Family celebrates 60th anniversary started by Mangonui meeting

On their wedding day, June 22, 1957.

"We'll be back in 10 years," they said in June 2007, after they had shared news of their parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Laura Adair and Robyn Maheno kept that promise last week, dropping in with a photo of Neville and Glennis Ansley's 60th wedding anniversary cake-cutting.

Neville and Glennis Ansley cut their 60th anniversary cake.

The occasion had been celebrated with quiet gathering of family and friends, Laura said, although her mum had been thrilled to receive congratulatory cards from Her Majesty the Queen, the governor-general, the prime minister and Northland MP Winston Peters.

Neville, 82, and Glennis, 78, who now live in retirement at Cooper's Beach, and raised a family of four - the two girls, and sons Dennis and Neil - are not by the official definition true Far Northerners, but their story together began there.

On the Mangonui waterfront, to be precise. Neville was riding his motorbike with a mate as his pillion passenger, when he spotted Glennis Hughes and offered her a ride home.

Four years later they were married, thanks in large part perhaps to the mate who was prepared to be marooned on the waterfront to smooth the path of true love.

The couple were married at the Mangonui Methodist Church on June 22, 1957, beginning their working lives together sharemilking for Arthur Powell at Double Crossing, just south of Kaitaia, then buying Neville's parents' farm at Paranui.

Neville also spent time fishing, while Glennis worked at the Mangonui telephone exchange (which later enabled her to monitor her children's behaviour or, according to Laura, to make sure the veges were on the stove).

Glennis made her way to the Far North from the King Country via Moerewa, while Neville was in Nelson. His family duly moved to Auckland, then to Mangonui in 1947, buying what would become the family farm at Paranui.

All four children attended Taipa Area School.