102 years: Cane, WWII and cockatoos
BORN in 1920, Innisfail resident Santa Coco has spent her last 100 years living among the cane fields of Far North Queensland.
On Sunday, Mrs Coco will celebrate her 102nd birthday and reflect on an incredible life.When asked what was her secret, Mrs Coco, laughed down the phone.
“There’s no secret dearie,” she said. “But hard work never killed anyone.
“I feel very blessed.” The story of this remarkable woman and her hardworking husband was captured in Eugenie Navarre’s book The Cane Barracks Story: The cane pioneers and their epic jungle saga, which was published in 2007.
When she and her mother arrived from Italy in 1922 to join her father on his cane farm at Silkwood, Mrs Coco was two years old and they lived in cane barracks during the off-season and stables during the harvest.
Mrs Coco can remember walking 8km to the Silkwood school at age five.
“Sometimes the loco driver would feel sorry for us and give us a lift,” she said.
Mrs Coco met her future husband when he came to work on her father’s property which was located between Japoonville and Silkwood.
She said they lived with her parents for nearly a decade after they married in 1939, before buying a farm of their own.
“My father chose Joe for me to marry because he was a good man,” she said.
When Mrs Coco’s husband was interned during WWII and her father became ill, she and her mother ran the farm and the women took over every chore from ploughing soil with the horses and planting cane, to milking several cows every morning by hand and turning surplus milk into ricotta, cheese and butter.
Her husband was put to work alongside other Italians and Germans, building the road from Toowoomba to Darwin and he brought her back a sulphur-crested cockatoo, which remained Mrs Coco’s beloved pet for 68 years.
Looking ahead to her milestone birthday, Mrs Coco said she felt “very blessed” to reach 102. “It’s the luck of the draw, dearie,” she said.