Elizabeth Meldrim KELLETT [5474]

  General Notes:

Australian Women's Weekly Wednesday 6 October 1971
A full life lived in two centuries - by - Lorraine Hickman.
Eliza Gunter often wonders why she was chosen to live so long
The lady, born on the dirt floor of a bark hut the year the American Civil War ended, sternly locked eyes with the camera. "Go on - smile," someone urged. But Eliza Gunter retained her dignity and physical rigidity to the last shutter click. The result - a photographic "pose" typical of any pioneering woman worth her salt. "I must say I have always disliked portraits," she admitted, sliding into a smile. At almost 106 years of age (birth date, October 27, 1865), Eliza Gunter is a pioneer - and perhaps the oldest woman in Australia. She is also one of the most remarkable. These days, her hearing and eyesight are poor. Her spirit and mental agility - enjoyed by the chain of visitors to her bedside in Neringah Hospital, Sydney - are intact. Born at Bolong on the N.S.W. south coast, Eliza Gunter enjoyed the strange experience of living a full life in two centuries. For 30-odd years, she grew and was moulded by the 19th century - prelude to more than 70 years in the 20th. She watched her Queen (Victoria) and even her local Member of Parliament (Sir Henry Parkes) step from the stream of life to legend. The everyday items of her youth (her long, sweeping frocks, her butter churns) vanished almost before her eyes - swept into museums as relics decades later. She was a young woman when man invented the wireless and flew his first aircraft; a middle-aged matron when the motor-car became generally popular.
Passing events
As an old lady, she witnessed the coming of an ingenious entertainer - television. She saw man invade space with satellites, then space- ships. When he walked on the moon - under whose remoteness she had dreamt for a century - there seemed little left to surprise her. She is a will-o'-the-wisp figure, poised like a small bird on an island of bed-clothes. Her eyes, intent and searching, look beyond that boundary. "I often wonder why I was chosen to live so long. I had no idea I would ever reach 100. I clearly remember as a young woman fainting several times in succession. They took me home and called the doctor. I was frightened. I asked him if I would die. He replied, in a doctor's joking way, I should go on to be 100. Really, it is amusing!" Her parents - Northern Irish Methodists - met and married at Shoalhaven, N.S.W., where they worked a tenant farm close to the river, with a large swamp on the other side. "In 1870, my parents lost everything in a great flood. The river and the swamp water met, flooding our home. "My mother had us standing on the kitchen table. I recall my father getting a ladder and chopping a hole through the ceiling. We were pulled through it and it was very dark, very cold. "We seemed to be there for a long time. Then two men in a boat came by. "They dragged us down and took us to a house. We children lay on warm straw. Mother had a bed. A baby was born to her, but it lived just a few days." The family moved to Berry, where Eliza was able to attend a small, private school for three years. "I was lucky to get an education. Sir Henry Parkes once visited our school and promised schools for all Australian children. But that did not come about until 1881." By which time Eliza was 16, and hard at work on the farm, an existence she heartily detested - "common slavery." It was dawn to dusk back bending labor - milking, stripping wattle bark (sold to tanneries), churning butter, sewing, cooking, and cleaning. Somehow, she made time to educate herself for escape from the life she dismisses as "boring." At 17, she came to Sydney - "Where I felt very inferior. I always thought that coming from the bush, I was nothing. My Sydney cousins were dressed very smartly and grandmother herself aspired to be a lady of fashion, though she made her own clothes." Eliza's drive for knowledge took her through many books and by the age of 18 she was a schoolteacher. She returned to the bush to teach and, at 37 years of age, married another school-teacher, George Gunter, a widower with seven children. They had another five, which gave Eliza12 children to rear on the home cultivated vegetable patch with milk and butter from the family cow, and meat provided by a few pigs. She also made the children's clothes -? "It might very well have been hard work. But it was fun." Before World War I the family moved to Sydney. George Gunter died in his 80s, about 30 years ago. Eliza said reflectively, "I should not have minded dying at that age." Instead, she went on to take a trip in an aeroplane when she was 100. At 102 she repeated the experience on a jet, remaining politely unimpressed at the marvel of it all - "Aero- planes are a very quick mode of transport and most comfortable." Eyes streaked with ironic humor, she denied the experience had frightened her. "At my age, what is there to fear?" She believes in God - "Not as the vengeful figure supposed to have created that cruel fairytale Hell. No God worth his salt would have thought of such a thing. "Yes, I believe in religion, though I can understand why so many young people doubt. There are too few people capable of abiding by its principles - love, lack of cruelty, and honesty." Which is why, she asserts, the morals of today have reached "such a disgustingly low ebb." Talk of sex has "reached the point of tedium. It should be regarded as something sacred and private for very good reasons." Despite her staunch support for family life - "I think it is sometimes wiser for young people to leave their parents. "Some parents can cause harm to their children. I am thinking of a woman I once knew who became wealthy. "Once she had money she thought it smart to use profane language, of which I strongly disapprove. "She referred to her child, in my presence, as 'a little bitch.' The child was a very nice little girl, the mother was not. That girl will be better leaving such a home when she can." These days Eliza Gunter's greatest pleasures are chatting with friends (she averages one visitor daily) and a quiet think. "I often think about death. Oh, no, it doesn't bother me. It will be a nice rest. Besides," with a reassur- ing hand pat for her visitor, "it will be most interesting to discover what happens néxt."

Eliza married George GUNTER [5475] [MRIN: 1835], son of George GUNTER [5476] and Mary Hannah [5477], in 1902 in Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia. (George GUNTER [5475] was born in 1867 in Muswellbrook, NSW, Australia and died in Jul 1948 in Cremorne.)

  Marriage Notes:

1902 NSW Bathurst Reg 8792