It was a special year for Pakenham High School in 1974, welcoming two exchange students.
This week has seen them both set foot back in Australia to meet their old schoolmates in a very different Pakenham.
Pakenham High School’s class of ’74 is having its 50th reunion this weekend and two special guests will be joining them: Daryl McLoughlin from Canada and Hope Haugen from the United States.
Though from two different and very large nations, they are relatively close to each other, Daryl is from the little community of Denman Island in British Columbia and Hope is from Seattle, Washington.
It may be a trip of over 13,000 kilometres across the world, but coming to Pakenham feels like a home away from home.
“It’s a strange feeling, I don’t know how to put it in words eloquently but it’s like we’ve never left and yet we have left,” Daryl said.
“Australians are so hospitable and so generous, that’s the part that really affects me.”
Hope’s exchange was organised through the American Field Service when she was 17.
Daryl was the first ever exchange student to be sponsored by the Pakenham Rotary Club when he was 16.
Both have stayed in close contact with friends in Pakenham.
Hope has returned to Australia several times. This time she has brought her youngest daughter, Stefanie to experience the country with her.
Hope stayed with the Walden family on her exchange and is again spending her time on this trip with friend and former student Catherine Walden (now Oldenburger).
This is the first time Daryl has returned to Australia since he stayed with six different families on exchange. He remarks jokingly that he wasn’t quite the ‘model student’ that Hope was.
Daryl is being hosted by Stephen Fletcher from one of the families he stayed with 50 years ago.
For both, there is not much recognisable anymore about the town.
“I barely recognise anything, the family home where I lived with Catherine, that’s gone and changed,” Hope said.
Daryl added, “milk is no longer delivered by horse”.
“And the most important thing, of course, is that it’s no longer the VFL.”
Back in those times, being an exchange student was a commitment to not seeing or hearing from your family for a long time. Hope was fortunate to get the privilege of one phone call to her family on her birthday.
As the first Rotary exchange, Daryl’s was a bit haphazard at the time. He was one of two exchanges from his very small home town and he had ‘less than a week’s notice of where he was going’.
“If Pakenham hadn’t put their hand up, I don’t know where I would have ended up,” he said.
“Because it was such a new program, nobody knew what was going on. There was nothing set in stone, so sometimes I didn’t know how long I was going to be staying with anybody.”
Sixteen-year-old Daryl would arrive at Tullamarine and wait for whoever it was that was supposed to pick him up.
For anyone with children of a similar age, this might be quite a worrisome scenario.
However, the point of exchanges was about building character and trusting that the next generation can find their way in their own walkabout.
“People were very close-knit and, you know, I was invited out to many different homes so you see many different perspectives,” Hope said.
“It did give me the travel bug also because later in college I applied for another scholarship and ended up in Germany for about 10 years.
“But that was all because of this wonderful experience here, being not afraid to just adapt to wherever you’re going.”
For Daryl, it gave life-long appreciation for Rotary worldwide.
“Building world exchange, I think, helps to make the whole world a better place because people understand each other, it’s really great,” he said.
They would take these characteristics back home and across the world, especially in community service.
Hope would become a leader in Girl Scouts and Daryl would join the Denman Island Fire Brigade.
“Rotary has a saying ‘service above self’, it’s so important, when I retired I went and joined the fire brigade in my little town because that is a way of saying thank you and that’s what I learned being in Australia,” Daryl said.
This weekend will be the formal reunion, but they are already seeing old friends. It’s not just a moment to catch up as they have stayed in close contact, it’s more like meeting family abroad.
“It’s absolutely wonderful, I got to meet briefly Stephen’s daughters who I felt were like my Australian nieces, who I’ve never met,” Daryl said.
Hope added, “you meet the children of the next generation through the letters and cards, even though I might not have met some of their grandchildren, you feel like you know them”.
“To actually see people, have time to sit down and catch up on their life stories will be great.”
The reunion will be held from Saturday 19 October to Sunday 20 October, the former will include a dinner at the Nar Nar Goon Football Club rooms and the latter includes a tour of Pakenham Secondary School.
The reunion is for students who began Form 1 in 1969 and their teachers.
Tickets are available on trybooking.com at trybooking.com/events/landing/1273422.
