Sixty years ago, Earle and Jenny Phillips were married at a church in Girgarre East, kicking off the second chapter of their life devoted to each other, and the large family they would eventually blossom.
It all began 62 years ago when Earle was 20 and Jen was 18, in a place that many young socialites at the time frequented — the Halston Youth Club.
Earle and Jenny were both attending one of the many dance events that the club would put on for the community.
When Earle walked in, he spotted her right away.
“Those days we had dances where the girls were on one side and the boys were on the other — and I looked over to the other side and I saw a girl dressed in a blue dress coat-type of thing,” Earle said.
“I thought she was a good-looking chick so I went over, I chatted her up, and that was the start of our courtship,” he said.
That blue dress kicked off a chain of events that would lead them to eventually sit in their cozy central Kyabram house talking about their life and their happiest memories together.
After that fateful night, with one blue dress, and one enamoured Earle, he went right to work courting Jenny.
After a year of dances and drive-in dates, Earle planned to propose to her on New Year’s Eve in 1963, but had conflict with Jen’s mother — they never really got on.
“He and my mother loathed each other, mutually — but both behaved badly,” Jen said.
“Jen’s mother made me bring the engagement ring to show her first because there was a little bit of friction,” Earle said.
There was nothing stopping Earle from proposing to Jenny, however, so he bent his knee to floor in front of their friends and family and held up a ring.
That night they celebrated not just a new year, but a new chapter in their lives.
They quickly married in June 1964 at the church formerly known as Springvale Presbyterian Church.
It was the one month that Earle, who worked in the cannery, had off because nothing happened in the month after irrigation season was finished.
The priest who married them was Protestant and would not let most of Jen and Earle’s closest friends who were Catholic, into the ceremony.
However, a church setting and an audience with a new disapproving mother-in-law did not stop Earle from being Earle.
“We got married and we come out of the church, and you know in The Flinstones whenever Fred Flinstone would yell — I came out of the church and yelled out ‘YABBA DABBA DOO!
“Jen was a quiet girl, she didn’t say a great deal,” Earle said.
“I’d given up by then,” Jenny said.
After they were married they did what a lot of young aspirational farmers did back then and share-farmed.
“It was b*******, you really got ripped off,” Jenny said.
A couple of years later they put in a deposit on a piece of farmland in Wyuna, just outside of Undera.
It was there in a small farmhouse, about the size of a small shed, where Jen and Earle would raise three children, Sharen, Paul and Joe, born in 1966, 1968, and 1970 respectively.
“Twenty-four foot long by 25 foot wide — that was the whole house,” Jen said.
“We put the bed in the living room, and we had the three kids in the bedroom where they would share — then of course when my daughter got older and wanted her own space, I had to get off my ass and build her something,” Earle said.
“We never ended up buying the farm outright though … we just went on and on developing it until the drought in ’07 which is what did us — all of our savings went on the first year of the drought.”
Life living as a mother to three children, and eventually six grandchildren, would prepare Jenny for her job as a teachers aid at the Dawes Road Primary School, which is now lost to time.
“I was a s*** teacher, but I got along well with the kids,” Jenny said.
“What she hasn’t told you is that she was fantastic with kids — there’s kids around here in their 30s that remember who Jen is,” Earle said.
While Jen’s teaching days are over, she is still stopped on the street or in the supermarket and remembered by old students who remember her warm teaching style.
“I remember one time we were going through a supermarket together and I must’ve had 50 kids come up and say ‘G’day nan’, Jenny said.
“They all called her nan,” Earle said.
“You were a bit horrified though,” Jenny said to Earle.
Flash back to the present, Earle is Jen’s primary caregiver following a stroke that Jen suffered five years ago.
“The government pay me to take care of my wife … just over $151 a fortnight — but as one lady in the hospital said: ‘You don’t do it for the money, you do it for the love,’” Earle said.
So the big question, after 60 years together: what has kept them together for so long?
Earle’s answer was quite simple.
“You just take life day by day really,” he said.
“Well, I didn’t have any money to do anything else,” Jenny said jesting.
“She had to stick with me because she had no money, and I had no money — and in some ways that was enough for us,” Earle said.
After 60 years, starting with Earle spotting Jen across the dance floor, their teasing, their support, and their love for each other had never wavered.
To celebrate their milestone their family — three children, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren — are gathering in their home in central Kyabram.