ASK Mick Morrissey, 94, if he’s happy joining his 91-year-old twin sisters Susan Fitzpatrick and Margaret Windsor as residents at Heywood Rural Health’s aged care facility, and the answer comes back quick as a flash.
“I suppose I am,” he said. “They do all the arguing.”
The three siblings reuniting is believed to be a first at the facility, in recent years anyway, with Mr Morrissey recently becoming a resident where his sisters have spent the first four years together.
There’s plenty of banter between them, three of four surviving siblings in a family of nine, six boys and three girls.
Mr Morrissey, who spent his working career at Borthwick meatworks and the Shire of Minhamite (as a loader driver) was until not long ago living independently at Macarthur. The family grew up at Broadwater, near Bessiebelle and that community was the centre of their lives and where they all helped out on the family farm and enjoyed football, cricket, tennis, horse racing and old-time dancing.
They were cousins of the famous entertainer Johnny O’Keefe and are of course related to Johnny’s nephew and well-known television personality Andrew O’Keefe.
Mr Morrissey, the third eldest in the family, played football with his brothers (Joseph is the other surviving sibling) for the former Bessiebelle Tigers, and his love for the club still shines bright.
Ask his sisters what their favourite football club is and they both reply Collingwood”. And Mr Morrissey? “Only Bessiebelle.”
A tall man with big hands (and he retains both traits, Mr Morrissey was cheered on from the sidelines by his sisters when playing football, something they remember well. Though Mr Morrissey isn’t quite so sure.
“I suppose they did,” he said. “I never heard them.”
The trio have been spending their time reminiscing on their family and lives.
