Learning keeps Jean young

Going to university wasn’t an option for Jean Ferguson back in the 1930s, but that’s exactly the place where the soon to be 91-year-old can be found most days.
Jean is the oldest and one of the brightest students at Pakenham’s University of the Third Age (U3A), where she studies computers, craft and the Koran.
The latter may be an unusual subject, but it is one which Jean finds particularly stimulating.
“I want to know what makes people tick,” she says.“We know so little about the Islamic people.”
It is this passion for learning, a yearning to find out more about the world, which saw Jean awarded best senior adult learner in the southern Westernport area in her first year of studies at the university.
U3A president Ron Topp says Jean, who has been at the university for five years, is an “inspiration” to other students, especially those who think they are past it.
“You get 50-year-old people coming in who say ‘I am too old for this.’ And I can say we have a 90-year-old that’s still cracking,” he said. “I wish I had 100 of her.”
However, Jean doesn’t think for a minute that she is too old to learn new tricks.
“I cannot believe I’m an old lady myself because I don’t feel it,” the Pakenham resident said.“I love scrabble, I play it a lot on the computer. I love my crossword puzzles, I cook, I sew – I do what other people do.”
Jean has always been a bright student, even in her school days when she aced every test and exam.
“I was in the high nineties most of the time so I must have been all right,” she said.
But despite her book smarts, Jean didn’t go on to study at university, in fact she didn’t even finish high school.
“One had to pay a lot of money to go to university,” she said. “It was Depression times so one was sent out to work at 14.”
And Jean did exactly that. Her first job was cutting cotton in a shirt factory, earning a modest wage of 73 cents a week.
Jean was born in Bendigo and moved to Melbourne with her parents when she was four. She recalled how tough things were as she grew up in the city terrace house with her three brothers.
“It was a very sad time,” she said. “It was very sad because my father was in this Scottish Pipe Band and he won a gold medal and he had a gold Masonic medal and they were both sold so that food could be put on the table. He was a bootmaker. He would mend the shoes but people couldn’t afford to pay for them. Sometimes I wonder how my mother managed, how a lot of people managed.”
Jean spent most of her life in the Brunswick area. She married her first husband Victor in 1943 at a Presbyterian church on Sydney Road. She was widowed in 1966 and in 1972 married her second husband Ken at another Presbyterian church in the area.
Jean also worked close to home at a business called Your Expert Service, taking orders and dealing with depots all over Australia.
“We didn’t sell anything, but we did a lot of things,” she explained.
“Getting to meet people was the most marvellous thing about it.”
Jean was such a “city girl” that she never imagined she would live anywhere else.
“I was 18 minutes from town, it was really quite good,” she said.
But things changed shortly after the Ash Wednesday fires, when her son Don and his wife Jan urged Jean and Ken to join them and their son Adam in the hills.
“My daughter-in-law rang and said how would you like to live in Cockatoo? I said that would never happen. I was a city girl.”
However, it wasn’t long before Jean and Ken moved to Cockatoo, where they ended up living until 1991 when the couple moved to Pakenham. Ken has since passed away, but Jean has managed to maintain an independent lifestyle.
“It’s a great place because everything is so handy,” she said.
And it’s also home to her favourite place in the world. “I love coming to U3A.” Jean, who turns 91 this Sunday, says keeping her mind active is one of the secrets to her good health.
“I look on the bright side of life always … because everyone has problems so one has to keep one’s pecker up as they say,” she said.
Jean will have a small gathering with family to mark her birthday, but is already looking forward to a bigger celebration when she notches up a century.
“I will hang on for the next nine years and hope everyone else does,” she said.