“THE newspaper’s not big enough to cover everything I’ve done in my life,” Peg Mavin told News Of The Area when chatting about the planned celebrations for her 90th birthday.

Peg will be blowing out the candles and having a good old reminisce and laugh amongst her family at a birthday bash at Wiigulga Multipurpose Centre on Saturday 4 November, the day before her 90th.

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A stalwart, lifetime charity worker, Peg said, “There’s not one local charity I haven’t worked for or donated to in some way.”

Perhaps her biggest fundraising achievement was when the tsunami hit Thailand in December 2004.

At the time Peg was living in Woolgoolga and running her own clothes shop in Grafton, amusingly called Clothes Peg, a business she ran for 34 years.

Seeing the devastation to the Thai people, she set out boxes in her shop for locals to drop off supplies and donate cash.

“My grandson had the shop next door and we did it together.

“We raised $1 million and filled 700 boxes with clothes and supplies which the Lions Club sent over to the aid services in Thailand.

“I put my name and address on a Pooh Bear teddy with a note saying, ‘Please write to me’, and two years later I received a photo of two little boys in Thailand holding Pooh and I knew our money had got to the people there,” she said.

A legend of Grafton’s Jacaranda Festival, where she worked on the Jacaranda Queen young ladies contest, Peg’s efforts went towards earning her a nomination for Business Woman of the Year, supported by Cr Steve Candsell MP in 1992.

“Steve took me to Parliament House in Sydney; I had a lovely time being treated like a VIP.”

Some time later Peg was nominated for Coffs Harbour Grandparent of the Year by her granddaughter Jodie, for which she was named Runner Up.

Peg has lived in Woolgoolga since moving there with her late husband Kevin in 1966, having relocated from Moonee.
They ran the tuck shop opposite the school, “selling pies and goodies for the children”.

It was from Woolgoolga, after closing the tuck shop, that she began selling clothes door-to-door and then set up Clothes Peg in Grafton.

Being busy worked for Peg and when she heard about the proposed building of a retirement home in Woolgoolga she thought, “If I can do what I did for the Jacaranda Festival here we can raise the money required before the government would then provide a grant.

“We did Picnic Races on the beach and various events and raised the down payment.”

Woolgoolga Retirement Village was built in 1991 and has flourished and grown to the facility it is today.

Coming up to her 90th, living with Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia (CML), Peg takes oral chemotherapy every day and is well most days.

“If I’m feeling off I say to myself ‘get up old girl and help the young’uns’,” Peg said, a role she excels in.

Peg keeps the books and packs the cucumbers for her grandson’s farm, Corindi Organics.

“That keeps me occupied,” she said.

With a hundred other tales of her life-well-lived, Peg told NOTA about times as a little girl living in North Boambee, where her father ran a sheep farm, then a banana farm.

She attended Korora Public School, claiming her only strong subject to have been maths, a subject she’s used all her life.

Peg then entered nursing at Sunnyside hospital when she was aged fifteen, met her husband Kevin through the window at that hospital aged seventeen, was married at nineteen and had her daughter Julie nine months and three days after her wedding.

Peg was right, we don’t have a newspaper big enough to tell the full story of her colourful and meaningful life.

Married to Kevin for sixty-one-and-a-half years, she said, “I am so lucky that my daughter, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren all live in Woolgoolga – I want to thank them all for what they do for me, they are all so lovely to me.”

By Andrea FERRARI