CONNIE Hayter takes your hand in a soft and very firm grasp. Her strength belies her 100 years, celebrated on last Wednesday at Inverell’s Blair Athol Estate, surrounded by her loving family. The family brings Connie back to Inverell twice yearly to see her family home in Tingha and observe her birthday.
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Connie was born Connie Cox, in her family home in Tingha on February 25, 1915.
One of several children, she grew up on the family property Red Hill and attended school on the New Valley Road. She said her father, Oliver Cox was a sheep and Hereford man, who brought his foundation bulls down from Queensland.
Connie recalled the local family names of Tingha in her day.
“Well, there was Fentons, and Ravages, and Baxters, Orchards, Littles. Arthur Little had a family of a dozen kids,” she chuckled.
She didn’t attend high school because the closest opportunity was in Inverell, she said, 20 miles away.
“So you can imagine, it isn’t like today,” Connie said. Rather than stay in Tingha, she left for Sydney in her late teens to become a hairdresser.
“I suppose she was quite adventurous for the time. A young girl going off to Sydney to learn to be a hairdresser,” her granddaughter Melinda Hayter said. Melinda seems to carry a family resemblance.
“That’s me when I was young. She’s the dead spit of me, when I was young like her,” Connie said, gazing at Melinda. Connie thought she must have met Jack Hayter at a dance. The two married, and had three children, Greg and twins Denis and Des. They raised their family in Brisbane where Jack ran a shrimp and crab trawler, taking the boys out on the boat weekends.
She lost Jack in 2000, and has been in the warm embrace of her family ever since. At her century, Connie can read without glasses, feels in very good health and said she is without pain in her body.
“Nothing. I’m 100 per cent perfect,” she smiled
