A stable was home in early life
WHEN Santa Coco arrived in Australia as a two-year-old nearly a century ago, life couldn’t have been tougher.
But on the eve of her 100th birthday, Mrs Coco is counting her blessings and is full of smiles.
When she and her mother arrived from Italy in 1922 to join her father on his cane farm at Silkwood, they lived in cane barracks during the off-season and stables during the harvest.
“Part of the stable was partitioned off and we had fertiliser bags for sleeping. I can smell those bags even today,” she recalled in Eugenie Navarre’s book, The Cane Barracks Story.
“The dining table was a slab of wood right in front of the nine horses. At 3am they were fed, ready for work at 6am.
“We had nothing, a pannikin to drink our tea, enamel plates and one hurricane lamp. That’s it. It was hard. No electricity or fridge until I was 14.”
Mrs Coco was 17 when she married her late husband, Joe Coco, hand-picked by her father because he was a “good man” and a hard worker. But he wasn’t the only hard worker in the family.
When Mrs Coco’s husband was interned during WWII and her father became ill, she and her mother ran the farm.
“They had to do everything – plough soil with the horses, plant cane,” says Mrs Coco’s daughter, Tina Neri.
“Mum used to milk three or four cows every morning by hand and neighbours would come and buy milk off her. Any surplus, she would turn into ricotta, cheese and butter.”
While her husband was put to work alongside other Italians and Germans, building the road from Toowoomba to Darwin, he sent her a companion – a sulphur-crested cockatoo, which remained Mrs Coco’s pet for 68 years.
The Cocos spent the first 10 years of their marriage living with her parents before buying a farm of their own.
Ms Neri said her mother does “everything she needs to do for herself”. “She’s up at the crack of dawn. You don’t sleep in, she says, because it makes you feel lazy.”
“I’m very blessed to reach 100,” Mrs Coco said. “It’s the luck of the draw.” Surviving a farm accident and an illness that killed others, Ms Neri said her mother was told by doctors she had “the physique of a horse because not many people survived it”. “She’s a very determined woman.”