Our People
24 April, 2026
Century milestone
THERE was laughter, cake and a room full of well-wishers at Macpherson Smith Residential Care on Tuesday afternoon, but Tom Cooper’s 100th birthday was never really about the moment itself. Milestones like these are markers — brief pauses in lives that have been lived in full — and in Tom’s case, a life shaped less by years than by what has been carried through them.
Born in Goroke in 1926 and raised on a soldier settlement block at Peronne, Tom’s early life followed a path familiar to many in the district — hard work, long days and a quiet acceptance of what needed to be done.
His first job, on a farm at Ozenkadnook, set the tone: shearing sheep, clearing land, learning early that effort was not something to be talked about, but simply given.
That sense of steady, practical resilience would be tested again and again.
In 1952, at 25, Tom was driving through Goroke with his sister when a car struck them from a side street. The impact flipped the vehicle onto its side, his arm pinned between metal and bitumen. The injuries were severe — the skin stripped from his hand and arm, bones shattered. At Goroke Hospital, he was told his hand would need to be amputated.
It wasn’t.
Transferred to Horsham, surgeons worked to save it, painstakingly removing fragments of road embedded in the wound. It was there, in recovery, that Tom met nurse Winifred Smith.
They married the following year.
It is a detail that sits quietly in the story, but it says something about the shape of a life — that even in trauma, something lasting can begin.
Together, Tom and Win built their life in Pomonal, where the couple had six children while carving out a living that combined steady employment with the demands of the land. Tom worked on road maintenance crews with the Country Roads Board and, at home, tended a small farm — potatoes, strawberries and raspberries — the kind of work that filled the gaps and kept things moving.
But the years that followed would ask far more than work alone.
Their daughter Shirley died three days after birth. In 1967, tragedy struck again when daughters Ruth and Lorraine were killed in a crash on the Western Highway south of Ararat while travelling with Win’s sister. Win was pregnant at the time.
“You just don’t get over that,” Tom has said.
There is no sense in the telling that he ever tried to.
Grief, in lives like these, is not something resolved. It is absorbed — carried alongside everything else, folded into the routine of days that continue regardless.
There were other challenges. Their son Ross, born with Down syndrome and once given little chance of survival, lived to 52. Tom took him out cutting firewood, treating him not as fragile but as part of the rhythm of life.
These are not the moments that tend to define public celebrations. But they are the ones that define a life.
Now, at 100, Tom is part of the community at Macpherson Smith, where he still visits Win regularly. Dementia has taken much of what they shared, though there are moments that break through.
“I was in Win’s room the other day talking to her as I often do when suddenly she just said ‘Tom!’,” he recalled.
He remains grateful for the care they both receive. He still spends time in the garden with staff, planting seeds and doing the watering. His son Alan takes him to church and out for coffee, and until recently, Tom was still playing golf.
There is a tendency, at milestones like this, to look for a lesson — a simple answer to a long life.
Tom’s is straightforward: keep active.
But that only tells part of the story.
What sits beneath it is something less easily summarised — a capacity to endure without spectacle, to continue without complaint, and to hold on to what matters, even as parts of it fall away.
On Tuesday, there was a cake, a piñata, and a room full of people marking a century.
What they were really marking was something harder to measure — a life that has taken its share of hardship and kept going anyway.
