Now... This is a story. This is a question of which you get asked so often: "How do you come to be a 100?" Now you're expected to kind of think up some ridiculous, funny thing, which mean nothing. But I now Just say to them "I am under good management". My name is Eric Tweedale. I live in Peninsula Village at Umina. I am 100 years old. I turned 100 on the fifth of May this year gone. I was born actually in England. A big textile industry town called Rochdale only ten miles out of Manchester. Mustn't have been a very nice place to live. Chimneys popping up everywhere. Black smoke. The long rows of tenement houses and everybody working in the mills. My father and mother, they did work in the mills from twelve years old. Had they stayed in England, I would have worked in the mills also. Thank goodness they decided to come to Australia. We came, of course, by ship. Everybody, all the migrants in those days, came by ship. The population of the whole of Australia was just over 5 million people, and it wasn't a land of milk and honey. Things were getting very tough. Employment was hard to get. My father, having worked in the mills of Lancashire, came out here as an unskilled worker, and so he was looking around for unskilled employment which he found working for William Arnotts - the biscuit people. Mum and dad bought a place in Merrylands. Just a cheap little place. And it was just wonderful to bring up kids because there was vacant land all over. There was more vacant land then there was building over the place. The area was full of poultry farms, dairy farms, brick pits. And really, as far as the children were concerned, we had a wonderful time. We went to school barefooted. We thought that was great. We had such tons of room to move around in. Meanwhile, mum and dad, they were doing it pretty tough. Just a few years after that, of course, The Depression set in. And of course, that was that was an absolute terrible time in the history of Australia, not only in Australia, but worldwide, really. William Arnotts sacked nobody right throughout The Depression, but they did lessen their working hours. So it could be that my dad would work four days a week instead of five, sometimes three days a week. It got us out of the poverty, the real depression. We we still handled it pretty well, but we didn't have any to put away for a rainy day, I could tell you that. I don't think my dad ever had a bank account until the day he died. He lived from day to day. I was very average student. From the day I think I was born I was meant to be a sportsperson. Left school at 14 to go and find a job somewhere. I had to because I was getting a big kid. I was eating a lot of food. I was keeping the family poor. So I had to get a job for myself, which I got a job with Anthony Horderns. At 14 years of age, I started at twelve shillings and a thruppence... very close to a dollar 30 per week. When I was 15. I was a big lad. I was over six foot tall and weighed about 13 stone. I met a man called Bill Cerutti. Bill Cerutti was the international front row forward, one of the finest forwards Australia has ever seen. So he said to me, "Eric have you ever considered playing rugby union?" I said to him, "Mr Cerutti I've never even seen the game played that's only played in top high schools and GPS schools, but I've never seen the game played". He said, "Well, you're big and ugly enough". He said, "Would you would you like me to take you over to Parramatta Rugby Union Club on Tuesday night for training? We'll see what we can make of you". And by the time the season was finished, I was really rapt in this game, and by the time I was 17, I was a permanent member of the Parramatta District side and at 19 I was the youngest player picked in the only representative game played at the start of the war in 1940. There was no representative played from then on until 1946. Another five years, I served in the Navy for four years. Well, at this time I'm no longer the 'the kid on the block' type of person. I'm 25 years of age with a burning desire to play for Australia. After playing the interstate games against Queensland, I made the Wallaby team to go to New Zealand. How did I get to know I was to become a wallaby? I was working for the shell company. I knocked off work that day. I bought a paper, Wynyard Station, went down to Wynyard, got on the train, sat down, opened up the paper... always started at the back page, which was the sporting page and there was the team to go to New Zealand. In the back page. My name was there. And it said, this article said that "the chosen players will train at Sydney Cricket Ground Number two at 4:00 Tuesdays and Thursdays until the team goes away". We went over to New Zealand by Air New Zealand on Sunderland flying boats. I was told to be at Rose Bay terminal by 6 o'clock the following Monday morning. It was just after the war, very few people had cars. If they had cars, they had very little petrol. It was all rationed. I said, "how am I going to get from Guildford or Merrylands to Rose Bay by 6:00. They as good as said, "Well that's your problem mate". But anyway, you've got to remember that the game hasn't been played for eight years so we don't know what to expect, really. We've got a team that's half full of kids and half full of soldiers or servicemen. We've never seen the All Blacks play - 8 years is a long time. The New Zealand team had been to England and had just come back from a tour of England. They were toughened. They were hardy and they were recognized international players and their passion is so great that makes them a very difficult team to beat whether it be in 1946 or 2021. We played the first Test down in Dunedin. We got beaten 33 to 8. It was a real drubbing, really, but we weren't expecting to win, really. We played the second test at Eden Park in Auckland, and we got beaten too, 14 points to ten and we scored two tries to the All Blacks one. So this was giving you some indication that this team of ours, with all its inexperience, was learning very quickly, and the team that they took to England was a good team. one of the best teams ever to represent Australia on a long tour. We played 30 matches. We won 25. We convincingly beat Scotland, Ireland and we beat England eleven to nil. As I say, Wales beat us six to nil. Two penalty goals to nil and didn't have a try scored against us in the four test matches. No other international team has ever done that. We had our first match when we went to England in 47. This is a beautiful photograph. Charlie Eastes is a winger. We were convinced that we scored tries. Their way of playing football was to combine the two or three: they had tries, conversions and field goals. Now that type of football wasn't the way we played at all. You can imagine there's been a scrum over here and the ball was whipped out across the back line as the outside center there and Charlie Eastes... They liked our type of play and slowly but surely over the years that have gone past, they now play more of a game like the way we used to play it. There's not a tight forward until you get someone way back here. Of course, in those days - 46, 47, 47-48, the game was patterned. We played to a pattern we had with we had a scrum here with a line out there. The ball was supposed to go out to the winger and the winger went down there, passed it back in, picked up the forwards here and away we went. But today... the forwards and the backs get mixed up together. We had a fella by the name of Roger Cornforth. He loved to get out amongst the backs. He was a breakaway, but they wouldn't pick him in an Australian side because he had no business to be out there in the first place. If I went down to Sydney and spoke to the powers that be down there, they'd probably say that rugby is being played more now than ever before because of the inclusion of women's rugby and the popularity of the Seven's side. It's quite apparent that women's rugby is here to stay. They've played, they've played it for a number of years. But in the doldrums, you might say. Now, they're up and going and they're quite a force to be reckoned with. And I believe the women... the sport itself will be reliant as the years go by on the women's participation as well as the men. I'm a very sentimental type of person, and I... I am very much aware of the value of the women I've had throughout my life. From the time I was a kid to the present time - different women coming in, you know... It just seems so remarkable that these kind of things could happen. Now, of course, I've lost so many loved ones, wonderful, wonderful people. And the fact is that I, I hope that I'm going to be reunited with them sometime. This is my first wife, Isabel, who as a child, I fell in love with as a kid. From the time I was about ten or eleven we used to sit with each other at the local Saturday afternoon matinees, when we were still going to school, where we left school, we parted. We went our different ways. I met a girl called Enid Wagner, and I fell in love with her. That was in 1939. We got engaged in 1941 and I joined the Navy. The world was in an uproar that particular time. People were just different, shall we say. Enid and I decided that we would call off our engagement until such time as we could do something about it. That was in 1942. So we broke off the engagement. During the War years I met my old girlfriend from way back - my school girlfriend. I made up with her again and we were married in 1944 and we had 20 years of happy marriage. She was taken away with a disease called nephritis, which is a disease of the kidneys, which they couldn't do anything about. My only child was born while I was playing football in New Zealand. I haven't forgotten that. That's my daughter, myself... That’s when we were going to England. I put football before the rest of my family life and... I don't dwell on it, but I'm very conscious of the fact that I should have given a little more attention to her. As I say, Isabel passed away in 1962 and I was married to to Phyllis in 1966. My lovely Phyllis, so from America. So we had 42 years of wonderful, wonderful, happy life, and she passed away 13 years ago now. Phyllis died and Enid came back from 62 years later and came into my life again. I received a phone call from a lady asking me would I go to a reunion of the Merrylands RSL Younger Set. And she said to me, there is a lady that I contacted. She lives in a retirement village at Cromer, and she would like to come along, too. Her name is Enid Wagner, my old girlfriend, from 62 years before. I often wondered whatever had happened to Enid. And here it was. She was then in her mid eighties. So too was I. And we met under the big clock at Central Station, where everybody in our youth used to meet. We never married. We never, ever slept together. But it was an amazingly close relationship that we had... Twelve years we were spared and we had a lovely time. And about eight years ago, we both came into into this village. We both had individual units and we were so, so happy. She developed dementia and she passed away in... In January of this year. And 99 years of age, as I was when when Enid passed away that my life is in that direction is finished, you know. So there we are. I don't think the 'good ol' days' were ever good. The average life span was very much less, probably 50 or 60. Now a life span goes up to somewhere in the late eighties and people are living not only longer, but they're living much healthier than they were going back 100 years, for instance, a time that I was born. I've had a wonderful life and I wonder if I could say the same if I was stayed in that old town in Lancashire. Working in a cotton mill.