Lord Howe Island's oldest resident reflects on century of family, community and living in paradise

Lois Whistler has seen more than half of all human history on Lord Howe Island. ()

Lois Whistler has witnessed more than half of all human history on Lord Howe Island.

And as she approaches her 100th birthday in November, the remote island's oldest resident is still contributing to the close-knit community.

She is an active member of her church congregation and does her bit for the island's World Heritage-listed environment by sewing cloth bags for tourists to borrow.

Mrs Whistler only left the island for a short time, when at the age of 16 she attended a boarding school at Cooranbong near Newcastle.

The rest of her childhood was spent roaming the island with her three younger siblings, who also remained on the island for their whole lives.

"You just made fun out of what there was to do," she said.

"There was tennis and always the beach, that's where most of our time was spent — swimming at the beach."

She says "everything" about the island, which lies 600 kilometres off Port Macquarie on the northern New South Wales coast, "is just so beautiful" she never wanted to live anywhere else.

Regal ancestry

Mrs Whistler's forebears were among the original settlers on the island: Nathan Chase Thompson, a whaler from Massachusetts, and his wife Bokue, a runaway princess from the Kiribati island of Abemama.

According to family history,  three Abemama girls were sent to sea in a canoe after one refused an arranged marriage.

They were plucked from the ocean by sailors aboard Thompson's whaling vessel, before he and the girls jumped ship and settled on Lord Howe Island in 1853.

Thompson eventually married Bokue and they had five children who survived to adulthood.

"I'm related to a lot of people here because my mother was a Thompson," Mrs Whistler said.

Archaeologists have found no evidence of human habitation on, or even of visitation to, Lord Howe Island prior to the arrival of the first settlers in 1834.

The island was first sighted by sailors aboard the HMS Supply in 1788, and then served as a place for whalers and other seafarers to resupply food, fuel, and firewood.

The curator of the Lord Howe Island museum, Ian Hutton, said the settler families regarded themselves as the indigenous islanders.

"There is no dark history here," Mr Hutton said.

No aged care

Mrs Whistler, who still lives in her own home with her daughter Sandy, considers herself "very lucky" to have been able to remain living on her beloved island home, as the remote community has no formal aged care options.

"The old people can't be catered for here, there isn't the medical care," she said.

"It's very sad really because they don't come back. They go into nursing homes on the mainland and they don't come home."

With a permanent population of about 380 residents, and only 400 tourists allowed on the island at any given time, the island is currently served by a series of locum doctors.

As a child, Mrs Whistler only survived an appendicitis attack because a doctor happened to be visiting the island at the time.

"I didn't know any different because that's how we were all raised, without a permanent doctor on the island," she said.

Memories to last a lifetime

Mrs Whistler has fond memories of spending a lot of time with her grandparents, who lived in the island's first wooden house — a step up from the previous abodes made of thatched palm fronds.

She also enjoyed working at the island's first accommodation house, Pinetrees Lodge, which is where she met Jim Whistler, who had recently moved to the island.

They went on to marry and raise three children, with only their son leaving to live on the mainland.

Mrs Whistler, who was married to Jim for almost 60 years before he died in 2008, has seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren who keep her on her toes.

Anne Kennedy, Mrs Whistler's other daughter, said despite her mother's age, she wasn't taking any medication and credits her good health to a diet of unprocessed foods, and no drinking or smoking.

Mrs Whistler's nephew, Bruce Thompson, described his aunt as an inspiration.

"She's always been active and full of life, she walked everywhere," he said.

"She looked after us all too."

But it wasn't all paradise for the islanders.

During World War II, residents would have to make do for months at a time while waiting for a supply ship to arrive.

At times during the war, Mrs Whistler recalls, the RAAF used their flying boats to land on the island's lagoon to deliver emergency supplies of fuel and food.

"It was very isolated during the war, services to the island ceased totally for a time," she said.

Flying boat days

Like many islanders, some of Mrs Whistler's fondest memories are of the years after the war when the RAAF sold the flying boats to private operators, who started bringing tourists to the island in 1947.

"It was all very exciting for me," Mrs Whistler said.

"The flying boats would come in and land on that beautiful lagoon."

After an airstrip was built on the island, the flying boats made their last voyage in 1974, but not before securing the title of being the longest-running and the last of the world's flying boat services.

Historian Peter Phillips said it was a golden era of travel when islanders gathered to welcome and farewell the visitors.

He said each departing guest was given a flower lei to cast onto the lagoon as they boarded the flying boat.

Should their lei drift back to shore, it meant they would one day return.

In his book on the subject, Mr Phillips included an excerpt of a speech by Mrs Whistler's husband, Jim, on the occasion of the final flying boat service:

"I feel quite inadequate as I attempt to express our thoughts at this time. The flying boats have made more than 5,000 flights to the island and have brought more than 200,000 visitors to our shores.

Our whole way of life has been linked to the flying boat service … I venture to say that we will indeed be lucky if the future brings us the enjoyment, comradeship, safety and economic security the flying boat era has given us."

Mr Phillips' wife, Janine, travelled regularly aboard the flying boats as a teenager going to and from the island for boarding school.

Mrs Phillips said people who arrived on the island in suits and ties often departed in shorts and Hawaiian shirts.

"It was just a gorgeous period of the island's history, I love thinking about those times," she said.

Another cause for joy will be Mrs Whistler's 100th birthday later this year, and with so many of her relatives living on the island, she has been warned to expect a big celebration.

But the birthday girl has some reservations about it.

"It's a very delicate subject," she said.

"I hate the thought of it, it's too old."