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Who could forget those Qantas ads with all those talented kids standing atop Aussie landmarks belting out ‘I Still Call Australia Home’?
No one. (And now we’re guessing that song is firmly planted in your head for the remainder of the day…)
But all these years later, those kids are all grown up and two of them have gone and fallen in love.
Elysia Simons and Paul Van Der Toorren met at Uluru in 1999 as nine-year-olds, and now 16 years on they returned to where they first met to get engaged.
“We had been placed next to each other for the last scene of the Qantas ad singing ‘I Still Call Australia Home,’” Simons tells the Daily Mail.
“During takes we would have to wait a while so would muck around together. I remember him looking over at me with this shy smile on his face. He was pretty quiet, but very cute and, like now, was just listening the whole time.”
The couple stayed in lost contact over the next few years, but in high school when they got back in contact through mutual friends and tat wonderful thing called social media.
“I remember chatting with this boy called Paul who seemed all too familiar. He said he was in the National Boys Choir and I couldn’t believe that he remembered me. Once we got chatting all the memories from the day came rushing back.”
Flash forward to May 2016, and Van Der Toorren devised a plan to trick his future fiancée into taking a trip back to where it all began.
Van Der Toorren set it up so that Simons thought they were returning as part of a Channel 9 documentary in conjunction with Qantas after hearing their story.
“We stopped at sunset at the most breath taking spot near Uluru and as we were being interviewed Paul confessed that we were not actually there to view the Field of Light at all.
“We were there because he needed a way to get me back to the special place we had met 16 years ago. He had enlisted the help of Qantas and Channel 9 to bring me back without knowing what was really going on at all.”
She said yes, “of course”.
Naww, ain’t love grand.
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