Olive celebrates 100 years

OLIVE Mawson made the seachange to Torquay at the relatively late age of 86 but is happy to extol the virtues of the town where she just turned 100.

“I love it down here! I wouldn’t move from this beautiful view,” she said.

In an interview held a couple of days before reaching Sunday’s milestone, Olive said she was a little surprised to be turning 100.

“I didn’t expect it, but I’ve nearly got there, so there’s nothing much I can do about it!”

Raised on a winery in Rutherglen, Olive Mawson (nee Stanton) was born on August 22, 1921 in Sydney along with her twin sister Joan, and quickly developed a talent for the violin.

“My mother was a beautiful musician, a pianist,” she said.

“As I got older, I went to the Conservatorium in Melbourne and I used to practice four hours a day – my mother was very strict about practice!”

She was educated at Rutherglen Lake School and Rutherglen Elementary School.

“I rode a bike for two miles. I wanted to ride a horse to school, but my mother was very strict and wouldn’t allow me on a horse,” she said.

After spending two years of “leaving” at Presbyterian Ladies College in east Melbourne in the late 1930s, Olive wanted to be a violin teacher, but the onset of World War II meant Australia needed school teachers so her first job was as a maths teacher in Waygunyah, then Glenrowan and Dederang.

She met her husband, Kenneth Charles Mawson, at teachers’ college at The University of Melbourne , where he later won a scholarship to do a Bachelor of Commerce.

After a five-year romance, Olive and Ken married on May 10, 1947 at St James’ Old Cathedral in West Melbourne, where her uncle was the bishop but unfortunately unwell on the day so he couldn’t preside over the ceremony.

They had their honeymoon in the South Australian town of Robe.

“Someone had written on top of the car ‘Just Married’, and we didn’t know, and we pulled up at Robe, and there was a line of people up on the balcony shrieking with laughter, and we said ‘what’s so funny?’,” Olive said.

Olive stopped teaching as soon as she was engaged and the couple moved to her parents’ home town of Cohuna, where she lived for the next 60 years.

Their daughter, Ann, was born in 1956.

A keen sportsperson, Olive also went on frequent skiing trips to Falls Creek as well as Europe and the United States, which resulted in a handful of accidents, including a sore knee that still troubles her today.

“It wasn’t fun (the accidents), but I had a lot of fun skiing in different countries,” she said.

Olive’s father bought a holiday home on the site now occupied by Two Sugars.

This was later upgraded to a home a little further down The Esplanade, where Ken (who passed away in 2019) and Olive permanently settled in 2008 after coming to Torquay for a holiday and deciding not to go back.

The grandmother of three and great-grandmother of two still does the crossword and Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper every day.