A Lilydale legacy: 100 years in Victoria for local centenarian

Bolton Clarke Lilydale resident and proud lifelong Victorian Dorothy (Dot) has celebrated her 100^th birthday in the very building where she gave birth to her two children.

The home started its life as the Dame Nellie Melba Bush Nursing Hospital and opened its doors on 7 May 1933, with Central Bush Nursing Association president Lady Mitchell presiding.

Meanwhile Dot, born on 16 July 1925 in the small town of Koondrook (which she emphasises is on the Victorian side of the Murray River), had moved with her family to what they thought of as “the big smoke”.

“I think we were all very shocked when Dad said we were coming down here to live, because we couldn’t imagine it and no one had seen anything closer than Bendigo,” she says.

“It was all dirt roads and farmland back then – lots of sheep!

“I was only here for a year when I joined up to the Navy as a cook and then I was away for two years.”

Before starting her journey with the Navy during World War II, Dot spent her weekdays at a packing shed for fruit farms, her weekends as a telephonist and any free time in between helping her mother raise her seven siblings. 

She moved to Lilydale from Coldstream five years ago but says her connection with the home started in its earliest days.

“When we first moved down it was still being built,” she says.

“It was a really nice hospital, I remember coming to it and there was a lovely big veranda along the front and from my room now I can see where the driveway entrance was.

“Back then, the nurses offered me a room but said if I didn’t want a room I could stay out on the veranda because it was all covered – you wouldn’t read about that now!”

Dot now insists that her 100^th birthday is “just one more day” in her life and was pleasantly surprised by an afternoon of celebrations over high tea with her family and the Lilydale community.