By Casey Neill
Valuing each other’s opinions and avoiding heavy debt are the keys to marital success, according to Emanuel and Anna Saliba.
And the Springvale couple should know. They’ll celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary on Thursday 18 May.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Emanuel said.
“The reason we’ve stayed together is because if she had something to say I’d listen to her, no arguments,” he said.
“We’re not involved in lot of debt.
“Nowadays’ generation, they want all the luxuries in the world.
“The payments, they can’t do it, and then the arguments start.”
Anna agreed and said: “And we trust each other.”
The Maltese-born migrants’ 60-year marriage all started with a party in Springvale.
“Every Saturday I used to go the town hall in Dandenong for dancing,” Emanuel said.
“That particular night, there is a friend who used to live at Clarke Road, they had a party.
“Then he missed to invite me over there.
“I went to pick up my friends from that place.
“He said to me ‘you come in’.
“I said ‘no, I’m not invited, I came to pick up my mate’.”
He relented and went inside.
“I’ve seen her and my eyes went on her,” he said of Anna.
“I ask her if she wants to have a dance.
“She said to me, ‘I can’t dance’.
“I said, ‘I’ll teach you how to dance’.
“When the party finished I asked her where she worked.
“She used to work in Dandenong.”
Emanuel offered to drive her to work – and her brother.
“After six months of seeing her, I said to her ‘we will get married’,” he said.
They checked with their parents, who still lived in Malta, and got the go-ahead.
They married in the Springvale Mechanics Institute hall.
“After a couple of months we were married, I told her that I had a villa to live in,” Emanuel said, with a grin across his face.
“The villa was a bungalow.
“We lived in there for four years.
“In the meantime, I was building the house.”
They still call that house ‘home’.
“I bought the land as soon as I arrived over here,” Emanuel explained.
“I built the bungalow to live in by myself.”
The pair’s first child, Frank, arrived 11 months later. He now calls Canada home.
They had another son two and a half years later, and a third two and a half years after that.
Their daughter, Angelica, was born two years later and completed the family.
Emanuel and Anna have nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
