You only get one life to live.
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And Edward ‘Ted’ Davis has managed to fill his with 65 countries, 45 years in the one job, countless community service endeavours and a family that still gathers around him.
Throw in an OAM and that’s a life well lived.
Now, at 90, Ted isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, but instead is still doing what he’s always done: show up.
That was seen as he followed his 90th birthday celebrations on Monday, September 7 with a family dinner at his home in Mooroopna and a much larger celebration the following Sunday — and still managed to make all of his committee meetings in the days between.
It’s the kind of consistency that has defined his whole life.
Ted has been the treasurer of the Mooroopna Recreation Reserve Committee since 1972.
In 1983, he joined the Rodney Shire Council and sat on it for 14 years.
He was a member of the Mooroopna Apex Club until he was 40 and then co-founded the Kiwanis Club of Mooroopna nearly half a century ago, served as the first president and is still there today.
He has also been a member of the Shepparton-Mooroopna Masonic Lodge for 60 years.
And three years ago, that lifetime of service was recognised with an OAM, but for Ted, the medal was never really the point.
“I didn’t do all those jobs to be recognised,” he said.
Ted’s story started humbly.
Born at the Kyabram Bush Nursing Hospital in 1936 to English migrant parents, he grew up in Wyuna and moved to Mooroopna when he was 12.
He is the oldest of six siblings, and helped raise his younger siblings before he was even a teenager.
It was a role he says was not easy.
“People say being the oldest in the family is the best, but it’s not,” Ted said.
“I had to look after them [his siblings] all the time until I went off to work when I was 14 and a half.”
It was then that Ted left school for an apprenticeship at the Ardmona cannery, and that was the start of the next 45 years of his life.
He rose from being an award-winning apprentice to engineering supervisor, twice sent to the United States — the west coast for 15 weeks, and 10 years later to the East Coast for six weeks — to master new fruit-processing technology, and became a specialist relied on to train others.
“It was the only job I really ever had,” he said.
“The west coast was better, San Francisco is my favourite city.”
But when stress began to take its toll, Ted decided to step aside — a decision he could make thanks to his early start in the workforce.
“It was getting harder and pretty stressful, I got sick and decided when I was 60, I would retire,” he said.
When it came time to send out the invitations to his 90th birthday celebrations, he realised he had outlived almost everyone he had worked with, and was certain he made the right call.
But retirement never meant slowing down, it meant redirecting his energy.
His council period delivered some of his proudest projects: the Tatura sports hall, the Lancaster Recreation Reserve and the relocation of Toolamba Primary School on to land the council had bought for it.
The school that now operates there and was moved off the side of the highway, he says, still makes him smile with pride.
“Every time I go out there, I think, ‘Geez, we did a good job here,’” he said.
That’s been the constant thread running through Ted’s whole life, not chasing recognition, but showing up, again and again, for the people and places around him.
While age has taken some things from him, like the balance he once relied on to complete 21 Great Victorian Bike Rides — his most memorable cycling trip being a three-week ride along the coast of Vietnam from Hanoi to Saigon — his drive remains the same.
And he says he owes it all to his late wife, Dawn.
“She turned me from a farm boy into more of an urban person,” he said.
Of the 65 countries Ted has visited, with Antarctica being the only continent he is yet to set foot on, it’s the wine countries that he says are “really beautiful”.
“My favourite place would be Stellenbosch in South Africa and the Barossa Valley (in South Australia),” he said.
Alongside his many commitments, golf is still on his weekly schedule.
And as time goes on, Ted says he isn’t dwelling on the endings.
“I think it’s coming to the end of the road,” he said.
“But you never know, you might go to 100.”
Whichever it is, one thing is for certain, it will have been a life well lived.