When you turn 100, others want to know what fountain of youth you’ve been drinking from to grant you such longevity.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Centenarian Maurice Pedretti reckons it could’ve been the pure mineral water he drank from the local spring in Hepburn, near Daylesford, where he spent his first 35 years.
Born on May 13, 1925, he’s the youngest sibling of five older brothers and one sister.
Maurice attended St Michael’s Primary School in Daylesford until Year 8, before leaving to work on his aunt’s family farm, where he’d grown up, while his mum was recovering from post-natal depression in a Ballarat facility.
While his aunt reared him, he didn’t see the unconventional family life as a disadvantage.
“I’ve had a pretty good life. A lot of kids didn’t have a mum, but I had two mums to look after me,” he said.
Theirs was a subsistence farm, with three or four cows they would milk, a few pigs, apple trees and vegetables.
“Mum made butter and sold it,” Maurice said.
“We grew our own vegies and lived off the farm because we had no money.”
Again, the arrangement didn’t leave a bad memory, instead it inspired the Tigers supporter to buy his own farm later in life.
Also after leaving school, Maurice worked for 12 months bottling the mineral water from Hepburn Springs, recalling that “everybody in the town had a go at doing that”.
Outside of work, he’d fill his own bottles for personal consumption from the spring that ran directly out of the ground back then.
“I used to go down twice a week with three bottles in each hand and fill them up; we never had any money to buy soft drink, so that’s what we used to drink, that’s what everybody there used to drink,” Maurice said.
He remembered the high iron content in the water turning it red inside the bottles if it was left for a couple of weeks.
“People would say, ‘your guts will be like that’,” Maurice laughed.
Maybe liquid from that chalice truly did equip him with the cast-iron strength he has carried throughout his life.
He was working in Hepburn when war broke out and most of the town’s young men were sent to fight.
Maurice was spared in the draft, but confused as to why.
“After two trips up to find out why they wouldn’t take me, they just said someone’s got to stop home and you’ve been picked,” he said.
“I wanted to go. All my mates and everyone else went. There was no young blokes left in the town.
“They said I had to do this and that, run dances, I got a football team going again. That’s what went on until the war finished.”
During the war, he learned many skills from the old blacksmiths, carpenters and other tradesmen who didn’t go to war, such as shoeing horses, ploughing, sharpening blades and cutting grass with horse-drawn implements.
He would deliver milk with a dipper, bucket and can on the back of a horse and cart or a truck, carrying out odd jobs along the way.
“You’d fill your two-gallon bucket with a quart measure and go from house to house, whether they wanted a pint or a quart, you’d just dish it out into their pot,” he said.
He hung washing out, helped turn ill people in bed, collected groceries, delivered beer and assisted with anything the townspeople needed.
“On the milk, you knew everybody, from one end of Hepburn to the other end of Daylesford, because we were delivering milk all day,” Maurice said.
While he was running wartime dances at Hepburn’s Palais in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he met the owners’ daughter, Pat, who worked in the shop there, and fell in love.
The pair were married in 1958 before moving to a share farm in Lyndhurst, Dandenong.
Together, they had their own big family, bringing six kids into the world.
Maurice was almost 40 by the time he purchased his first car, a Holden station wagon.
Now, at 100 and still driving, he’s only on to the third vehicle he’s owned.
In 1976, during a drought, Maurice and Pat bought their own dairy farm in Tallygaroopna, north of Shepparton.
Times were tough, so between milking the herd of 120 cows twice a day, Maurice learned to pick fruit to make ends meet.
“I had to do that to survive. Milk was worth nothing. The drought was on, $5 to take your cows out to Katandra and they were shooting them and putting them down a hole,” he said.
“I said, no-one’s gonna shoot my cows, so I went over and picked fruit. I’d never picked fruit before, but I’d pick a couple of bins between milkings.
“I just did what I had to. I had six kids going to school. I worked hard, but I had a good wife.”
Maurice milked cows until he was 76, retiring in 2001.
He and Pat moved into the Shepparton home he still lives independently in today.
Two weeks after his retirement, he was invited to join the volunteer gardening team at Ave Maria.
He accepted the position and still gives his time every Wednesday morning to this day.
He and Pat took a few short holidays when they were in their 80s, to New Zealand for a few weeks, a short cruise and a road trip up the centre and down the east coast of Australia, staying in cabins along the way.
But sadly, Pat developed the debilitating Parkinson’s disease soon after.
Their daughter Kathy Ziemer said her dad cared for her mum with “minimal assistance” for eight years until she passed in 2018.
“He never complained. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t ask for help, stubborn to a fault and is fiercely independent,” she said, with both pride and awe evident in her tone.
She described Maurice as the glue that held their family together.
“Not just for siblings, but the nieces, nephews, relatives, friends,” she said.
“He just does what needs to be done.”
Remarkably, she said he remembers all 21 of his grandchildren’s names easily and most of his 19 great-grandchildren’s, only struggling to recall the newest additions while they’re settling into the family.
Three babies have been born in the past six weeks, with more arriving soon.
Ms Ziemer said even at 100, her dad had a better social life than most people, with regular catch-ups with friends, mates over for morning tea, regular trips to Congupna and Shepparton East to watch the footy on weekends, Saturday night Mass and grandkids over for a meal he cooks every Wednesday night.
He still loves visiting Hepburn, where there’s said to always be a bed waiting for him.
The footy club there, which he played for in his youth, presented him with a special birthday edition jersey on the weekend, complete with a giant number 100 on the back.
He will head back to his home town again in July for a firefighters’ function after serving in the CFA for many years while he lived there.
He and Pat had been involved with the Congupna Football Club and hall committee shortly after moving to the area, with Maurice running dances for the townspeople there.
Maurice said Pat would always say about him, “You can never make a party big enough for him.”
Years later, that might still be true.
A whopping 270 guests turned up at that hall in Congupna — where he celebrated his 70th, 80th and 90th birthdays — to help him celebrate his milestone 100th with a fully catered hot lunch and “the biggest cake you’ve ever seen” made by Maurice’s niece in Hepburn.
Senior journalist