Mary Young was sitting in the kitchen of a guesthouse in Sydney’s Bondi Beach when a spontaneous flip of a coin dictated the rest of her life.
It was May 29, 1976. Mary was 21 and visiting Australia on a working vacation from her home in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Mary had arrived at the rundown guesthouse in Bondi Beach a few weeks earlier, with her friend Brenda, a fellow Canadian, in tow. The two women were ready to enjoy the area’s sandy shores, laid-back atmosphere and soak up Sydney for the next few months.
Not long after her arrival, Mary was sitting on the porch of the guesthouse when she spotted two young guys approaching the building. Mary zeroed in on one of them, who was wearing a short-sleeved black T-shirt and blue jeans. He looked over at her as he walked past, smiling.
“I watched him walking up the sidewalk, and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a nice-looking guy,’” Mary tells CNN Travel today.
Fast-forward to the moment Mary was sitting in the guesthouse kitchen, drinking a cup of tea with Brenda. In walked another resident, and Mary recognized him as the friend of the guy in the black tee. He introduced himself as Kenny and asked if they wanted to join him at the pub that evening.
Mary and Brenda hesitated. They hadn’t found jobs in Sydney yet, and they were starting to run low on cash.
“So we said we didn’t have enough money for both of us to go to the pub,” recalls Mary.
Kenny thought about this for a moment, then suggested one of them should still come — they could flip a coin to figure out who’d go and who’d stay behind.
Mary picked heads, Brenda picked tails. Kenny dug out a coin from his pocket.
“Then he flipped the coin, and my girlfriend won,” says Mary. “So she went to the pub with Kenny and I stayed in the kitchen.”
For a moment, Mary felt a bit deflated. The Saturday night stretched ahead of her with no plans and no company.
But then, to her surprise, into the kitchen walked the guy in the black tee, Kenny’s friend. He greeted Mary, introducing himself as Wayne Corlett from New Zealand.
Mary’s mood instantly shifted.
“Wayne came in,” she recalls. “It was an instant attraction. And that was the beginning of everything.”
Bonding in Bondi Beach
Like Mary, Wayne Corlett was also on a working vacation in Sydney in 1976 — though he hadn’t traveled as far.
Wayne and his friend Kenny had recently finished apprenticeships in New Zealand, turned 21 and decided to embark on an adventure together.
“We just wanted to go to Australia, live in Bondi, do some surfing and live on the beach,” Wayne tells CNN Travel today. “Our plan was to maybe spend the year there, save as much money as we could, and then just hang around Australia and have a good time with the money that we saved.”
Before they left New Zealand, Wayne and Kenny made a pact “not to meet any girls” — or at least none that would become significant and could derail their plans.
But when Wayne walked into the kitchen and started chatting with Mary, “that was it,” as Wayne puts it.
“We just got to talking,” he recalls. “Next day, I think we went for a walk together around the beaches, and it was a relationship from then on. It just felt right.”
When Mary caught up with Brenda the next day, she couldn’t stop gushing about Wayne. She told her, “I think I’m going to marry this guy.”
“And I had never thought about marriage until that point, ever, ever,” says Mary.
Over the next few days, as they walked along Bondi Beach, hand in hand, Mary and Wayne bonded over a shared love of traveling and adventure. They talked about their respective upbringings on opposite sides of the world, both keen to hear one another’s perspective on life.
“I was fascinated by Wayne’s family, he came from a very large family. I was an only child and my dad died when I was 12, so that was a huge draw for me,” says Mary. “We didn’t do any small talk. We didn’t do any of that sort of stuff — just launched right into a full-scale relationship.”
“It just felt right,” says Wayne. “And things just moved along smoothly.”
Within a few weeks, Mary got a clerical job in Sydney. Wayne was also busy working in a butcher shop. In between shifts, the two spent all their free time together.
“Bondi Beach, it was a pretty cool place to meet,” says Mary. “Going to the beach, going for walks… Occasionally we would go to a movie. We never went out for dinner ever, it just wasn’t in the budget.”
Mary and Wayne never confirmed they were officially dating. It was just obvious they wanted to be together. And within a month or so, the two had moved out of the guesthouse and into an apartment together.
A decisive moment
Mary’s Australian visa was initially only set to last six months, but she ended up staying for a year.
“I extended my working visa because I wanted to be with Wayne, and I wanted to stay in Australia.”
In letters back home to her mother in Canada, Mary wrote about Wayne and their life together in Sydney.
“I said I’d met someone that I was really fond of,” she recalls.
And, as Christmas 1976 approached, Mary’s mother arranged to visit for three weeks. She got along with Wayne right away, finding him funny and charming.
“I think my mom liked him better than she liked me most of the time,” says Mary, laughing.
After a year of working and living together in Australia, Mary and Wayne packed up their life in Sydney to embark on a three-month stint traveling around the country together. Before they embarked in a station wagon, the two went to New Zealand so Mary could meet Wayne’s family.
“We didn’t come out and say anything’s going to be long-term. We didn’t talk about that. But we were making travel plans and thought, ‘Oh, we’ll go back and see Wayne’s family,’” recalls Mary. “We must have known we were pretty serious then.”
The couple stayed at Wayne’s parents’ place for a week, where Mary was welcomed into the loud, loving family. She felt instantly at home and embraced by his crowd of siblings.
“Then we traveled around Australia for a few months,” she recalls.
Up until that point, Mary and Wayne’s relationship had been smooth sailing — they never seemed to disagree, or find points of contention. But traveling together got off to a rocky start.
“There were the odd arguments and disagreements,” recalls Wayne.
They were both strong characters, Wayne suggests, and it was sometimes a bit of “power struggle” between them.
“And I remember one time we had a pretty bad argument.”
This disagreement took place in Townsville, Australia. In the middle of the blowup, Wayne found himself thinking this was a “make-or-break moment.” Either he and Mary would work to make it work, or they’d each go their own way.
“I’m going to have to decide,” he thought. “Do I want to keep this relationship going, or do I want to leave?”
The answer, he realized, was obvious. There was no question, really.
“I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted to stay with her. So that’s when I decided to ask Mary to marry me.”
“And I was a little bit dumbstruck then, because we were in the middle of an argument, and then he suggested marriage,” says Mary. “I thought, ‘Whoa, where’s this going? We were just fighting a minute ago.’”
But Mary knew, instantly, that her answer was yes. She’d known since the first night she and Wayne bonded in the guesthouse in Bondi Beach.
From backpacking to putting down roots
After exploring Australia, Mary and Wayne went on to backpack through Southeast Asia.
“We flew from Perth to Bali and then travelled by local buses and trains all through Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey…” recalls Mary.
It was an amazing experience.
“Once we’d made the decision that we were going to get married, things smoothed out quite a bit,” says Wayne. “I don’t remember any arguing after that.”
“The whole Asia trip was a highlight as there were hardly any tourists back then, especially the way we were travelling. We did all local trains and buses and never spent more than $1 a night on accommodation. Probably another highlight was the Taj Mahal. We went at sunrise and we were the only ones there,” says Mary.
Throughout the trip, Mary and Wayne were also thinking ahead to their wedding and imagining their future together.
For a while, they considered getting married in the UK, as a middle ground, of sorts.
“But my mother really wanted me to come home and get married. So that’s what we did. We came back to Vancouver, and we got married in December ‘77,” says Mary.
As Wayne wasn’t a Canadian citizen, he wasn’t allowed to enter the country until 30 days before the wedding.
That whole period was a bit of a whirlwind, and Mary says she didn’t have “much time to reflect” on how her life was changing.
“I came home broke, with no job, about to get married, had to find a place to live… I don’t remember really thinking too much, because we were just so busy.”
Mary had been away from Canada for almost two years. In between wedding planning and apartment hunting, she caught up with old friends, some of whom were skeptical about the upcoming marriage.
“A few friends said to me it was never going to last with a guy from another country,” Mary recalls.
But Mary felt marrying Wayne was the right choice. She was sure it would work. And while there were naysayers, most of Mary and Wayne’s loved ones supported their decision.
“Everybody could see that we had a good relationship, right from the very beginning, that it wasn’t going to be a fly-by-night,” says Mary. “I never thought I’d come home without Wayne, ever. I didn’t know if I would come home, but whatever I did, wherever I went, I was going to be with Wayne.”
Technically, Mary did go home without Wayne — but that was only for visa reasons, and only for a short while. Wayne joined her in Vancouver as soon as he could. After he and Mary parted ways in India, Wayne spent the next month making his way to Canada.
“I traveled through Pakistan, Afghanistan overland. I met a couple of guys in Afghanistan from Italy who gave me a lift to Italy from Afghanistan and made my way to London,” recalls Wayne.
“I caught a flight from London to New York, so spent a couple of nights at the airport in New York and then flew to Canada.”
When Wayne arrived, Mary introduced him to her Vancouver friendship circle. None of Wayne’s friends were going to make it from New Zealand to Canada for the wedding, and Mary wanted him to get to know her pals — and there were bigger implications at play.
“He had to find a best man,” recalls Mary. “So I introduced him to my friends’ boyfriends, and I said, ‘Pick one for your best man.’ Because he didn’t know anybody here in Canada at all, nobody.”
“I didn’t want to do that, because I thought, ‘Well, I want to find my own at least,’” recalls Wayne.
He told Mary: “I’m just going to go down to the pub. I’ll meet somebody, and I’ll say, ‘Look, you know, do you want to be best man?’”
Mary told Wayne this “was not going to fly.”
“I said, ‘No, that’s not going to work. We’re not having someone from the pub,’” says Mary.
Fortunately, Wayne quickly made friends with Mary’s friends’ boyfriends — and one of them in particular.
“We ended up hitting it off pretty well,” Wayne recalls. “So I asked him, and he agreed. And it worked out well, we still see each other today. We play pickleball together in the summertime two or three times a week.”
The wedding was a great celebration at a church in Vancouver. On the day, Mary and Wayne felt excited about beginning a new chapter together — though they didn’t initially expect to stay in Canada long-term.
“We thought we were just going to come home temporarily and work and get some money together,” says Mary, who took Wayne’s last name when they got married, becoming Mary Corlett. “We didn’t have any firm plans, but I think we thought that we were going to do some more traveling. But by eight months married, I was pregnant.”
Navigating life’s ups and downs
Mary and Wayne’s first child was born on May 29, 1979, the three year anniversary of the day the couple met in Sydney. It felt like fate.
Mary and Wayne were excited to welcome a child. Wayne was from a big family and loved the idea of raising his own, while Mary had spent her sibling-less childhood fantasizing about the idea of a large, rambunctious household.
“It was exciting,” says Mary of becoming a parent. “We were very young, so we had no idea about bringing up children. We were the first amongst our friends to have a baby, so there was not even anyone to ask for any advice, but we just quickly morphed into a routine, like every family does.”
Wayne and Mary went on to have four kids in total, bringing their family up in British Columbia. They were happy to be close to Mary’s mother, and visited New Zealand every few years. On two occasions, they moved their family there for a longer stint, enrolling their kids in local schools to give them a taste of life in their father’s home country.
“I thought that we should do it and give the kids an opportunity to experience life down there,” says Mary.
Back in Canada, Mary and Wayne started working together. At first they ran gas stations together, and later they owned three branches of the coffee and donut franchise Tim Hortons.
The couple strove to protect their private time at home, even when their shared job proved challenging.
“We never talked about work at home — that was something we decided when the kids were young. We always said, ‘We don’t talk about work at home, over dinner or anything like that,’” says Mary.
For some years before her death, Mary’s mother also lived with the couple.
“Wayne was very kind and patient with my mom,” says Mary. “Wayne is super respectful.”
Between juggling family life, bringing up four kids, working together and life’s ups and downs, Mary and Wayne went through some tougher times. But they remained committed to each other and their life together.
“I think we’re both the type that are not going to give up easily, are going to make it work,” says Mary.
49 years later
Today, Mary and Wayne are about to turn 70, retired and enjoying life in British Columbia.
“We’ve got a real legacy now, with 13 grandkids and four kids that are all doing well and launched,” says Mary. “It’s good to see everyone is content and happy, they seem to be, and it all started from us.”
Mary and Wayne’s family members, who live close by, enjoy hearing the story of how Mary and Wayne met by chance in the guesthouse on Bondi Beach — even if the younger family members can’t quite visualize it.
“The grandkids, they can’t imagine us ever being 21 years old,” says Mary, laughing.
Since retiring, Mary and Wayne have also re-embraced the spirit of adventure that bonded them together back in the 1970s.
“We’ve been to all continents except Antarctica,” says Mary. “We just got back from Morocco and southern Spain. And we’ve still got places that we want to go and see — we’re not finished yet.”
The couple celebrate 49 years together this year — and in 2026 they’re planning to return to Australia to celebrate five decades since they first met. They’re going to hunt out the old guesthouse in Bondi Beach and retrace the steps of their younger selves.
Reflecting on almost 50 years together, Mary says “it’s really comfortable being with someone that’s known you all your life, since you were 21 years old.”
“We’ve really sort of grown up together,” she says.
Mary adds she feels “incredibly lucky” and “grateful to find someone who values me enough that he wants to spend the rest of his time with me.”
Wayne says he feels similarly thankful.
“Sometimes I think back to when we first met, and then here’s this woman I met and married, and now we have four children,” says Wayne. “I think that’s pretty amazing.”
Both Wayne and Mary also find it surreal to consider how they grew up on opposite sides of the world, then unexpectedly came together at 21 and have lived a whole life together since, side by side.
“What are the chances of the stars aligning?” says Mary, “What if I had won the bet and gone to the pub with Kenny? I never would have had that dinner with Wayne. I feel incredibly lucky that it happened the way it did. I always say I lost a bet and I won Wayne — I lost a coin toss and I won a husband.”
