Ernie and Mollie Askew host a wedding anniversary morning tea at Autumn Lodge

Mollie came out to Australia with her family from Northern Ireland in 1958 when she was just 20-years-old and met Ernie at the Egg Marketing Board in Sydney where she started working.

"I thought he seemed a nice enough fellow and he had clean fingernails," Mollie laughed.

Ernie said he was smitten with Mollie instantly, and although he already had a girlfriend, he progressively paid less attention to her and more attention to Mollie.

The couple went on their first date a couple of months after they met and were engaged about one year later.

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"I was worried about what my father would think because Ernie had been married before and I thought oh god this is going to be a hard thing to tell father,"

Mr Crawford lived in Bathurst, and Mollie lived with her sister in Granville, so the young couple caught the train to see him.

"I told Ernie my father is going to ask what you are - meaning are you Catholic or Protestant," Mollie said. "Because we were Protestant."

Sure enough, when they got there, Mollie's father said 'what are you?'

"And then Ernie complicated things and said 'what do you want me to be?'," laughed Mollie.

However, Ernie was Protestant, so the couple received Mr Crawford's approval and were allowed to marry.

Ernie had a daughter Gail to his first wife, and the couple had two sons of their own: Rodney and Graeme.

Frugally they forwent a honeymoon, preferring to put the money towards a deposit on a house in Guildford West in Sydney. Then after nearly twenty years of living in Sydney, Ernie suggested they move, so they relocated to New England in 1977 and bought the Kentucky Store, which they ran for four years.

"We walked into the shop and customers who were in the shop at the time asked us to buy it because they said there was never anything in it," Ernie said. "We also extended it and added a bottle shop to it."

Mollie said the couple had a great time and loved the Kentucky community.

"A lovely girl called Lyn Phillips used to come up and help me every day in the shop - she never charged us - we had great fun with her," Mollie said.

Then it was off to Uralla to open a grocery shop in the former Trickett's Store building before the couple simultaneously got jobs at the University of New England in 1988 where they worked for the next decade.

"Mollie was being interviewed for the cleaning supervisor role, and I was waiting outside," said Ernie.

"A man came up to me and asked what I was doing there, and I explained Mollie was inside in a job interview, so he asked if I was good with tools, and I said yes, so he asked me if I could start work the next day.

"When Mollie came out of the office, I asked her if she had a job, and she said she thought she did, then I told her I had to start the next day."

When they retired, the couple moved to Woolgoolga where they lived for 21 years, and Mollie says it was one of the highlights of their marriage because they were involved with everything and they had time to do things. She enjoyed dancing, and he enjoyed playing bowls.

They also took a trip to Mollie's Irish homeland - the day after Ernie took two of his fingers off with a circular saw.

"The doctor didn't want him to travel, but Ernie insisted, and he changed his own bandages every day," Mollie said. " He wouldn't let me or any of my aunties touch it."

The couple moved back to Armidale three years ago to be closer to their son Graeme and his wife Christine because of Mollies deteriorating health and now live at Autumn Lodge.

"I'm a diabetic, and for the last three years, I've been going blind," Mollie said. "It must be hard for Ernie looking after me at nearly ninety. But he doesn't want to be alone, so that's something I suppose."

They get dinner delivered four nights a week, and on the other three nights, Ernie cooks for them.

"He's quite a good cook," Mollie said. "His speciality is crumbed cutlets because he likes to take his time with things whereas I used to like to just whip things up quickly."

The couple says the secret to their success is simply that they were well suited to each other - both are easy going and patient by nature.

"She never objects to me doing anything," said Ernie.

However like all of us, they do clash from time to time, but perhaps the way they negotiate those disagreements helps to keep their relationship strong.

"We never go to sleep without talking it through," said Mollie.

"Ernie hates it if I don't speak to him."