself up like my older sister, Evelyn. She always dressed the part, even if she never went anywhere.”

Edna didn’t quite make it to the platform in a pink uniform, but she did get a job as a Vic Rail cook and ‘counter jumper’ at the lower end of Flinders Street, opposite the Mission to Seamen.

As Edna assembles her memories from the perspective of 99½ years, she has an air of acceptance, as she says at one point when talking of children and broken marriages: “I like the straight and narrow path myself.”

And she obviously managed to walk that path through the years of World War II, when she worked as a tram conductor, until she met her future husband at the age of 28. Burnie Neubecker was named after the town in Tasmania and was a third generation barber, whose father and grandfather had owned a barber’s shop in Hawthorn. Edna met Burnie at a dance (a ‘turn out’) in the local hall. Burnie played saxophone in a band and his brother played violin. She has a surprise in store when asked about children. “They were given to me,” she says. “We had this very nice minister at the church and he arranged it.”

She confides that at first she didn’t want children because Burnie began to suffer from epilepsy and she was afraid it might be hereditary. She remembers the first episode: “Suddenly Burn’s on the floor, writhing – it was terrible. We didn’t know what to do. How to treat him. We got him home in a taxi, got him into bed and – God help us – he had a second one. His parents had no idea, they’d never seen it before.”

So, Edna and Burnie, with the encouragement of their Presbyterian Minister, decided to adopt, first a son Geoff, and then a daughter Merilyn, a year or so younger. (Geoff went on to serve in Vietnam.) Edna and Burnie settled down to family life with Burnie’s parents above the barber shop in Church Street, Hawthorn.

“We had a real village in Church Street. Lots of shops – two butchers, two bakers, a big factory over the road, a couple of banks and newspaper shop – right on the tram line.”

To help the business along, Edna set up display shelves in the window to sell something other than cigarettes. “Burnie was a terrible smoker. He wouldn’t give it up and he smoked himself to death,” says Edna. Burnie died in 1980. Edna gave up smoking and set about living life without him. She was an active member of the Hawthorn Bowling Club and served as its President for a couple of terms, staying on for an extra year, when another friend didn’t feel that she could take over.

A little over five years ago, Edna reached the point where she could no longer maintain a life alone in her flat at Coppin Grove. But the prospect of moving away from Hawthorn to be near her children on the Mornington Peninsula, didn’t appeal and she didn’t want to impose.

“The family wouldn’t have time for me and I didn’t know a soul down there. All my old friends live around here.”

Edna chanced to meet a lady she knew who lived at Vasey RSL Care’s units in Manningtree Road and who offered to introduce her to Judy Koves, the former Community Services Units Manager. Judy arranged for Edna to move temporarily into a unit in Vasey RSL Care’s Lisson Grove location before moving into her current unit at Manningtree Road.

Here, surrounded by her possessions and her memories, Edna is making the most of her life, with someone to take her shopping and help with the housework once a fortnight and her regular weekly practice of tai chi at Boroondara Council’s Peppercorn Club.

Edna certainly takes her own advice about stimulation and activity.