Lenny Wilton is a man of steady habits. He wakes up each morning and breakfasts on four Weetbix. Lunch is baked beans and four good slices of toast. And dinner is almost always meat and three vegetables.
He doesn't drink or smoke, and at 97, he doesn't concern himself too much with birthdays, though he remembers his ninth birthday, in particular, because his mother sent him a cake that disagreed with his constitution.
He's also tough. Tough as wire.
Around the time of the Black Summer Bushfires in 2001, he was living in humble digs in the scrub around Freemans Waterhole with a friend in a corrugated iron shack the pair built together. It was a welcoming, warm and modest kind of place. It may have had some rough edges and cobwebs in the corners, but it was believed that the webs of the Daddy-Long-Legs kept more sinister nuisances in check and made some food for the little birds. It was the perfect place for the consummate bush bachelor who lived modestly and never needed much.
"He had broken his arm," says Leanne Sinclair, who now lives with Lenny at Awaba in the house his father built from Wakefield timber dragged out of the bush by a bullock team when Lenny was a boy.
Ms Sinclair, Lenny and Cheryl Shean now share the house that the two women have renovated. Ms Shean cooks and cleans, and Lenny sleeps in his childhood bedroom.
"His wrist," Ms Shean says gently.
"Oh," Lenny says in a boyish way, somewhere between dismissal and bashfulness. "Oh, that."
He had broken the bone near where there is now a lump on his right wrist, but he refused to let his friends call for an ambulance or take him to emergency because there was a bushfire and there were other people who needed the help more, he says.
A few years later, he fell from his bicycle and broke his pelvis in two places, but managed to walk to the nearest bank - pushbike in tow - to call for help. The pain would have been excruciating, Ms Sinclair says in disbelief, and suspects that the adrenaline probably kept him going.
"I went from the bank to the Ambulance," he says, with a grin.
Mr Wilton's roots are buried deep in the country of his home. He has lived in a few places but never far from the house his father built with little more skill than two strong hands and the will to see it done. When he describes his life and his father's, it's of a time and a generation of making do with a little and doing what they had to do to survive.
"You don't know when you start your life if it's going to be a good place or a crook place," Mr Wilton says. "It's just a type of place.
"Dad was a very handy man. I don't know if he ever had a trade, but he was one of those blokes. He could mend your bones - he had about half a dozen tickets for that - but if you wanted something, he had that ability. Wherever he got tangled up, he got the better of it.
"Hard times fetches the best out of people because you're there for survival."
Mr Wilton sits in his kitchen with his back to the light from the window, which looks out over the original shed where he parks his bicycle. Each day, usually in the afternoon, he mounts up and rides a similar route of back streets, and waterside tracks past the local high school, along Stony and Mudd creeks, out of Toronto and by Blackalls Park to Fassifern, and along the northwestern edge of Lake Macquarie where Kooroora Bay spills past Ponte Point, to Fennell Bay where he buys his daily copy of the Newcastle Herald. And then follows the Main Road home again.
"It would be about 10 kilometres or something," he says, but there's a sense he probably knows it's further than that. His friends do, too.
"It's five kilometres to Toronto!" Ms Sinclair says and suggests that the whole ride is probably closer to 20 kilometers each day.
"No, no, no," he bats back playfully.
"It is!" Mss Sinclair and Shean insist in unison.
"Oh, is it? Oh, well."
Then: "I've been ground down to that because I used to ride out to West Wallsend or out to Wangi, but I had a couple of setbacks and each time I did, it took that conditioning away." (The setbacks were his injuries).
Mr Wilton is not a man accustomed to indolence. He hates sitting still. There was a time when he couldn't imagine going to bed before 1am because he hated the idea of lying there staring at the ceiling.
Even after his daily ride, he will spend his afternoons weeding his garden or pottering around.
He did not retire until he was 72 and had spent his career variously as a poultry farmer, then working on the construction of the Wangi Power Station when he says it was just something in someone's paddock. Later, he had a little patch of land where he raised vealers and drove coal and water carting trucks in the collieries.
The Newstan Colliery opened up the area, he says, and created wealth. People came to live around Toronto and build houses. He remembers when the coal workers used to catch the buses.
"I'm energised," he says. "Now, it's different; I can go and lay there when I want."
Still, if he takes an early kip, he will often stay up late to read the newspaper at the kitchen table.
There is a distinct sense that Mr Wilton approaches his life the way that he approaches his daily ride. Sometimes, there are headwinds and steep inclines. The downhills and a nice tail breeze are most enjoyable, but he would never concede to change gears when the going gets tough.
About Topics:
- Topics is the Newcastle Herald's daily column exploring stories that shape the unique cultural identity of Newcastle, its suburbs, and the Hunter region. Simon McCarthy is a Herald journalist and feature writer covering culture, local news, and community issues in the region since 2017. He has been the Topics correspondent since 2023. Contact the writer via email. To read more from Topics, visit the Herald's opinion section.
