Your Lifestyle

Still Inspiring: June - Jack Tinetti

I'm eighty-six. I met my wife Alice when she was only sixteen. Beautiful girl she was. The day I got home after being in the army, I went to the dance with my sister and walked in the hall and saw this girl and that was it. I had a cousin there and he took my sister home and I took Alice home. We got engaged for her seventeenth birthday and married for her eighteenth. And went on to have five lovely children, eleven grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.

My main thing has always been the aged welfare, even when I was young. I was thirty-three when the whole thing started. We came up with the idea that the pensioners needed a drop-in centre. In those days pensioners got their money over the counter at the post office once a fortnight. There were no Seniors Centres then and in Kalgoorlie we only had a very limited tram service. Some of them had to walk for a considerable distance to get their pension and then walk home again. So we got the idea of having somewhere that they could drop in and rest and have a light meal before setting off.

There was a public meeting. We had thirty-two people and we all put in two shillings each which was three pounds four. A lot of people gave us furniture and money and just one week later The Goldfields Aged Pensioners Welfare Association was born. I was given the book keeping job. It was only going to be a short job and they were going to get someone else to take it on. That was fifty-three years ago and yes, I'm still doing it.

The thing just grew. We were getting two hundred each time at the centre and ended up being open every Tuesday and Thursday. It was through the drop in centre that we found out that a lot of these were single people with very basic, sub standard accommodation and so we decided the next thing we needed to do was to get a hostel going.

There'd never been one outside the metropolitan area and people said it couldn't be done. But exactly three years after our inaugural meeting we had a home going for sixteen aged persons. Eight men in one building and eight women in the other. Exactly three years after that we doubled the size of it. We put up a new building beside it. It was paying for itself. The tariff was less than in Perth and it was never in debt. We never ever borrowed any money right from the start. We just raised the funds and eventually had thirty eight rooms. We just used to make appeals for money and we used to get it. And we started getting grants too. These days it is a huge complex with forty low care and forty high care beds. My wife is one their patients unfortunately.

I still do all the clerical work for the Association as the Secretary Treasurer. We've just finished handing out our winter subsidies for fuel. We give $50 towards electricity or gas or firewood to all aged pensioners who apply. We have our money invested in term deposits and draw out what we need and roll the rest over. I write out all the cheques by hand: there was three hundred and forty four this year which was really good. We had three hundred and seven last year. Cost us $17,200. We do the same in October to help pay the Council rates.

Looking back, I've enjoyed what I've done and I've helped a lot of people with the hostels and other things like our holidays to Esperance. (Eighteen hundred pensioners had a holiday over the forty-years we did that.) But it will never be like it was in the early days -that was a real adventure!

I'll keep going with what we've got now, these subsidies and so on but I don't propose to take on anything new in the future. Looking after my wife keeps me pretty much involved. I go there every day at 11:00am and help her with her meals and so forth and stay there until she goes to bed.

We've been married 64 years in October. We were so close. We always knew what the other one was thinking. And we never worried about anyone else. We never had many visitors or anything. We were just happy to be together.