Mrs Murphy is enjoying extremely good health for her age, despite a sometimes-hard life that included many tumbles from horses.

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It was a her love of horses that brought her into contact with future husband Dan, also known for his horse expertise.

Mrs Murphy said her grandparents were Brauers, legend having it that they walked from Brisbane to claim a piece of land on Scrub Road after arriving from Germany by ship. The settlers needed to show evidence of having worked the land before being eligible to claim more, and that’s what brought Muriel into contact with Dan.

She was born in Brisbane on January 8, 1916 into a large family and attended school in Sydney at Haberfield before her mother’s poor health meant Muriel was sent to live with her grandparents. She said she was never a keen scholar, and in those days it was rare to be school past the age of 14 anyway.

Her siblings got married and moved on, several to Sydney where they took up various trades including tram driving.

For Muriel however there unfolded a life of farming dictated by the seasons, occasionally battling the drought conditions that we’re experiencing at the moment. She well remembers the dry seasons, feeding cattle, finding water, mending fences and branding calves. She also remembers her grandmother riding sidesaddle.

There were plenty of good times as well, of course. They along with other local primary producers would regularly travel together up to Roma to buy bulls, generally with the stock agent acting as chauffeur. Any purchases would then need to be processed at Wallangarra to clear them of ticks before crossing the border.

Muriel and Dan married in 1940 in a simple wedding at a Casino registry office with Tom Cowdrey and a heap of Hamilton family members as witnesses. They ended up with three or four properties down the Rocky, including Bilirimba and Wunglebung. She recalls many horse tracks through the properties where they’d encounter riders with saddle packs of letters or gold, although she herself never came across any gold waiting to be mined.

The couple had one son who didn’t survive long (she blames all her horse work for that) and Dan sadly passed away of cancer in 1986.

A horsewoman all her life, Muriel said she still has four saddles in the old shed and manages a small 28-acre property on the New England Highway from her room since relocating to Millrace in 2012.

John Hurtz kindly carries out her instructions, but she said there aren’t too many cattle run in the property now as she finds it too awkward to buy them.

“It can cost you $1000 for an animal or a cow-and-calf, and it’s hard to get that back again,” she said.

She’s pretty surprised to find herself at 103 given all the busters she’s had but said she loved the job and was always pretty lucky with horses.

She feels her grandparents set her on the right path to eating well. They all ate ‘pure’ meat off the farm, with no fridge but just a bag over the pieces to keep the flies off before they were treated with saltpeter and preserved in barrels as corned beef.

Muriel has no sage advice to pass on for achieving a good, long life, instead putting it down to luck and good genes.