Twins together at last to celebrate
TWIN sisters Pat Wilson and Judy Taylor’s 80th birthday celebrations were all the more touching this year.
Lifting coronavirus restrictions meant the twins could reunite, with Ms Taylor travelling from the Gold Coast to celebrate in Cairns on Saturday, July 11, at Dundees on the Waterfront.
The party of 23 included friends and family travelling from Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Mackay to join the Cairns contingent.
There were personalised Pat and Judy balloons, cake and a delicious set menu, according to Ms Wilson.
“On Friday night they all arrived so we had a sausage sizzle here and then the dinner on Saturday,” she said. “Sunday was our actual birthday so Judy and her husband and some of the rellies came over and we had seafood for lunch. We had a big weekend.”
Ms Wilson, who is a Cairns
Art Society member and a regular at its DFO Gallery, said the twins had also gathered the troops to mark their 21st, 60th and 70th birthdays.
The pair grew up in a very different world to the one we live in now.
Medical staff and the twins’ parents had no idea two babies were on the way, until four hours after Ms Taylor was born, Ms Wilson arrived.
“We were only between 3-4 pounds (less than 2kg),” Ms Wilson said.
“They didn’t have humidicribs around so they put us in a chicken incubator. They put cotton wool in that and bathed us in olive oil and fed us by a dropper.”
Life was simple, with the pair growing up on a farm at Boonah near Ipswich.
There was no electricity and no fridge, tank water for drinking and baths, and transport to school was via horseback.
“You could trust people,” Ms Wilson said. “Even up into the ’60s you didn’t have to lock your house up. It was a different world.”
Ms Wilson made a home in Cairns, moving here in 1969, which at the time had a population of 20,000. She married husband Russell Wilson, who passed away in 1990, and watched the town’s population jump from 40,000 in the early 1980s to today’s 150,000-plus, brought on by the Cairns International Airport opening in 1984.