Heaps nice to meet ya 👋🏻

I’m Al, your friendly authorised marriage-maker and rom-com obsessive sporting major excitable labrador energy.

I’m a fan-girl who will buzz at the beauty of oh so many everyday delights: 

  • Hot chippies by the sea

  • That video of Kim Cattrall scatting with an upright bass

  • Making the perfect playlist for a roadtrip

  • An eccentrically dressed ~woman of a certain age~

  • An overly-brewed head-sized mug of T2 Melbourne Breakfast tea

  • And above all, when two weirdos find each other and want to shout it from the rooftops, lock it down for life and choose lil ol’ me to make it offish. Hitching couples with ceremonies that are as unique as their one-of-a-kind unions is an honour I don’t take for granted for one hot minute

If I’m going to marry you, you’ll need to get to know me a little better, so here are some fast Al facts

🚐 Based on Awabakal land (Newy born and bred!) but you’ll often catch me rolling up and down the coast with my family in my mustard vintage Viscount caravan, so where love leads, I travel

🎹 I live in hope that one day I will learn to play the piano. So far it’s randomly just the melody to Chariots of Fire that I mastered when I was seven that’s stuck with me. Maybe don’t book me to serenade you down the aisle just yet (or maybe do - could be just the motivation I need and some Vangelis in your ceremony would be baller)

👸 Reformer pilates princess (any kind of exercise where you get to lay down is my kind of exercise)

🤘🏻 Karoke song: Lincoln Park’s “In The End” (a melancholic ‘hey’ to my former fellow emo teens who who survived the MySpace era with a side fringe)

🍿 I’m a pop culture fiend and my past career-life in film curation flickers on in unsolicited movie recommendations and rants. I’m a proud card-carrying member of Newcastle Film Society and my Sunday night cinema visits are my religion

🥐 I’m happiest when: I’m hanging with my people in naytcha, horizontal on a picnic rug, pastry in hand. Salty > sweet CONTROVERSIAL I KNOW!!!!

🐕 Pooch-obsessed and oh-so pup-clucky, but no dog YET. Verrrry open for dogsitting. The scruffier the better

📋 Perennial planner - I’m the friend that makes the booking, hunts the local haunts, pours over the menu before we visit, creates the holiday itinerary spreadsheet and coordinates everyone’s calendars. The kinda gal that (almost) loves dreaming up a trip more than taking it

My formal qualifications to be your celebrant

  • PhD in D&M’s. Give me a new acquaintance and 3 minutes in I’m chatting mortality and magical thinking

  • Editorial background ✍️ Me write real pretty

  • Born love of performing (Leo alert!). I did a short acting course at NIDA in my 20s and will never not bring it up given the chance (exhibit A)

  • Certified empath (I may ugly cry during your ceremony more than Aunt Judy) who can read the room like Benoît Blanc at a dinner party

  • Olympic athlete of cosy, comforting hugs (just ask my kids!)

  • Oh, and seven years as an authorised hitcher. I’ve married childhood sweethearts, office crushes who swore it was strictly professional, the couple who reconnected at a 20-year reunion and decided, “Why not now?”, soft-spoken sweethearts who say more with a glance than a Shakespearian soliloquy, and a pair of musicians who sang their vows as a duet. With every union, my heart grows another size

I never pegged myself as ‘the marrying kind’

But when it came down to it, after 11 years with my partner, I really did want to do the whole lifelong love celebration, hopeless devotion declaration thing in front of my nearest and dearest.

My ceremony was 4 million laughs per minute and surprisingly our favourite part of the day. We skipped down the aisle together. There were no gendered bridal parties, no ‘taking of his name’ (we melded ours, but more on that another time), no ‘being given away’, just a pure and joyous celebration of all that is weird and wonderful about our one of a kind love and a commitment to down drinks together 4eva. I want to help other couples cook up that same ceremony magic.

Let’s strip back all the traditions and rituals you may have thought were part and parcel of a wedding and keep the ones that ring true for you. I kept the white dress, because, henny, a cream brocade, I die!

Am I The One?

Squee! What an honour.

Right this way. Let’s talk all things love and marriage.