Big The Day

Sun Herald

Sunday November 5, 2006

Erika Woods

Fairytale weddings don't look like they used to. White dresses and churches have been replaced by nudity, camels and Aboriginal smoke ceremonies. By Erika Woods.

Half an hour before Lisa Reynolds's wedding, everyone began to panic. "Where the hell is she?" yelled the make-up artist. "She's gone missing. Has anyone seen her?" Ten minutes later, Reynolds was found, like any other Australian bride-to-be, by the river herding camels. Twenty minutes on, she was showered, made up and dressed in her strapless full-length oyster-coloured silk gown, being lifted up into a tiny wooden Indian bridal carriage that was to be carried down to the wedding by her dad and the strongest four of her male friends.

Only then did she regret not having organised the camels slightly earlier so she'd have had time to rehearse her own spectacular arrival. "The dress was tightish and the carriage was tiny," winces Reynolds. "It was quite a Houdini act to get into it." And that wasn't the worst moment. When she was almost dropped halfway, her piercing scream was heard by every guest waiting in the beaded Indian wedding tent in a vineyard in the NSW town of Mudgee.

In the old days, weddings were standard affairs. Parents organised - and paid for - everything, ministers of religion presided over the service, and the bride and groom either grinned and bore it or furtively eloped. Today, weddings are vastly more individual, with more than half conducted by civil celebrants on beaches, by rivers and in parks, and many financed by the happy couples themselves.

"The biggest change in the past five to 10 years has been the age of the couple," says Tim van Brugge, the managing director of online wedding service www.i-do.com.au, and Reynolds's boss.

"As they've become more mature, it's meant they pay for the wedding themselves, which has changed the dynamic completely."

In 1902 - the first year the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) collected figures - civil celebrants conducted 3.6 per cent of weddings; in 2004, it was 58.7 per cent. "The couples are now much more in control of the event," says van Brugge, "and they want to add a personalised touch."

As a result of the steadily rising marriage age - up from 27 for men in 1984 to 32 in 2004, according to the ABS, and for women from 24 to 29 - couples such as Sydneysider Reynolds, 35, now eight months' pregnant, and her new husband Patrick Haddock, 34, originally from the UK, have tailor-made their own big days. In their case, since they both loved India after a number of holidays there, Reynolds organised their March wedding as a weekend away with friends and family at Logan Wines vineyard, with a theme that crossed a classic Hindu ceremony with pure Bollywood.

She arrived (in one piece) in her bridal carriage along the rose-petal-strewn path, while Haddock and his best man made their entrance on camels. They were then married beside a statue of Ganesa, the Hindu elephant god, which, ominously, fell over during the blessing. "It was all quite mad," says Haddock, a wine marketer. "It was one of the hottest days Mudgee had ever known, 40 degrees, and we had these ridiculous thrones that I joked we'd borrowed from Posh and Becks. It was so surreal but it was also just brilliant."

Similarly left of field was Peta and David Shepherd's August wedding. Standing in the heart of the lush Daintree rainforest, looking over a tranquil lagoon,

the pair were gradually swathed in smoke as they recited the words of an age-old Aboriginal marriage ceremony. Presided by 79-year-old Ngadijina Wilma Walker, traditional owner and Aboriginal elder of the local Kuku Yalanji people, who'd been through the same rites at her own wedding as a 13-year-old, the ancient smoking ceremony banished bad spirits.

The Shepherds stood spellbound, lost in their own Dreamtime. Then the elderly woman grabbed their hands and placed them together. "You are as perfect together as me and my husband were," she said huskily. "There are no bad spirits here."

Peta, 49, felt tears well up in her eyes and looked at David, 53, who was also struggling to hold his composure. "It was just so touching," she says now. "We were both hopeless. We were in tears so much of the time; David said he could have asked Kleenex to sponsor the wedding."

Peta then changed into thongs for the hike up the nearby waterfall and the reception with 35 friends and family at the restaurant of the Daintree Eco Lodge, where guests feasted on reef fish and local produce from the property.

"It was a perfect day," says Peta, who's been with David for five years. "It was so moving. Wilma was amazing. As a baby, she'd been put in a basket and hidden in the trees by her mother when the white men came to take Aboriginal children away from their parents. She stayed with her family. Her own children weren't as lucky, though. She lost three of them and they've only just been reunited."

Neither of the Shepherds, who live in NSW's Blue Mountains, have Aboriginal heritage but Peta, a technical writer, describes herself as a pagan, with a deep love of nature and the environment. A Celtic wedding was an option but Peta felt it wasn't appropriate in the southern hemisphere, where all the seasons are different. Instead, she approached Walker's grandson and outlined her beliefs about the importance of being spiritually at one with everything around her. When he relayed that to Walker, she said, "She thinks like us! I'll marry her!"

The wedding was the third for both - they were each widowed, then divorced - and they eventually settled on a sacrament to suit David, a Christian, at ? Port Douglas's non-denominational St Mary's by the Sea conducted by Aboriginal celebrant Eric Pitt, then the smoking ceremony and service in the Daintree. Only then did they sign the marriage papers.

"We recognise we have totally different beliefs so we had two ceremonies," says David, who owns a mortgage lending business. "And we felt the sale hadn't been closed until we'd done both deals!"

With 110,000 to 120,000 weddings taking place in Australia every year and each couple spending an average of $30,000 in an industry now worth nearly $3 billion per year, there's plenty of room for experiment. "In 1975, 90 per cent of weddings were paid for by Mum and Dad but now that's only 18 per cent," says John O'Meara, chairman of the Australian Bridal Industry Academy. "A lot of weddings are still traditional but there are a lot of wacky, weird and wonderful ones, too."

Indeed, a large sector has grown up to cater for gimmicky weddings alone. Couples can marry in a hot-air balloon over Victoria's Yarra Valley ($5980 from wedding adventure company FreemanX), arrive by tandem skydive ($1280) or even marry underwater with a congregation of sharks at Sydney Aquarium ($7500), although the celebrant stays on the dry side.

At Sydney's 1997 nudist beach wedding of computer service engineer Peter Schubert and his child-care worker bride, Elizabeth McGinty, there were definitely no frills - apart from the bride's garter and the groom's bow tie - but still the vows were time-honoured favourites.

"Nudists are a fairly conservative lot," says Les Rootsey, editor of The Australian Naturist Magazine. "Those weddings are usually held in clubs or resorts as you don't want a lot of strangers turning up."

Celebrant Charyl Walsh believes people simply love tradition in whatever form, clothed or not. "People do like the same traditions, even though it might not look like it," she says. "The first wedding I did, 12 years ago, was a witches and warlocks wedding, where the bride had a shaved head and tattoos for the day and everyone was dressed up. But they still wanted the regular service. I thought that was wonderful. I felt if I made a mistake, everything was so strange that no one would notice."

Karen Morris, the deputy CEO of national relationship counselling service Interrelate, says while people are increasingly writing their own vows and putting their own spin on the ceremony, weddings will never go out of style. We love rituals and since

we were too young to appreciate our own christening, if we had one, and won't be around to enjoy our funeral, why not have a wedding?

Often, the most tradition is found where you least expect it. When people hear that Warrick Glynn has just got married in a terribly conventional ceremony, dressed in a black dinner suit, for example, many congratulate him and ask his wife's name and what she's like. "Darren," he says, without missing a beat, "and he's gorgeous."

There's usually a flicker of surprise, then confusion, on people's faces before realisation slowly sinks in. Glynn, 42, laughs as he watches the drama play out. "I guess every time I answer, there's a little protest going on there because it can be confronting to some people," he says. "But that isn't the primary reason we married. We've grown up in Australia as part of the same culture as everyone else. In that ? culture, marriage is the public expression of love and commitment to another person. So we married for exactly the same reasons as anyone else does: to formally declare our relationship and how we feel about each other in front of family and friends."

Perhaps Glynn and his new husband, 39-year-old Darren Cundy, treasure tradition more than most simply because it's denied to them in Australia. Here, gay marriage isn't recognised and while the Marriage Act 1961 was silent on gender, the Government stepped in to ban same-sex unions in 2004 by amending the legislation to make it clear that marriage had to be between a man and a woman.

As a result, Australian gay couples must travel to Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Belgium and Spain if they want to marry. However, the marriage isn't recognised back home. Glynn and Cundy, who both work for the CSIRO in Melbourne and have been together for seven years, chose to marry in Montreal in August, with two best men and lots of mates in attendance. Like any good wedding, there were plenty of tears. "It was a very emotional day," says Cundy, who's been married before, to a woman. "I know it sounds cliched but it was the best day of my life. I felt proud to be marrying the man I love and it felt like we were forging a small but important path ahead. It was tremendous to stand up in front of family and friends and pledge our commitment."

More straight couples, too, are choosing to marry overseas, albeit for different reasons. Package deals in the Cook Islands, Fiji, Thailand, Las Vegas and Hawaii - security scares have seen Bali fall out of favour - can cut costs dramatically, with only close family and friends choosing to attend.

"I prefer to spend my money on travel and we had the ceremony at a five-star resort on Koh Samui," says Sydney IT salesperson Tanya Langridge, 33,

of her July wedding to roofer Harry, 42. "It was fabulous, marrying on the beach and with a seafood barbecue afterwards." Guests paid about $1800 each for two-week packages at a nearby hotel.

"But no one minded at all," says Langridge. "And it included the flights, accommodation and meals so it wasn't really very much."

Cross-cultural wedding ceremonies are also a growing trend. Whereas people may have once played down their ethnic backgrounds, today they celebrate them. For Sydney's Kellyville couple, advertising co-ordinator Masieray Sesay, 29, and IT worker John Agyei, 30, that meant a civil celebrant and a Muslim blessing in Arabic for her and a Christian one to suit his beliefs, with a ceremony

in September that marked their African ancestry.

"Some parts of the wedding were African, with traditional drummers and dancers and the guests in African costume, and other parts were a traditional white wedding," says Sesay. "Having those two elements was great. It was colourful and loud."

Their celebrant, Carol Koenig, says it was wonderful to see both Muslim and Christian traditions being celebrated, side by side. "It was a beautiful wedding," she says. "They embraced both traditions, which is a trend I'm seeing more and more." As for Sesay, she couldn't be happier. "I never wanted to get married when I was younger," she says. "But I felt it was time. And we had a beautiful day."

Weddings, parties ... anything

Stars often refuse to let taste ruin their special day.

If anyone ever doubted celebrities' appetite for wacky weddings, they need look no further than Anna Nicole Smith's recent commitment ceremony. Taking place 18 days after her son, Daniel, died from an overdose, and 21 days after she gave birth to a daughter whose parentage is hotly contested, Smith exchanged vows with lawyer Howard K. Stern on a catamaran in the Bahamas, then hurled herself into the sea in her full-length white dress.

But, sadly, she's not atypical. Some celebrity nuptials have been seriously nutty. Remember British trash queen Jordan's 2005 wedding to Australian singer Peter Andre? The bride arrived in a pink horsedrawn carriage and her massive pink dress had so much gauze, it took three bridesmaids to help her sit down next to her new husband on their matching pink thrones.

Former Baywatch pin-up Pamela Anderson has so far married her beau, Kid Rock, three times this year. The first wedding was on a yacht off St Tropez where Anderson wore a white string bikini, the second was in Beverly Hills and the third, in Nashville. She plans to repeat her vows "several" times.

At Britney Spears's wedding to former pizza boy Kevin Federline, which came late in 2004 just nine months after her one-day Las Vegas marriage to childhood friend Jason Alexander, the bride changed into a tracksuit for the reception at a nightclub, while the men in the wedding party wore tracksuits each with the word "pimp" on their backs.

© 2006 Sun Herald

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