By Callum Ludwig
Yarra Junction residents Henk and Gwyneth Boer are set to mark a special milestone on Wednesday 28 August, celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary.
Having met at church in Wandin, the couple are heading back to where it all began and spending the day with friends and family.
Mr Boer said his family arrived here from the Netherlands late on the night of Saturday 20 May 1950, spending the first night catching a train to Lilydale, a bus to Mount Evelyn and then walking to Silvan to stay with a friend of his dad’s.
“I already had a job lined up, we were all bakers, and so I started work the next morning, and received my first lesson in English ‘I’m very pleased to meet you sir’ and then we lived in a shed, my dad wasn’t completely honest, as he had said ‘I found a house’ but it was actually a shed,” he said.
“After two weeks, my mother said to us, find us a church, because we’re Christian people and I didn’t find out until this week, how we found out about that church which was because my sister went to a school opposite the church and the following week, I noticed all these girls sitting, she [Gwyneth] was the oldest so I thought I’ll walk up and sit next to that woman and then I ended up holding her hand.”
Mr Boer had been the only member of his family to enjoy the boat trip over to Australia, as the rest of them had gotten seasick. Upon arrival, they got straight back into their jobs as bakers; Mr Boer’s brother started at the Mt Evelyn bakery and he started at Lilydale the day after they arrived.
Mr Boer said Mrs Boer had ticked all the boxes for him.
“During the war, everybody was deprived of everything and we had no divorces or separations, no sooner had the war finished quite a few people separated, divorced and started smoking and drinking,” he said.
“One of the first things I asked her was ‘Do you smoke? No. Do you drink? No. What do you do for a living?’ and her mother was ill so she was running the house for all the girls, so she was ticking all the boxes and she could cook, but she didn’t really want to get married, she wanted to be a dressmaker,”
“She made her own wedding dress, but then she chose the noblest profession of all time, a wife and mother.”
Mr and Mrs Boer have three sons, nine grandchildren and soon-to-be 11 great-grandchildren.
In their near 70 years of marriage, one of the greatest achievements was keeping Mr Boer grounded, literally.
“I bought an aircraft and flew everywhere and everything else and hired it out to two doctors, one of whom flew it into Mt Dandenong and killed himself, it took me a long time to get over that but the insurance phoned me that night and they said if everything’s in order, they’ll pay it under fortnight so I started scanning the magazines to replace the aircraft,” he said.
“She [Mrs Boer] kept an eye on me, I said ‘Next week I’m going to Brisbane to have a look at an aeroplane and she said ‘Before you do, I’ll give you something to think about; if you bring that home, I’ll leave’
“I was sick of driving to airports everywhere where he’d landed because of poor visibility and it raining all the time, he was landing in people’s paddocks, he landed on the Hume Freeway and another time the aircraft people rang me and they said ‘We can’t find him anywhere, we’ve lost him on radar’ so I was so sick of it and the boys didn’t like it much although he persuaded [son] Jeff to take flying lessons, though when it came to going solo he changed his mind and I was grateful for that,” Mrs Boer said.
The Boers are holding their anniversary celebration in the very same church where they met all those years ago across from the Wandin Yallock Primary School; the Wandin/Seville Uniting Church.
When asked what the secret to their long love was, it appears to be compromise and caring for each other.
“Up until the last few years where I’ve had some handicaps, prior to that I did everything at home and looked after the boys because Henk travelled a fair bit for business all over Victoria and New South Wales, so I felt I had a great influence on the boys and I was really happy to be a mum and bring up the boys myself,” Mrs Boer said.
“We moved to Yarra Junction to Yarra Street didn’t we after we sold the fish shop and we lived down there for 20 years but it was right in the town and the corner of Yarra Street and Hoddle Street and it became so busy there, so I said to Hank let’s get out of here so we came up here and that was 41 years ago,”
“This morning he [Henk] helped me with the shortbread, normally I always did it on my own, but it was very difficult mixing so he mixed it all this morning and pressed it into the tray so I didn’t have to do very much.”
