Olive Riley, World's Oldest Blogger, Dead at 108...

Olive Riley of  the blog The Life of Riley, the world's oldest blogger, has died at 108.  She went into a nursing home only a month ago. 

Mike Rubbo, a documentary film maker, became friends with Australian Riley while doing a documentary on people who made it to age 100.  Inspired by Olive, he named his documentary All About Olive.  Urged by Australian Elder Blogger Eric Shackel to help Olive to learn to blog (she called it blobbing), he began working with her to create her blog and to post her stories.

She was a forgotten woman who, through blogging and a friend who was charmed enough by her stories and her engaged mind, found at age 107, surprising fame and world-wide adoration.  The Australian press never took to her, but the world did and she became a star in the blogosphere, especially in the US.

I missed his announcement while on my Texas travels this month and have just caught it while catching up w/ my blog reads.  Mike has posted more since her death, including details of her funeral.

Here's what he wrote in announcing her death on her blog:

It’s funny to say this, but doing the blog with her, doing all the typing, the photographs, the movies, has been a big part of my life this last year, something that many friends couldn’t quite understand.

“Why all this effort for an old lady? they’d ask, “Are you in a hurry to age yourself?” (Me being 70 this year)

Quite the contrary. Olive Riley’s been keeping me young... if a woman who left school in 1914 can embrace the internet in her 106th year, what is there you can’t do, friend?

I was gob smacked by this dame with a memory like a hard drive. At 104, Olive was able to remember conversations she’d had in 1908 and bring them to life. Amazing!

I knew I’d not only found my film star, but I that I’d been given a reprieve from worries {about my own death}.

Post Olive, there’d be no sense of having an age limit, no downward slope for me!

Olive's stories, such being the 12th child of a mother who hated her, or her memories of cleaning Rupert Murdoch's hotel room, and of a horse who turned up daily at a side window for his afternoon beer at the pub where she worked as a teenager, were collected and written for the world.

Perhaps those of us who have mastered blogging might be inspired by Mike to help our elders enjoy this vehicle of personal publishing and, in doing so, capture stories that might otherwise go untold. Olive delighted in the connections that were made to others via blobbing.

RIP, Olive.  Thank you, Mike.

Comments

[Casdok]

Olive sounds fasinating so thank you for the link. I wonder if all we still be bloggin at such a grand age.

[Janet]

I discovered Olive shortly after I started blogging. It's so cool that she was able to do that at the end of her life and go out smiling.

[Mike Rubbo]

Thanks Mother Pie for the lovely tribute to Ollie. You went to so much trouble that, if you'd like to borrow her film, (All About Olive) I'll send it to you.

A copy has just gone to another kind blogger in the US and can go onto you afterwards if you like. let me know a street address. (rubbo@aapt.net.au)

It's really sad that this wondeful filmic portrait of Ollie (one hour) has not been, and probably wont be shown on PBS, Discovery or any other US TV channel because US TV, even PBS, rarely shows anything made overseas.

I would really appreciate anyone who wants to contact their local station, pointing out the amazing following Olive has in the US as evidenced by coverage on Good morning America, CNN, AP etc, and that they would do well to show it.

If the blog inspires, than the film does even more.

There is a link to the film distributor on the blog.

Bye, Mike Rubbo, Ollie's helper. We do miss her so much!