Age-Old Uni Romance Ignites As Softly Spoken Country Boy Finds Natural Partner In Kinda Hippy Chick

CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT

There's a handful of archetypes that exist in every university in Australia.

From the sandstone-walled capital city institutions to the regional party colleges, the same young kids can be found sitting on the library lawns year after year.

First, there's the former school duxes who suddenly realise they are way out of their depth in the big pond and quickly pivot their identities towards campus politics.

Then there's the first generation migrant sons who blossom into red-blooded Australians are discovering that they are incredibly piss fit and very good at contact sport.

Alongside them are the long underestimated mousey girls who unexpectedly click into a higher gear of academia and begin their rapid ascent to a highly-paid career as a corporate executioner.

Then you've got the cliquey kids who are desperately trying to pretend that the status they once held as popular high schoolers still matters more than their ability to function in an unstructured environment.

In and around these loud and proud pillars of the student body is where you will find the side-characters who are on their own, less visible, journeys of self discovery.

While these students comes in all shapes, sizes and backgrounds - they too often fall into age-old tropes.

And that is exactly what appears to be happened on the Western Queensland University's Betoota Campus this Autumn, as an alternative suburban arts student finds herself falling in love with a near-mute country boy.

Isaac 'Izzy' Rundle (19) knows for a fact that his parents would've never met anyone like Bridget 'Didge' Bernard (18) before.

He also knows there's no universe where the two of them could have possibly met without him deciding to study business after his gap year coaching rugby in the north of England.

Didge, having just finished year 12 at an inner-city selective school has never met anyone from west of the car dealerships before.

The two of them have no shared mutual friends and seemingly nothing in common except for the fact that they sat next to each other in a communications lecture once.

However, after being allocated to a group assignment together, it has become immediately evident that these two are destined to enter a long-term romantic relationship that will inevitably result in a happy marriage and a couple of kids.

From their first date at an awful local Thai restaurant, it appears that Izzy really enjoys learning about popular culture and exotic foreign cuisine. And likewise, Didge loves hearing about horses and the most mundane aspects of small-scale agriculture.

It's happened before and it'll happen again.