Reaching 100th birthday attributed to a busy farming life

Son John Burlace shows Eileen Burlace the card from the Queen. She thought the Queen looked lovely.

Eileen Burlace didn't plan to live for 100 years, but on June 12 that became a reality. If you asked her what her secret was, she would say it was a life of working hard and keeping healthy.

For 60 years she was a worker on the land. She was born in Whakatāne, the third of eight children. Her first home was a dairy farm in Taneātua and from there moved to her granddad's farm in Nukuhou North.

They were a farming family, proficient in horse-riding, using cart horses, hand-milking cows until the 1930s when electricity came, raising calves and pigs and largely self-sufficient in meat, fruit and vegetables.

It wasn't all work. She loved riding horses, would push the boys into the river first to scare away the eels, and enjoyed playing golf. There was a nine-hole summer golf course on their farm and she would provide "helpful advice" to the young men as they hacked their way around it on Sunday afternoons.

By 1939 Eileen and two siblings were running their farm and their neighbours, milking 100 cows daily. She recalls "we worked like men and thought nothing of it, lived in trousers or shorts. It was no use feeling sick, just had to get on with it. Dad would come up and do some horse work and help at harvesting time."

During World War II she joined the New Zealand Women's Land Army as "it was the only way to get decent clothes".

In 1944 she started work on Burlace's dairy and pig farm at Te Rehunga. When the war ended the family's son Edgar came home, "one look at the handsome son and romance bloomed".

Edgar and Eileen worked the farm together, raised four children and were an integral part of the Te Rehunga and Ruahine School community.

The couple built fences and Edgar tapped his wartime experience, using explosives to blow earth to create drains, and clay pipes were laid. On one occasion - helping a neighbour to remove a very large tree - he overdid the explosives and the couple spent the next two days picking up shards of timber spread over two paddocks.

Eileen's expertise was animal husbandry and they built a herd of 90 high-quality jersey cows and sought to provide sheltering trees in all paddocks. She firmly believed "warm cows are happy cows" and if they had ever won the Golden Kiwi she would have built a covered barn to house the herd.

In 1969 they sold the farm and moved to a sheep and beef farm on Maharahara Rd.

Of course, she had to take a house cow with her to hand-milk every morning to provide the fresh milk and cream she had always enjoyed.

They later retired to Dannevirke but kept their connection to the farm. Eileen got a weekend job at Rahiri Home serving meals. She joked that it was the first real job she had ever had.

In 2016 she moved into Eileen Mary Lifestyle Village after being a widow for 23 years.

Covid-19 has meant limited access for the family to Eileen over the past 3 three months but her children and grandchildren are thankful to the rest home for keeping her safe to enjoy this memorable milestone.