This Wednesday marked Joyce and Ross Catanzariti's platinum wedding anniversary, as they celebrated an incredible 70 years of love and affection.

The Griffith couple are still going strong, and admit that while they "don't enjoy getting old", their love for one another is something which will never fade.

"We still enjoy eachother's company, even after all this time," Mr Catanzariti said.

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According to Mrs Catanzariti, there are no 'big secrets' to having a long, happy marriage, and that all it took was staying alive and not giving up after the first argument.

"Everybody goes through changes as the years go by," Mrs Catanzariti said. "But we were both brought up to stay married, and that's what we've done."

The pair first met in the early 1950s, while Mr Catanzariti, who had moved to Griffith from Italy as a child, was on a working holiday travelling around Australia.

But the young Italian's trip came to a grinding halt, after he found himself enamored with an Australian woman at a dance in Canberra.

A whirlwind few months later, and Ross Catanzariti and Joyce Lowe were getting married - but it wasn't quite as simple as it sounds.

Speaking to The Area News in 2011, Mrs Catanzariti described how the pair had at first been star-crossed lovers.

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"In the 1950s a mixed marriage like ours was very rare," Mrs Catanzariti said.

"When my mother knew I wanted to marry, she called a big family conference because she was very dubious about the whole thing."

"I also had to change my thinking to the Italian ways. I had my parents in law who didn't always agree with what I did at the start."

But despite the early hurdles, Mrs Catanzariti says everything has worked out beautifully.

Seven decades later, their devotion to one another is clear to see, and has seen them produce not only three children, seven grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren, but also an iconic local business.

Not long after marrying, the couple opened a small fruit shop, which went on to become Rossies Foodworks, a staple of the Griffith landscape for over 50 years, which their family owned up until 2017.