Antoon reaches the marvellous milestone today, but he’s been eagerly awaiting his birthday for several weeks.
‘‘He’s been asking mum almost every day, ‘how long until my birthday?’,’’ son Tony said.
Antoon will celebrate not once but twice, starting with a 20 person family celebration today.
He’ll then be joined by more family and friends for another luncheon tomorrow.
Both will be held at the Deniliquin RSL Club.
The seventh of 14 children, Antoon has often told his family the story of when doctors told his mother that he was too small and should be ‘‘put in a cold room and left to die’’.
Not happy with the advice, she chose instead to warm her small son by the fire.
And it obviously did the trick.
Antoon was born in Utrect in The Netherlands on January 7, 1922.
In his youth the family moved to Houten, which is where Antoon got his start in farming.
He left school early and ran a market garden in the 1930s.
He was well known for his cherries and strawberries, but Antoon said he would grow ‘‘everything; all kinds of things’’.
Life was ticking along okay until the end of the decade, when in nearby Germany a force was brewing that would turn the world upside down.
Opposed to the Nazi regime, by the early 1940s Antoon and his brothers Jan and Wim were doing everything they could to protect their beloved homeland from the invaders.
They had joined the ‘underground’ and were actively fighting the Nazis.
‘‘We had to look after the bridges,’’ Antoon said.
‘‘The Nazis would bomb the dykes and the bridges to flood the land, and make sure the British could not land their planes.’’
At the same time, all young Dutch men were being hunted down by the Nazis, mainly to be used for slave labour in the ammunitions factories.
Tony recalls his father’s stories of being caught by the Nazis and then escaping — once from a boat, and another time from a train.
Antoon also clearly remembers being hit on the back of the head with the butt of a rifle, at the hand of a Nazi soldier.
It forced the brothers into hiding almost all the time.
‘‘We would sleep in the room under the house, and often slept at our neighbour’s.’’
The fighting spirit Antoon demonstrated during World War II stayed with him at the end of the war, when he became a soldier in the Dutch Army and was sent to Indonesia between 1945 and 1949.
‘‘Indonesia belonged to Holland, and we had to take it back from the Japanese,’’ he said.
Antoon was a machine gunner, and on his return to the Netherlands — and Houten — in 1949 he became a federal policeman. He held that job until 1959, when he and his young family decided to seek out distant shores for a new life in Australia.
Antoon already had some knowledge of Australia because of a visit to Darwin during his time in Indonesia, but he said his wife Maria also liked the idea of Australia.
They had married only four years before the move, having met at a dance in Houten.
‘‘I went on my bike (from Utrect) to a little village (Houten) for a dance. I had told my sister we should go,’’ she said.
‘‘He (Antoon) approached me and we danced the night away.
‘‘And that was the beginning.’’
By the time they moved to Australia, Antoon and Maria had already welcomed two of their four children — Wim, born in 1955, and Teakela, born in 1957.
They first went to King Lake where they grew potatoes, and that’s when Tony (1961) and Marianne (1963) were welcomed to the family.
In 1974 the family moved to Mayrung where they spent a year farming sorghum and corn, before moving to Deniliquin in 1975.
Antoon joined the team at the Deni Rice Mill in 1976, and remained a loyal employee until his retirement at the age of 65 in 1987.
At the rice mill Antoon would help load bags of rice, on his shoulders, into shipping containers.
He was also responsible for cleaning and general maintenance, and was known for his practical jokes against his work mates.
Fun has been a running theme throughout their lives, according to Maria.
This prompted Antoon to bring up the time his ‘‘silly girl’’ of a wife once stood tall on the seat of his motorbike as they made their way through France on a holiday in the early 1950s.
Family is clearly another driving factor in Antoon and Maria’s lives — with family photos taking up every possible space on the walls of their north Deniliquin kitchen.
Their four children blessed them with 25 grandchildren, and soon they will have 44 great grandchildren. Right now it’s only 41, but there are another three on the way.
