A tribute to Riley
Today morning when I was going through Business Standard as a part of my morning routine, my eyes got stuck to an exciting write up. The title said, “World’s oldest blogger dies in Australia”. It continued by mentioning that “An Australian woman described as the world’s oldest Internet blogger has died at the age of 108, after posting a final message about singing “a happy song” in her nursing home”. My curiosity made me travel through the blogs written on her and made me wonder about her contribution to the bloggers universe.
Olive Riley the oldest blogger ever in the world died last Saturday (July 12th) at 6 am. She was 108 years old.
Born in Broken Hill on 20th October 1899, she was the youngest of twelve children. As Mike Rubbo (who was so close to her) puts it, when Olive was born, Queen Victoria was still on the throne of England, and Australia was not yet a federation. At 15, Olive was working in a local pub, serving meals and getting confused and mixed up (She wrote a story of a horse who came to the hotel side window every afternoon for beer, for the sake of enjoying the flavour). Later, fleeing an abusive husband with three kids, she went to Adelaide and became a cook and a cleaner. She spent most of her working years in the later part of her life, as a barmaid. It is really amazing to know about a woman who left school in 1914, went on to embrace the Internet to catapult into the world of blogging. Even at 104, she was able to remember conversations, which she had in her earlier part of life, and bring them to life. Her memory was always amazing.
She was a straightforward soul who lived a quite life. After completing a century in her life while remaining in the limelight of blogging, she became a hero and people all over the world started loving her. If you browse through the thousands of wonderful comments she gained through blogging, you can see that her power to inspire the masses was amazing. See one of those comments, which said, “Thanks so much Ollie, for inspiring my parents to get active, and overcome their fear of computers.” Really inspiring isn’t it!
Though she was handicapped due to poor eyesight, and struggled to see things out of one eye, she used to say with a smile “I have got vision”.
With more than 80 million blogs in the world at present, Olive’s was ranking 7000th. Olive had no great philosophical thoughts on life to offer us but her belief on spirituality gave her strength and comfort to inspire others. In last January her blog attracted 3,50,000 visitors. It is a fact that her blog got crashed because it was unable to withstand the load. Can you imagine such a thing? I am still struggling to get more visitors for my blog. Reaching to 3,50,000 visitors is a Himalayan task and I doubt whether anyone other than Riley can achieve this feat.
May her departed soul rest in peace. It’s really interesting to learn more about her and her work to derive inspiration to inspire others.
