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Keeping busy, a happy family life and home-grown vegetables are a recipe for a long and contented life, according to Wellsford resident Rhona Olesen QSM.
And Rhona should know, as she will turn 100 on August 16.
Still sprightly and engaging, “keeping busy” is a phrase she takes literally. Her volunteering around the Wellsford area is legendary.
Prior to covid, Rhona would pay weekly visits to the residents of the Heritage Rest Home and she helped at the Anglican Op Shop for decades until it closed earlier this year.
She continues to be a long-standing volunteer at CMA (Citizens for Mutual Aid), a weekly get-together for the elderly where she helps prepare the lunch, and she also volunteers at Wellsford’s community garden.
She still drives and once a month she attends church at Port Albert. At home, she knits for her family and others in the community, reads and plays the piano. She still cooks her own meals, although there is normally someone from her family to delegate this chore to these days.
She admits her passion is her garden, which she tends to rain or shine, and often barefooted as she doesn’t like gumboots.
It is no surprise, therefore, that she received the Queens Service Medial in 2000 for services to the community. And all from someone who describes herself as “not having a lot of confidence”.
At the time of the 2018 census, there were 648 Kiwis aged over 100 years – 111 males and 537 females.
Rhona grew up on a dairy farm in Wharepoa, between Thames and Paeroa, the second eldest of 13 children. Her father was recently returned from the war, a veteran of Gallipoli. She was in the shed milking cows with her mother from an early age, a task that was done by hand in those days.
When old enough, she would join her father in the paddocks fencing, draining, and scrubbing blackberries and ragwort.
“He’d talk about the years he spent overseas during the war, but he only ever told us the good bits,” she says. “His stories were mostly about the other fellas he was over there with.”
Rhona found school challenging. She had a stutter and couldn’t retain what she was being taught.
Consequently, she left school barely able to read. This was eventually remedied when she learned to read alongside her daughters when they went to school.
“My sisters were the clever ones, but I was a first-class horse rider and shepherdess!”
She worked full-time with her father on the farm until she was 21. War had broken out again by then, and her grandmother in Christchurch needed her to help manage her ration book. She was manpowered into working at a plant nursery while in Christchurch, which “suited me very well”.
Romance had blossomed when Ray Olesen came to work at the family farm in Wharepoa a few years earlier. The couple had kept in touch and exchanged letters for seven years, including while he was fighting overseas. They were married shortly after his return to NZ, and started married life as sharemilkers, first at Waiuku and then Aka Aka, near Pukekohe.
By the early1950s they had saved enough to buy 300 acres in Ryans Road, Tomarata, where they raised their four children – Dawn, Dale, Andrew and Anders.
“It was pretty run down and covered in gorse when we took over, but we worked hard and had a good life there.”
Rhona says her only social outing back then was the monthly meetings of the Women’s Institute in the old Tobaccolands Hall.
The couple eventually retired and moved to Wellsford, to a house that still had a view of open paddocks.
Ray died of cancer 16 years ago, but not before the couple enjoyed many trips overseas.
Amazingly, Rhona and her older sister Gladys walked the length of New Zealand when they were both in their 70s.
“People kept stopping and wanting to give a ride,” she laughs.
Rhona has 14 grandchildren, 36 great grandchildren and three great great grandchildren.
She celebrated her birthday with a large gathering of family and friends at a country and western themed party at the Wellsford Community Centre.
