WHEN Madge Geddes entered the room for her 100th birthday she removed her spectacles and said: "I'll take these off, there's people here who I recognise.
"And that is Bill Turner," she added, pointing at the founder of junior soccer competition the Bill Turner Cup.
Ms Geddes's two surviving sisters, Gwen, 81, and June, 86, were also among the many guests who attended the party for a still remarkably agile Ms Geddes at the new Seventh-Day Adventist retirement home Kressville Lodge in Cooranbong last week.
Ms Geddes was born to William and Margaret Rogers in Northern Ireland in 1909.
The Rogers were horrified to discover that newspapers back home in County Armagh had reported the death of Madge and her baby brother Bill during the six-week sea voyage to Brisbane a few years later.
A beautiful studio photograph of Madge and her brother was sent back to relatives in Ireland to prove "you can't believe all you read in the newpapers".
Ms Geddes was baptised into the SDA church in 1925 and joined Avondale College in 1929.
"I was 15 years old when I first met Madge in Hamilton. She was running SDA youth camps," Mr Turner, 80, said.
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