How to live to 100? Keep moving, says 96-year-old Peter Eaton – just one of VERNE MAREE’s inspirational older friends in Perth WA. Apart from the advantage of making you feel young by comparison, there’s a lot to be learnt from people who are fit, active and thriving well into their 70s, 80s and 90s.

Down on Burns Beach the other day – 23 December, to be precise – I bumped into Peter and Peta, two of my local Burns Beach friends. That wasn’t unusual, but this was a special occasion. It was Peter’s 96^th birthday – and he was celebrating it by doing his favourite thing in the world: swimming in the ocean.

“Just 1,460 days to go to my 100th!” he announced. Peter doesn’t think in terms of years. He lives day by day, and having a sea swim – or at least a walk on the beach – is what makes a day a great one.

Peter and Peta are good friends, not a couple. They live separately in Burns Beach Sunset Village, a sweet retirement spot a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean. An Aussie flag flies outside Peter’s house. He likes to say that while it’s flying, that means he’s still going strong.

Next door to the village is popular restaurant Sista’s, which serves the best scrambled egg and bacon ev-ah (as an Aussie might pronounce it). Over the road is a leafy park with a playground.

All this is 800 metres down the hill from home – and its just 300m from the house Roy and I are having built (click here for an update on that project).

Though I see Peter and Peta on the beach year in and year out, of course they’ll only swim during summer and when the sea is calm. After 2021’s exceptionally cold, wet and windy winter, these beautiful summer days are even more magical.

Relationships

I laughed when Peter told me that people suddenly started being extra-nice to him the moment he turned 90. “They weren’t like that before!”

Apart from the natural respect that’s due to someone who has made it so far – and, what’s more,  with their faculties and independence intact – I suspect it also has something to do with his positive, friendly attitude and wide-ranging interests. Peter can and will talk about almost anything, from travel, history and wildlife to the peccadilloes of human nature. But he’s not interested in others’ complaints about their aches and pains, he tells me. No doubt he has a few of his own that he’d rather not dwell on.

Down on the beach, he appreciates a bit of assistance getting in and out of the water; usually Peta is there to lend support, but sometimes it might be one of the other beach regulars I’ve befriended during the past two years. (Surprisingly few people use this beach, so you soon start to recognise, nod to, and eventually start chatting to familiar faces.)

And now there’s 50-something Ros, another beach-lover, who moved into the house behind Peter’s in March. She lends him a hand around the house.

Secrets of Longevity

As I’ve mentioned before, life span is less important than health-span – meaning the length of time we’re living a useful, happy and productive life.

A couple of days ago, I asked Peter why he thought he’d lived longer than most people manage to do. “It’s because I’ve been good,” he replied with a straight face. After the chuckles had subsided, he said: “It’s all about moving – walking, swimming, dancing. You have to keep moving.”

“It’s all about moving – walking, swimming, dancing. You have to keep moving” Peter Eaton

Apart from being a gregarious guy, Peter clearly also keeps himself busy, be it with bridge or painting. A number of his oils hang on the walls of his living room and kitchen. He plans on doing two more, he says, and after that he’ll be switching to media like water colour. Oil paint is just too messy, he explained – it gets onto his shoes and messes up the house. When I admired a pencil sketch of an orangutan, he told me it was a self-portrait, ha ha.

Peter has been living here for 13 or 14 years.  After his wife passed away some 20 years ago, he spent five or six years travelling, on round-the-world Qantas tickets. Today he is Qantas’s oldest frequent flyer, having first flown with them on the then state-of-the-art Empire flying boat Carpentaria 83 years ago. It took two days from Sydney to Darwin, and he remembers that he and his mother arrived in Darwin on Peter’s 14th birthday.

An old photo of the aircraft is propped up on a shelf in his living room, and here it is:

It was in 1938 that Qantas established its first Sydney to Singapore service, on Empire flying boats offering “full cabin service and modern comfort”. Not only could you walk around at will, he says, but you could play quoits or golf on board… and there was a smoking room.

He doesn’t mind cooking for himself, he confides, but having to clean up afterwards has become a bit much. You don’t have to be 96 to feel that way; I bet it resonates with most of us.

As for the beautiful Peta, she had her 80^th birthday last year. Not only does she look great in a bikini, but she has the grace of a dancer, and her balance is embarrassingly better than mine – I’ve watched her nimbly hopping barefoot across dauntingly rocky stretches that I would normally go the long way around to avoid. She’s also quite happy to drive solo all the way to Carnarvon to visit her son: a distance of close on 900km. To be in as good a shape as she is in 20 years’ time is something to aspire to.

I feel lucky to be surrounded by such an inspirational community of older people. Not least at Craigie Leisure Centre – an amazing fitness facility run by the local Joondalup council that boasts  numerous indoor and outdoor swimming pools, courts, fitness studios and more. It caters for everyone from toddlers to nonagenarians. (And I doubt they’d kick you out on your 100^th birthday, either.)

If you’ve ever tried a Les Mills Body Pump class, you’ll know it’s not for the faint of heart. Pump is “the original barbell class”, a full-body workout using light to medium weights and involving many repetitions. I’m a real newbie, still going light on the weights. But more than a few of my fellow-Pumpers are in their late 70s – slim, energetic, and above all strong: some of them considerably stronger than me, judging by the weights they pile onto their barbells.

The other day, when I had my recent Bodyscan, gym staff member Kelly told me about her other job at a nursing home. It had dawned on her that many of the frail, sarcopaenic and bedridden residents there were the same age – sixties, seventies and eighties – as the Craigie members working out with free weights, cables and machines, swimming laps or leaping around in fitness classes.

Here are a just few of my Body Pump mates, taken after the pre-Christmas dress-up class organised by bubbly instructor Jackie. (I can assure you that most of them are older than they look.)

So, as we head into 2022, three cheers for longevity, health-span and our inspirational fellow human beings – santé!