Married for 79 years!
These loved-up centenarians are still going strong
Adelaide schoolboy Ron Collings, 17, was waiting for a tram when he spotted a beautiful young woman – his wife to be – standing nearby.
‘She was wearing blue. It matched her eyes,’ Ron recalls of that moment he first approached Esther, 16, to say hello.
That was 85 years ago. Now Ron and Esther have just made it into the Australian Book Of Records, commemorated as Australia’s oldest married couple.
It’s an extraordinary milestone, and one the Sandpiper Lodge nursing home in coastal Goolwa, south of Adelaide, where Ron and Esther now live, will be celebrating with a party.
‘I can’t remember what Ron first said to me when we met, but I remember he couldn’t stop staring!’ chuckles Esther, 101.
Soon Ron was regularly squiring Esther, a schoolgirl studying to be a dressmaker, to the cinema and local dance hall.
Six years later, on October 19, 1938, they tied the knot – and next year they’ll celebrate 80 years of marriage!
‘Neither of us can remember where and when Ron proposed,’ Esther says of their record marriage, which has spawned three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Ron, 102, was ‘never especially romantic,’ she adds with a smile, ‘but he did used to bring me chocolates from time to time!’
The key to enjoying such a long relationship, says Ron, is ‘supporting each other, and giving each other the room to follow separate interests’.
For Ron, that’s meant plenty of Aussie Rules footy, cricket, and gardening over the years, while Esther’s hobbies included regular trips to Indian ashrams to study mysticism and yoga.
Ron chimes in: ‘In the past, couples put up with a lot more and worked it through. I think there’s too much violence today. That was almost unheard of when we were young.’
Says Esther: ‘Marriage is not always a bed of roses, but life is about compromise. These days, people are too quick to throw in the towel if the going gets tough!
‘Like most people, we’ve had our ups and downs. Living through the Great Depression in the 1930s was tough.’
Another setback was when Esther got a serious illness in the 1970s – ‘But I recovered after surgery, and then made a conscious decision to follow a diet excluding red meat, with lots of yoga, meditation and exercise.’
A highlight of their marriage was hot air ballooning over the Yarra Valley – both aged 90!
Esther reflects: ‘I guess Ron and I were pretty lucky, meeting each other when we were both so young and having such a happy life together. No regrets!’