By TANIA PHILLIPS
IT’S not everyone who gets a message from the Queen but Banora Point great grandmother Arlie Robson opened hers this week.
Mrs Robson was born in Lismore back in 1913 and will celebrate her 100th birthday with her two children, seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren on Saturday afternoon at her Banora home.
The alert and cheeky century maker put her longevity down to good living.
“I never drank and never smoked and I always eat well,” she said.
“Her father grew all the vegetables on his farm at Mt Burrell (west of Murwillumbah) – none of those preservatives, ” her son Lloyd said of his mother’s remarkable health.
And when a friend, who dropped in to see her, described her as being “sharp as a tack” Arlie quipped back “I think a few of my tacks are a bit flat now”.
Mrs Robson has always lived on the Tweed and has been a long-time member of the Uki Red Cross.
“I lived at Lillian Rock until I was six and then I went to Mt Burrell and then Uki from 1941 to 1968 – I’ve been in this house for 45 years,” she said.
“When I came here there was only this house and the two next door and they were building the one across the road. There was a lot of vacant blocks and there was no Club Banora.”
She said she met her future husband – local school teacher Jock Robson at a dance “at Kunghur Hall back in 1936”. And the pair, who were together until Jock’s death in 1995 at the age of 89, lived at Uki where Jock became headmaster – raising their two children Lloyd and Heather.
