'You're idiots. Why would you want to live in the outback?' was the plaintive (and somewhat offensive) query made of them.

To be fair, they were married in 1946, when Wendouree was still a place of paddocks and tin sheds to a great extent.

"I'd love some of them to come back and see it now," says Edna Plumb.

Edna and Cecil have been married for 73 years. Edna is 97, Cecil 96.

They met at a church meeting in Ballarat. Or rather, they met on the Drummond Street tram on the way.

"We were both going to a function at Tilly Thompson's house," Cecil recalls.

"We used to have meetings there. We took the tram from the Burnbank Street (Methodist) Church to Tilly's place. That was the first time I saw Edna."

"All of our churches are closed now," Edna adds.

Edna, Brown before her marriage, was a member of a well-known Ballarat family.

Her uncle was Ballarat Municipal Shire President Charles Edward "Ted" Brown, a property developer who had land in Wendouree.

In fact, the Plumbs' home now is situated on land he developed for his grandson many years previously.

"It was named for family members; it was a mullock heap and he levelled it," Edna says.

"The Linda Brown Preschool is named after his wife. I feel a real local connection to Wendouree, although there are not many of us around now. They are mostly gone, except me. I have a cousin who lives over Redan way..."

She has lived in Wendouree her entire life. Born in Dowling Street, as a young couple the Plumbs' first house was at the top of Howitt Street. It remained their home until the 1980s, raising their two sons in the relative freedom of the suburb's open paddocks.

During the 1956 Olympics, Edna says her two sons could often be found sitting on the rail fence of the rowing accommodation, the former migrant hostel Nissen huts in Gillies Street, thrusting their autograph books towards the athletes.

Beyond Howitt Street there was very little development, Cecil says; Ballarat Grammar existed, and Edna attended Wendouree Primary.

Little pieces of their memories put together a mosaic of a simpler time.

A girl named Gloria Reynolds delivered their milk to them after school, in a basket on the handlebars of her bicycle, for example.

With the onset of war in 1939, Edna found herself work in White's Shoes in Bridge Street.

Aged 16, she got her father's permission to take a job filling in for those away at the front or other duties on the homefront.

"We were all girls," Edna says.

"It was lovely; I loved it so much I stayed there until I got married."

Cecil Plumb was in Buninyong with his family when the war started; his father was a religious minister and had taken postings around the country.

Studying electrical engineering at the School of Mines, he had joined the Victorian Railway Department before enlisting in the RAAF.

He served four years in Australia and overseas before returning to the Railways - a condition of being allowed to join up at the time being Railway men had to return to their previous place of employment.

Cecil later became a teacher at his alma mater, the SMB and at the High Technical School in Forest Street, which opened in the 1960s.

Like so much of Wendouree, the home they built on Howitt Street is now gone, replaced by a service station and car wash.

"There was never a shopping centre in Wendouree then," Edna says.

"If I wanted meat, I had to walk down to Dowling Street. But it wasn't bad, because in the beginning the greengrocer would come to the back door; the grocer would come and get the order and deliver it at home; the milkman came; the baker came. We never had to carry groceries like you do now."

So the obvious question: how does a couple make a marriage work over 70 years?

"I don't think there's any particular item you could say, as far as the development of a relationship is concerned," says Cecil.

"The fact that I could spend four years overseas, unattached, and Edna could wait for me, so we could pick up again after the war finished, made a great impression on me.

"A relationship that was just starting, and then I was gone for four years, and she accepted me back.

"I thought that was wonderful, and she's been good to me ever since."

Edna is much more elementary in her reply.

"Patience," she says.

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