Vikki Campion: My perfect wedding and the Barnaby Joyce that I know and love
The unkind comments on my wedding to the man I love have no impact on me or my husband, writes Vikki Campion who last week married former Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce.
Opinion
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In the country, they say one man’s trash is another’s treasure. Well, I found mine.
Until it was leaked in an attempt to ruin our day, the wedding was planned to be privately simple. Yet, the carnival was back and it was too late to cancel.
What some call trash, will be my most treasured memory, setting up plastic chairs with dear friends in the shade of Yellow Box trees, watching butterflies dry their wings for the first time, for a short backyard ceremony. Arranging a party decorated with gum leaves with delicious food from a local cafe in a local hall built to commemorate the First World War.
The treasure is the community who made it.
That when we forgot a ladder, and the tallest man, (the brains behind the best political operators in the nation), was standing on chairs stacked five high to hang lanterns, the bloke across the road, who shot the fox that nipped my kid, not only offered his ladder but to help set up.
The organised perfectionists who gave up their boardrooms to endure 13 hour road trips, bulldust in their hire cars, stringing eucalyptus boughs from the ceiling, counting glasses, and buying last minute essentials.
The dad who went to four different service stations to find enough bags of ice.
The handsome Aranda-Warramungu boy who practised the wedding song every day after school to sing his heart out in a paddock.
And the ones who got up early with us the next day as we gagged over stale wine and handwashed glasses through hangovers.
And the same people who foraged for eucalyptus, laid out a calico “aisle” and grew and dried rose petals, were the souls doing CPR in the dark, while the circus lights shone too bright those years ago.
Between the butterflies and eucalyptus and the after-party stench of homemade rum, it was an eclectic worker bee – and the treasure they created was perfect.
When you are getting a lift to a paddock in a ute, no one sees your Tesla or Bentley or broken Hyundai, and no one cares.
The blue-collar worker who had never finished school and had taken his first plane that weekend was completely at ease with the man who flew there in his own jet.
They were Japanese and American, African and Aboriginal, conservative and progressive, urbane and rural, gay and straight, political and had never enrolled to vote, wealthy and barebones, and they not only came, but all worked together to create the day, because they had seen beyond the tarp and spotlight of the circus tent.
Enemies became friends.
Beautiful wild journalists who covered wars in the Middle East and insanity in the United States, hungry high achievers who chewed the fat with the altruistic charity workers breaking their backs for at-risk teenagers, the compassionate nurse who survived civil war and the murder of her own family, to find and bring a better life to Australians, veterans who fought for our freedom in the ocean and Afghanistan and the musterer who had a facial wound from fighting a kangaroo that day, so he claims.
It is a statement about Australia.
A gentle man or woman makes you feel comfortable in your skin, and that’s why the country musterers laughed with the inner city creatives. There was no snobbery, or bias, for one perfect day in a little hall in a rural town. Nobody knew if you were sleeping in a swag or a five-star hotel and nobody cared.
I learnt my lesson about the narrative the carnival wanted. Once you are on that ride you can’t get off.
So yes I had my chosen photographer, a dear friend of 14 years, instead of the ones who blasted car horns at me waddling across the street in my third trimester, or four days post-partum, newborn clumsy in arms, or drones poking into neighbouring apartments or the self-declared bloggers who once plonked themselves with an iPhone in front of me struggling to breastfeed in a dark backroom.
So call it trash all you like. It will always be perfect to us.
Our wedding was a public commitment to what we had said in our hearts long ago.
In ancient times, before religion, the marriage vow roughly translated to “where you are, I am”.
Barnaby, where you are, I am.
Circus lights don’t show the Barnaby I know – who gets the wind kicked out of him and gets up again and again to fight, who digs strainer holes in rock hard dirt, carries rocks up mountains to build gardens and goes through budget papers line by line to find the deficit.
He is the guy who gets in the gravel to change the tyre of a stranger, who lugs stranded overseas tourists into town late at night so they aren’t alone on the highway after a kangaroo has knocked out their car.
Even when we are heading in the other direction.
Other cars will pass you by, not his.
He doesn’t talk about helping the down and out, but gets covered in grease to do it – and then laughs off the stains on his shirt and tells them it was cheap anyway, even if it was one of the good ones that fit.
He may never read his diary, and forgets every single interview on the schedule, but he eats whatever I put on the table and never complains unless it is vegetarian.
He isn’t afraid of gross mice and snake jobs, or mice and snake people, believing even kindness in those who delight in their cruelty to him.
The Barnaby I know is the father who is thrilled to show our little boys a new nest floating on the dam, dolphins swimming by on the coast, constellations only visible in the darkest skies you get from being a long way from where a phone works.
He is the dad that wants to hear the depths of their imaginations on roads with no reception, and cuddles them until the nightmares pass.
The guy who sacrificed a pretty big job for his unborn, who was knifed by the ringmaster of the circus.
Who, when his colleagues began to fall from their own infidelities, looked past their insults to reach out to check they were OK – and was the only one to do so.
He is the explorer who stops to build a snowball, launches himself into ice-cold waterfalls, who when angry, walks until he is calm.
He will race home to beat a storm to get a nest out of the gutter to stop freshly hatched chicks from drowning.
He knows when to hold a hand because words won’t do and when to be loud and scream from the rooftops to stop China taking Taiwan or to free Julian Assange or to tip the scales on injustice.
There is a whole lot of Barnaby beyond the lights of the carnival.
And that is the true treasure.
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