Scenes from a wedding.

The couple emerged from the darkness of the great medieval hall and stood together on the sandstone threshold.

Their faces, flushed with heat and relief, bore the jubilantly weary expressions of the just-wedded: of having accomplished a great task, as if the thirty-minute ceremony were a four-year work-in-progress, a continuum from first making eye contact in a street or a lecture room or a supermarket or a shoe shop, to signing their names - finally! - with an ostentatious pen on parchment in front of a breathless, grinning celebrant. 

Of course, the great stone building was not medieval; in fact it was less than a hundred years old, parts salvaged from city buildings demolished during the Depression; windows and beams and doors and staircases, ghosts of the gilded era, rising again on a hill in the rolling acres of an artists’ colony in the far northern suburbs of Melbourne. 

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Cloudless early autumn Sunday. Four in the afternoon. On the forecourt in front of the great reclaimed hall, guests (attendees is such a terrible word) group themselves - as they always do - in unerringly and unfailingly instinctive hierarchies of families and friends. The bride and groom move from the great stone step and move through the fair, ignoring the hierarchy. Children, unaccustomed to the miniature grown-up shoes end-punctuating their formal suits and flowing dresses, find new purpose in their wear by ploughing roads through the rice paper confetti that has fallen, soundless, like soft rain, over the couple.

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Earlier in the afternoon guests, arriving on the southern side, had wandered, almost clambering in the case of those wearing high heels, around the thirty-odd buildings scattered over the twelve acres of the artists’ colony, along paths overhung with late-summer foliage, through kitchen gardens and flower beds and ornamental ponds and anonymous thickets of shrubbery; and into the old chapel, also of reclaimed faith and forest, because that’s where you’d expect to find a wedding. But all they found there, before moving on, was a young Chinese couple respectfully taking photographs of the deconsecrated altar.

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May 2005:  ‘… we walked up the street past all the restaurants to the big bookstore with the children's book department way down the back. The girls fell silent as they pored over the books. Shanra, 3, is into fairies and princesses but Canisha, 8, is over all that and was fascinated with the Egyptology book with the red brooch light on the cover and the pop-up pages showing inside a pyramid.’

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Canisha married Hamish at Montsalvat on March 8.