The love at first sight story has the happiest of endings. The woman he saw for the first time in Kingston on that day in the mid-1930s was the divine young Hilda Warry and they married at St Paul's in Manuka in April 1941. They have just celebrated their 71st wedding anniversary, a statistic that may boggle minds in these divorce-prone times.

''The first time I saw her, I was an 18-year-old. I remember it as clearly as anything. I was in the backyard of the house at Kingston … I heard these footsteps on the footpath. I looked up and there were two people, one an older woman I knew and the other a young woman I didn't know.

''She [the young woman] came towards me in the long dress and wide-brimmed hats they wore in those days. I was just standing there with my eyes wide open and my mouth wide open and as she walked past she gave me the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen. Now, this is the funny part about it. I said out loud: 'That's the girl I'm going to marry,' but then I said to myself, out loud: 'What in the name of hell made you say that? I don't know a thing about her?' It was just one of those things that hit me.''

Yesterday the recollection of that almost supernatural occasion (after all, it involved a prophecy that came true) caused him great emotion, especially with the cause of the occasion sitting at a table with him some 76 years after she'd first zapped him with that life-changing smile.

The other memory is obviously still vivid too. He was working on a tower at Canberra's airport on August 13, 1940, the gusting wind nearly blowing him off the roof, when he had the perfect, nightmarish view of the crash of a plane from Melbourne trying to land. All 10 people on board were killed, and they included, as well as the four crew, three members of Robert Menzies' cabinet and the chief of the general staff. Yesterday Mr McJannett described every detail of the big aeroplane's approach and of its crash (''I had an absolutely clear view … this huge, big black cloud of smoke came up'') from recollections his emotions suggest he wishes he didn't still have.

There's a grandeur about the length of the McJannett marriage, but the wedding itself had nothing grand about it. They had no money and anyway everything was done in haste, so as to fit the wedding and then the two-day honeymoon (they went up to Sydney in the train to see the Easter Show) in the four days of leave Mr McJannett was given from the army. It was wartime and Mr McJannett was married in his uniform. Hilda didn't have a wedding dress. There was only one guest. After the wedding they had a cup of tea back at the guest house where Hilda worked (today it's the Russian Embassy on Canberra Avenue in Griffith) and then left for Sydney, having had to borrow the fare.

After the war, Mr McJannett became a bricklayer and their marriage endured powerfully and blossomed and was fruitful and now there are five living generations of this branch of the McJannetts. In our city and region it is a very famous family. Historians come across McJannetts galore.

One of the most famous of them all was Mr McJannett's grandfather John Joseph McJannett, a tower of strength in Bungendore, where, folklore has it, playing cricket one day he hit a six out of the ground and all the way to Goulburn (achieving this by the ball going through the window of a passing Goulburn-bound train).

John Joseph (his family home was one of those ancient, characterful stone buildings you see on your left as you drive into Bungendore, just before you turn right to go through the town and towards the coast) was the secretary of the formidable Lake George Federal Capital Site League that from about 1900 pressed the excellent case for the federal capital city to be built on Bungendore's doorstep.

Today Bob and Hilda McJannett have a fine framed, formal photograph of the bewhiskered burghers of the league, circa 1902, the year a party of senators came to look at the site the Lake George Federal Capital Site League was spruiking.

John Joseph is the one sitting with his legs crossed, generally agreed in the McJannett household to be a McJannett trait they still notice in themselves.

The gentlemen of the league are all dressed to the nines, their whiskers tamed and groomed and their faces wearing purposeful, Bungendore the Unbeatable expressions.

As a team they look so invincible that you wonder what they might have achieved if ever-appearing ever-disappearing Lake George, on whose shores they imagined the federal capital arising, hadn't let them down by being so capricious.