PORT Macquarie resident Aileen Marie Linton celebrated her 100th birthday on Friday with family and friends.
Aileen was presented with a certificate of congratulations by Port Macquarie-Hastings mayor Peter Besseling on behalf of council at a celebratory gathering in the Renaissance Room at Port Panthers.
Mayor Besseling also read out many congratulatory notes, including one from the Queen, the Governor-General and numerous other politicians.
Aileen has been a resident of Port Macquarie since 1976 and has lived at Garden Village for the past 20 years.
She was born on Saturday 16 May 1914 in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote to jeweller Tom and Katherine Murphy. When she was still very young they family moved to Brighton where they took on a dairy farm, called Primrose Hill, where Aileen grew up the eldest of five children and her childhood was spent doing chores on the farm.
The family moved to St Kilda in about 1932, where they started a grocery shop and it was here she met her future husband George Linton.
The couple were married at the Sacred Heart Church in St Kilda on December 26 1936 and lived in Hobart for a time before moving back to Victoria, where they lived behind a shop in Sydney Road, Brunswick, where George made furniture.
They had a son, Trevor, in 1938 and daughter Tricia in 1944.
After the war George resumed carpentry and he and Aileen built their own home in Beaumaris at weekends and evenings.
The couple moved to Mt Macedon in 1956 to run a guest house, but found the winters too harsh so moved back to the outer Melbourne suburb of Mordialloc a few years later.
Eventually they moved north to Caloundra on the Queensland Sunshine Coast in the early 1970s, retiring to Port Macquarie in the mid-1970s, where they bought a unit in Munster Street.
They enjoyed some happy retirement years together, playing bowls togher at Westport Bowling Club, where Aileen served as ladies bowls secretary for several years.
Tom died in April 1993 and Aileen then moved into a unit at Garden Village, where she stayed for 19 years. She moved into the nursing home at the village three years ago after breaking her hip in a fall.
Her daughter Tricia died 11 years ago and two of her grandchildren have also passed on, but Aileen has six remaining grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, many of whom were present for her 100th birthday celebrations.
