Glad to be back in the Wimmera
Having lived an eventful life, Wimmera resident Shirley Powe is content to mark her 90th birthday with a quiet family lunch.
Mrs Powe will celebrate nine decades of memories on Sunday with friends and family.
She said she had a challenging start to her life, spending extended periods in Horsham hospital with osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone.
“It was very hard because my people lived at Lubeck and didn’t have a car,” she said.
“I was just a child, four-and-a-half or five, and this went on until I was about nine or 10.
“I’d have weeks in hospital and my mother used to come up with the green grocer on a Thursday. I’d see her perhaps once a week, if I was lucky.”
Mrs Powe said she moved to Stawell as a teenager, after which a medicine was invented that cured her of the condition.
“When I was 14, penicillin was invented and they gave me an injection every four hours for two weeks,” she said.
“Touch wood, but that was the last time it broke out.”
Mrs Powe said she met her first husband, Alan Horne, working in a garage and service station in Stawell. The two moved to Melbourne.
“We were married on April 16 in 1955,” she said.
“Then we bought a house in Yarraville and I worked at a rope factory in Footscray.
“When my daughter was 10 months old – she was born in December 1956 – we moved again, and bought a milk bar business at Willaura, which we ran for five years.”
Mrs Powe said she spent many years doing bookkeeping work and going into different business ventures with husband Alan, before he passed away in July of 1987.
She said she met Phil Powe, who was a sailor, in 1989, marrying him in March 1990 before he passed away in 2004.
“I’ve been on my own 19 years now,” she said.
“I moved to Horsham in 2007 to be near my daughter, who lives in Jeparit, and my brother who lives in Stawell. I lived a lot in the city, but I was glad to come back to the country. I felt like I’d come home again.”