A classic story of love in the Aussie outback
MATT and Kaia Wright open their Northern Territory home to talk about their cross-country courtship, recent wedding and life in the bush — pet snakes and all.
Stellar
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IT WAS a warm and quiet afternoon in 2014, and communications graduate Kaia Hammond was reflecting on life in some pretty lush surroundings.
She was with her friends in a boat anchored off Western Australia’s picturesque Rottnest Island, enjoying nibbles and champagne.
Kaia had been single for much of the year, and her girlfriends were asking when she planned to return to the dating circuit. After a few sips of champagne, Kaia made a declaration. She was not going to.
Instead, she pronounced: “I’ll just hope an angel will fall from the sky.”
What happened after this is ridiculous, corny and apparently true. That same afternoon, Matt Wright was on a mission. He should have been back home in the Northern Territory. Instead he was way out-of-area, on a dash to take care of a looming disaster with a wayward associate who was also partying at Rottnest Island.
Kaia could hear a chopper coming, its approach shattering the seaside ambience into a million pieces. Matt was onboard.
“Randomly,” Kaia tells Stellar, “this chopper just flew in and landed in front of us. [Matt] was all booted up. He changed into some shorts and jumped out.”
His entry into her life is noisy and raw — the very essence of Matt Wright, Outback Wrangler.
The two started chatting; the circumstances were so bizarre that a conversation just felt appropriate. Eventually, they would swap contact details.
Kaia noted “Big Kid” against Matt’s number in her phone; he wrote “Kaia Legend” against hers. Three years later, those labels remain. So too does that initial connection.
Three weeks ago, the Big Kid and the Legend got married.
Crocodile egg collecting season came early this year, and its start collided with their wedding day. So they both had to step back into work a mere 48 hours after exchanging their vows at a retreat near WA’s Margaret River.
The honeymoon will have to wait until next year.
But six days before they wed, the pair still found some time to meet with Stellar at a Melbourne hotel for breakfast and a chat. Matt, a suitcase jammed with good clothes back in his room, emerges in the same gear as the day before. And the day before that, Kaia reveals with a laugh.
Matt, 38, spends a lot of his time onscreen as the star of hit TV show Outback Wrangler on the National Geographic channel thigh-deep in Northern Territory lagoons. But it’s the city stuff — the fuss, the clothes, pretentious people — that makes him feel like he’s up to his neck.
“The bird what?” He screws up his face. Kaia, 27, has just told him he will be spending Melbourne Cup in the celebrity-filled Birdcage marquee a few days later.
“He’s actually a shocker,” says Kaia.
“He went to sleep at the AFL Grand Final two years ago; we left after the first quarter. He’s not into sport. Then we walked through the Melbourne city centre, which was empty because everyone was watching the game.”
Matt chimes in.
“Yeah. That’s when I like cities — when everybody’s at home and I have the streets to myself. Paris, New York, London ... they’re all just buildings and cars. They’re all the same.”
Matt is more Mick Dundee than Steve Irwin. His likeness to Irwin extends to crocodiles (specifically) and wildlife conservation (generally), but he is not one for spouting tea towel-ready one-liners like, “Crikey, it’s a big one!”.
Instead he wanders through half-stories in a relaxed Australian drawl.
“Steve was great. What he’s done is great. But he had a totally different outlook and attitude. We all sort of work for the same end goal, but we do it in our own ways,” says Matt.
It was back in 2011 when National Geographic commissioned the first season of Outback Wrangler. The world likes an Aussie danger man, some kind of rough-and-tumble outback hero.
But Matt thinks of himself as an entrepreneur and conservationist before he does a celebrity; and is not fussed about his fame.
“I didn’t set out to do TV. I set out to make a career. Fortunately what I’ve done in that career is quite interesting for the rest of the world to see.”
Outback Wrangler chronicles Matt’s work relocating crocodiles out of harm’s — that is, humans’ — way. But there’s more to Matt Wright Inc than that.
He runs three helicopters and has his instructor’s licence (mates joke that he will not drive anywhere he can fly); he and his team collect up to 40,000 crocodile eggs a year for the crocodile farming industry; he helms a successful tourism venture in Darwin. His smarts have won him a life that would surprise his high school teachers.
Matt spent much of his youth on the Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide, and promised his mum he would finish his schooling. But he did not stick around long enough to see his Year 12 results — and still doesn’t know what they are. Academic success didn’t bother him; he wanted to make his own way.
“I had too much energy,” says Matt.
“I wanted to get out and do stuff.”
As a teenager, Matt hopped from job to job as he tried to work out what he wanted to do. He “scrubbed sh*t houses” and did housekeeping in Falls Creek, Victoria; took a mustering stint at a mate’s cattle station near Bourke, NSW; headed to Kings Canyon in the Northern Territory and eventually ended up in Alice Springs. He thought about a trade, but that didn’t happen. Instead Matt joined the army and then worked on an oil rig.
“I had a fight with a driller who was smoking too many bongs on the job,” he recalls.
“It was getting a bit dangerous. But I’d saved up a bit of money and thought maybe I could do my chopper licence.”
He was only 19 at this point, but wanted a job that would propel him into something sound for the future. He got his licence aged 21. The first time Matt sat in a chopper, he tells Stellar, “I had a grin from ear to ear. Thought it was the best thing ever. I didn’t know how it worked or how to control it, but I knew I just wanted to do it.”
A career had opened up, and along with it not just the Northern Territory but the whole of Australia. Suddenly, the vast outback was his personal playground. Matt does not shy away from the comparisons with Crocodile Dundee: he reckons they are partly correct, and admits to being chuffed when he met Paul Hogan at a function in Los Angeles early this year — Matt is one of Tourism Australia’s global ambassadors.
Until recently he mustered cattle from his chopper, and when Kaia took her first trip to his turf, he took her out for a try. Partway through the flight, he turned to the back seat and saw her looking sick; she wasn’t accustomed to his usual tactic of flying by the seat of his pants.
So he set her down at a waterhole under a tree.
He assured her there were no crocs in there. She rolled up her dress and slept off the sickness, waking to a wallaby’s face just centimetres from her nose. Her vision was blurred, and she believed she was about to be eaten.
“I have never felt my heart jump out of my chest so hard,” Kaia tells Stellar.
“I jumped and bolted. I feel so lucky to be able to live this life. It’s so full. There isn’t a moment to stop, but I still get to be in the incredible Australian nature.”
That first visit to Darwin, Kaia had just come back from London, where she had gone to check out a job. She had planned to live in England for a while. When she called back in on her way back to Fremantle, Matt asked her straight out: “Shouldn’t you just come and live here?”
He now admits, “I knew if she went to London I would never see her again.”
So she did. Soon she was waking to his pythons, Olive and Popeye, on their bed. He plonked her into swamps, told her to “jump” from the hovering helicopter and to catch a porky little feral pig that he didn’t need — but wanted to enjoy the spectacle of seeing her chase it. The pig escaped.
“I knew she’d fall flat [on her face] because she was wearing thongs. It was great.”
He laughs at the memory, and she swats his arm in retaliation.
Kaia may have seemed impractical for the toughness of the Top End, but Matt liked it — she was boisterous, and so much fun. Plus, he says, she possessed the brains in the duo, and she actually grew up around the Kimberley.
Kaia’s parents worked in community development from Derby and Broome, and her early days were spent in the bush amid towns where, five minutes from the edges, the silence is deafening.
So Matt reckons that enticing her to his wrangling life wasn’t about him dragging a city girl to the outback, but was more akin to what he does with out-of-place wildlife.
“I took her back to her natural habitat,” he cracks, “not the other way round.”
On November 10, the pair married; the ceremony was relaxed, befitting a casual couple with a far-flung circle of friends. There were ringers from faraway cattle stations, celebrities from Sydney, people from remote Aboriginal communities and some very proper British relatives. “It was a perfect day,” says Matt.
“Everybody had so much fun even though a lot of us were from a different world.”
The bride and groom had practised the final dance duet from Dirty Dancing; Matt, a touch wooden but remembering every move, made his mustering mates chuckle.
“We even managed the overhead lift towards the end,” Kaia says.
“It was a bit wobbly, but we did it.”
Matt, so quickly back into crocodile work after the wedding, says there is no such thing as a “spare day” for him and his now-wife, and that is by design.
His philosophy is simple.
“You only get one shot at life,” he says.
“This is it. You can always make money, but time is the most valuable thing you have. And I’m trying to use every single bit of it.”