Just when I was beginning to fear I might be the world's oldest blogger, I learn that I am far from it.
Or, at least, I was far from it.
At the grand age of 108, Olive Riley last posted an item at her blog - like me, she actually had blogs plural, Life of Riley and World's Oldest Blogger - on June 26, voicing thanks for "a whole swag of e-mails and comments from my internet friends".
Two weeks after that posting, Olive died, or, to quote the announcement at her site, "passed away peacefully on Saturday July 12".
Visit Olive's sites for yourself and you will see why her late foray in the cyber age caused a bit of a stir, not only in her native Australia but, with the aid of YouTube and other forms of modern communication, throughout the world.
I particularly liked this vivid account of turn-of-the-century washday, not least because of which century it was that had turned a few years earlier than the events described:
You 21st century people live a different life than the one I lived as a youngster in the early 1900s. Take Washing Day, for instance. These days you just toss your dirty clothes into a washing machine, press a few switches, and it's done.I remember scratching around to find a few pieces of wood to fire the copper for Mum. Sometimes I'd find a broken wooden fruit box that I'd split with a tommyhawk. Sometimes I'd gather some twigs and dead branches, and use them for firewood.
When the water in the copper began to boil, Mum would add a cupful of soap chips, and throw in a cube of Reckitt's Blue wrapped in a muslin bag to whiten the clothes. Then she put in all the dirty clothes, first rubbing out the stains with a bar of Sunlight soap. She used a corrugated washing board for that. .
Some time later, when the fire had gone out, Mum would haul the clothes, dripping wet, out of the hot water with a strong wooden copperstick, and that was jolly hard work. The clothes weighed a lot more sopping wet than when they were dry.
Then she would feed the wet washing into a machine called a mangle. It had two large rollers with a narrow gap between them, and a big metal wheel that had to be turned by hand. That was my job - and it was real hard work for a small kid.
We hung the clothes out to dry on a line strung between two trees and held up with a prop made from a forked branch. Sometimes a crow or a magpie would leave a visiting card on a clean sheet, which would have to be washed again.
Mum used to starch the collars and cuffs of Dad's shirts to make them stiff and neat. He was a big man, and she was proud of the way he looked in his Sunday best, with his freshly ironed shirt.
Olive died in a nursing home in Woy Woy, New South Wales, but her blog postings leave us with a fascinating insight into her life, from childhood in the Outback to raising a family and keeping roughnecks in check while working as a barmaid.
She was clearly a serene, contented lady as the Life of Riley ebbed away. And perhaps the biggest tribute to the impact she had on the world of blogging is that visitors to her site today may well encounter, when attempting the sort of exploration I suggested earlier, the following message:
Due to overwhelming demand this page is currently not available...
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