Alexandra Oppenheimer and Andrew Murray

It was a (not so) romantic first meeting for Alex Oppenheimer and Andrew Murray, in the Robb/Earle Page College car park during Orientation Week in 1974. However last year the couple, both UNE Bachelor of Arts graduates, celebrated 40 years of marriage.

Alex: We met literally on day one or two of university. I was from Walcha and had returned to the New England from boarding school to live at Mary White College.

Andrew: My family were from Wollongong. I'd gone to school in Sydney and was keen to move out of home and I had three cousins studying at UNE. I was a late enrolment to Wright College and had to sleep on the floor of the common room for the first two weeks until a room became available.

Alex: I think we were gathering in the car park to go into town to the pub when we met. Not everyone had a car back then, so there was much more car-pooling. We ended up in this big group of friends, and things just went from there. We were an item within months.

We didn't have the money to go out much. I think I can count on one hand the number of times we went out to dinner. Our social life consisted of simple things, like going to the pub to listen to bands and going out to the Blue Hole for a swim - we did that quite a bit.

Andrew: We would just hang out in each other's rooms and listen to music. I look back on that time as the best three years I have spent anywhere. It was a lot of fun. Sometimes our social lives were a little too active. We still have friends in Armidale who were at UNE around that time.

Alex: I look back on our time at UNE as providing a really great grounding for what came next. We both left UNE at 21 and went on to postgraduate study, but we had no HECS fees. I went overseas for a year - my mother was keen to get me out of the country.

I came back and did a postgraduate library course and began my career as a librarian.

Andrew: I got an interview with an oil company between two of my final uni exams. I had to drive to Sydney and back for that. I finished my last exam on a Thursday and started work on the Monday as a marketing trainee.

Over the next few years we were often in different places. Alex was overseas and I moved to Cootamundra with work, but we managed to keep in touch.

We married in 1979, started our married life in Sydney, then moved to Brisbane, Melbourne and back to Sydney.

Alex: We had three babies in three states.

Andrew: We came back to Armidale in 1990 with three young children and bought a bulk fuel distribution business.

Alex: Coming back felt like coming home. We knew Armidale very well and my family were just down the road. With small children it was nice to have family around.

I'm now retired and Andrew is semi-retired. Two of our three children and two grandchildren live in Armidale. Our daughter Fiona works at UNE, as the Residential Manager of Marketing and Student Retention for UNE's colleges, and ironically lives right across from the car park in which we met.

Car parks can be seriously under-estimated.