By Max Davies
A long train trip is all that Shirley Dally remembers from the early years of her life more than a century ago – a life that turned out to be a long and storied one for the oldest resident at BlueCross Willowmeade in Kilmore.
Celebrating her 108th birthday last month, Ms Dally had many stories to tell having worked various jobs and lived in many places in both Victoria and New South Wales.
Her story started in a grocery store on Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street, where she lived with her adoptive parents from 1920.
Ms Dally’s son Alan Thomas said no one knew exact details about her early life beyond the fact she was born in 1915, as documents holding that information were never recovered.
“They changed her name when they adopted her, she’s got a fair idea of what her name is but there’s no birth certificate or adoption papers,” he said.
Ms Dally lived at the grocery store for several years and stayed with her mother when her adoptive parents separated. When the world entered the Great Depression it became clear that she needed to find a job.
After living and working at a milk bar in Fairfield under the care of Mr and Mrs Moore, she was eventually hired by a slipper factory in Preston after weeks of walking to and from the factory to convince the factory’s managers to hire her.
“She worked there for a while and befriended some of the workers, but on the first day she had been given a packed lunch to take with her,” Alan said.
“She was working at her machine and all of a sudden it went quiet, but she kept working until a lady called Gwen came out confused and told her it was lunchtime.
“Gwen saw the sandwich she had brought and said, ‘don’t eat that’ and gave her half of her lunch instead. They became really good friends.”
At the age of 18, Ms Dally met her first husband William ‘Clem’ Thomas who was a successful speedway racer and made annual trips to compete in Europe.
He decided to stay home in 1936 and the pair married in December of that year while living in Thornbury. They had two sons, Clemanshaw and Alan, born in 1938 and 1948 respectively.
During the Second World War, Ms Dally worked on double-decker buses and trams as a conductor in Melbourne’s inner suburbs.
“She’d walk up and down the aisle and they used to do what was called the ‘pub run’ through Fitzroy,” Alan said.
“She had someone who had been drinking get on one day who wouldn’t buy a ticket, so she sternly told him he had to get off.
“Instead of getting off when the bus next stopped, he picked her up and put her on the footpath.
“She had to run after the bus and caught up at the next stop, saw the man and told him to get off again. He got off and said to her, ‘I’m going to that pub there anyway’.”
Following the war, Ms Dally continued to work and in the late 1950s divorced her husband.
Alan remembered his mother’s ability to save money during that time and eventually purchase her own FX Holden.
It was then, while working at a carpet factory, that Ms Dally met her second husband – one of the factory’s owners, Ken Dally.
The pair married in 1964 and moved around Melbourne’s outer suburbs before relocating to Gosford, New South Wales, in the early 1970s to care for Mr Dally’s sick parents.
They lived in Gosford for 14 years, before moving back to Victoria in the mid-1980s, where they purchased a home in Wandong.
The couple lived in Wandong until Mr Dally’s health began to decline. Ms Dally moved to a granny flat on Alan’s property in Macleod, while Mr Dally purchased a house in Broadford.
“She stayed in Macleod, and she used to drive up to Broadford to see him three or four days a week. At that stage she was 79 and still driving,” Alan said.
In 2014 Alan and his family moved to Kingsgate Village in Kilmore while they began looking for a nursing home for Ms Dally, who had suffered a hip injury the year earlier.
“She went into Wattle Glen [Aged Care] for rehab and quite liked it there, but a week later Willowmeade called me and said they had a spot. She wanted to go there and had a couple of days to get moved in,” Alan said.
“She’s been there since 2014 and the rest is history.”
Ms Dally still attributes her longevity to never having smoked or drank besides a shandy every now and then, as well as a little bit of ginger before bed each night.