Elysia, Textile Designer & Nathan, Oncology Nurse
One sentence sum-up of the wedding vibe: A love- and flower-filled Adelaide wedding in the shell of an old theatre.
Soundtrack for reading: “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel
Other Cool Stuff We Should Know About
We were living in Melbourne but getting married in Adelaide, and our bridal party and immediate family were spread across those cities and around the world. As such, we went with our guts on a lot of decisions instead of getting to taste test, view, or meet vendors more than once or at all! Perhaps we would have done more ourselves if we were living in the same city as our wedding, but instead we did a few big things ourselves in the lead up (I designed the invites and made my dress) and saved just one big job for immediately before hand: flowers. My mum was quite sure we were crazy to try it, but arranging the flowers in a big lady-team the day before and making our own flower crowns the morning of the wedding were really lovely experiences. My veil was originally a random textile project I was working on recording the names of my ancestors in embroidery, but when it came closer to the day it felt very appropriate to use it as a veil. We also wrote our own ceremony (with a lot of help from our wonderful Celebrant), as it was very important to us that it was true to us and said the right things. Same-sex marriage is still illegal in Australia, and part of the legal bit of the ceremony that has to be said is “between a man and a woman” it was very important to us to include a strong disclaimer that we and our celebrant believed this should not be the case.
It was important to us that our wedding was a celebration of our community: our families and the family of friends we have chosen. We also wanted to take the opportunity to formally introduce our son to our whole community so we included a “naming ceremony” of sorts within our wedding ceremony. Actually my very favourite memory of the ceremony is the part where everyone said “hello” to him in unison as it suddenly made me very aware that all of these people I loved were really right here, and this was really happening—up until then I was really only very aware of Nathan and me being there! Our venue was an old theatre that had also served as a carpark and stables in the past. We divided the huge space with a red theatre curtain to create a cozier space for the ceremony and a dramatic reveal for the reception. In the spirit of community celebration we wanted the meal to take the form of shared platters on two big long tables; I am vegan and Nathan is a meat-eater so we split the difference and served vegetarian food, which went brilliantly. The kids ran around and danced and hid in dark corners and played jumprope over cables! Music was very important to us and we enlisted a talented muso friend to perform “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel and “All the World is Green” by Tom Waits in our ceremony. His band joined to play for the reception, including our first dance “Dance Me To The End of Love” by Leonard Cohen. We also entered the reception to “Straight to You” by Nick Cave. I was conscious that all of these songs have some kind of end or death or apocalypse built into their romance. Our readings from Margaret Atwood, EE Cummings, and Madeleine L’Engle spoke of the wonder and work of love. I hope they conveyed (along with our vows) the sense that the wedding day was a small part of a long, messy, beautiful story; a marriage, our lives.
Favorite Thing About the Wedding
The moment in the ceremony when we asked everyone to say hello to our son and suddenly my feeling shifted from Nathan and me being the only ones in the room to it being a room full of our loved ones supporting us.
