Australia’s oldest married couple first met as teenagers on the Adelaide streets. After 80 years together, centenarians Ron and Esther Collings tell Bronwyn Phillips that a healthy sense of individuality is the key to a successful marriage.
Like a scene from one of the films that screened at the cinema where he sold refreshments, when 17-year-old Ron saw Esther, 16, on an Adelaide street, he knew she was “the one”. It was the mid-1930s, and even though they had been introduced before, dressmaker Esther had blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Ron was smitten.
Eighty years of marriage, three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren later, 103-year-old Ron Collings and his 102-year-old wife, Esther, have invited The Weekly to lunch. In a pretty floral top that compliments the cornflower blue of her eyes, and a fashionable bob haircut softly framing her face, it’s easy to imagine the captivating young Esther. Ron still has the gift of the gab and twinkle in his eyes, quick with a joke and a story, honed after a lifetime as a travelling salesman. Sitting around the dining table at the Sandpiper Lodge, a retirement home at Goolwa, South Australia, the decades fall away as Ron recalls that fateful day.
“I thought she was the one as soon as I saw her again, and we’ve just gone on from there,” he says. Just like that, without dating apps or websites, the most enduring match in the country was made. With their eldest son, Ronald Jnr, his wife, Lynne, and their son, Giles, at their side, it’s a chatty lunch with much laughter.
Last year, Ron and Esther celebrated their 80th wedding anniversary, receiving a parliamentary mention and tributes from the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, a video message from the Governor General and a big party at the Sandpiper Lodge. “We got a message from the Queen,” Ron says with a chuckle. “We’ve received five from her now: one each for our 70th and 75th wedding anniversaries, then our 100th birthdays, and now for the 80th anniversary.”
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