Things go around and come around, Claire Coombs said the week she turned 100.
Spend a second in her steady company and the adage takes on weight with every story, told with the same unflappable stoicism.
Perhaps it was that she was thrust into an adult world at an early age that made her that way; the steady, unassuming but fierce glance that she fixes on you. The same look can be seen in a photograph of a tall younger woman on her bedside, with dark hair and a dress made for her by her friend.
The picture, she says, was taken on an evening at the Cloudland dance hall in Queensland where she grew up.
"There's nothing like that now," she said on Friday. "It's a shame, really. My two friends and I loved it. We had a boy each, and we used to play up."
The dance hall, her daughter added, had been demolished around the time of former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen's reign. On him, Mrs Coombs betrayed the smallest hint of dropping the careful diplomacy she had reserved earlier when talking about the politicians in her life.
She did not approve.
Mrs Coombs grew up in Ipswich. Her father, Tom Dwyer, worked on the railway before becoming an alderman of local government. She remembers, as a young girl, the people who would come to visit to speak with her father and get his advice.
They were a working-class Labor family.
Later, her son Robert would become the MP for Swansea. Now, her daughter-in-law Yasmin Catley serves as the state's police minister.
There was hardly a time when politics was not a part of her life. Now, though, as she rounds her century, she said she was ready to pass the torch.
"They all seem to have done all right for coming in and taking over," she said.
"I can't take over anymore. They have to do it themselves. When you're as old as I am, I can't do it anymore. But I think things are going all right, especially in Australia.
"But they have to get it right. I sit there and watch them, and think 'Come on!'. But I think they're doing a good job."
Mrs Coombs was shipped to Brisbane as a young girl to live with her grandmother and attend a prestigious Catholic school. Her grandmother, she remembers, was so proud of her enrolment that she insisted Mrs Coombs wear her school uniform during holidays.
Mrs Coombs, though, said the experience was more sobering. She was away from her brothers and thrust into a grown-up world. Two of her aunts were working as secretaries in Brisbane, and there were no children her age at home.
Of those years, she remembers only the sour smell of the brewery next door to the school and, after taking work as a secretary and a typist after her education, of deciding that she needed a change.
At 25, she joined the Air Force and was stationed at Williamtown.
She served as a typist, she said, and found that her knack for shorthand was a valuable commodity. During the 1955 Maitland floods, she worked through the nights to be of service, and as the cloud cleared her boss asked what she would like in recognition for her work.
She barely hesitated.
"I want to go up in a plane," she said.
So, her first experience of flight was low and fast, strapped into the second seat of a de Havilland Vampire, tearing over the Hunter low enough she said to see the chickens scurry as they passed.
"I just wanted to keep going," she said.
Mrs Coombs married in her early 30s.
Her husband, Max, had been an Air Force man too, and came from the other side of the political aisle, Mrs Coombs' daughter said.
He was a conservative, and the ice to her steady fire. The family dinner table could be a pitched theatre. But politics was in the blood.
They made their home at Caves Beach when the suburb was just four houses, and raised a family of four children - Robert, Darryl, Loretta and Merylin. Mrs Coombs was proudest of her children, and prouder still that they grew up in the Hunter.
Her daughters say she was the steady presence in their childhoods. She was constant, kind and patient with them.
Her rooms now, where she lives in care at Redhead, have a view of the beach and the suburb where she raised her family. Her walls are decorated in photos and birthday cards from family and friends, from the Governor-General and the King. And the flowers sent from her old school.
But Mrs Coombs downplays the significance of her milestone. Things come around, and go around.
"It doesn't feel anything different from just any other day," she said, then smiled. "I wish I was 99."
