Four weddings and a funeral in strange coronavirus times
Ray Blackbourn was an Australian war hero, but when tougher rules to restrict all social gatherings were announced his funeral became very different, along with the four weddings of these Victorian couples.
Andrew Rule
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In his quiet way, Ray Blackbourn was an Australian hero. He was loved as well as admired, so a lot of people wanted to go to his funeral on Thursday.
But when tougher rules to restrict all social gatherings were announced the night before, his family did exactly what Ray would have done: the right thing.
They called dozens of friends to apologise because only a few close family members could attend the service at Mary Immaculate Church in Ivanhoe next morning.
Ray would have understood.
There was an Australian flag on his casket for a reason. The young Ray Blackbourn, “Blackie” to his mates, was almost killed doing something unquestionably brave for his country.
He carried the injuries from that split second of horror for the rest of his life. Being an old-fashioned sort of patriot, he hardly mentioned it, although that didn’t stop the nightmares. Or the tiny pieces of shrapnel that emerged for 70 years.
Before he was old enough to vote, 21 in those days, the Collingwood Tech boy who’d spent a couple of years as a cadet newspaper photographer was an army bomb disposal officer.
It was a job that demanded absolute calm and skill under pressure. Digger Blackbourn had the right stuff. Army logic was simple: if he could mix chemicals to print photographs, he could disarm bombs. But that’s not all the army expected of this 20-year-old.
He was promoted to Warrant Officer and told to guard Japanese war criminals put on trial in Papua New Guinea in 1946.
The next year, he was leading a work party picking up depth charges on Bougainville Island when one exploded.
It killed several men and injured more, including Ray, who was thrown a huge distance by the blast and suffered serious injuries. He forced himself to drive to the nearest post for help, an action which saved other people’s lives. Then he collapsed.
His life hung by such a fine thread he was twice given the Last Rites on the trip to Rabaul, where an American surgeon operated on him on a hospital ship.
It took months in hospital in Brisbane and then in Heidelberg before he went back to newspapers to resume what would be a long and distinguished career.
Meanwhile, he was recommended for the Military Medal and was awarded a Royal Humane Society bravery medal for the Bougainville bomb tragedy. For years, he had to wear a neck brace, until the day he took it off at work and threw it in a rubbish bin, declaring that years of daily swimming had “fixed” him.
“Blackie” impressed all sorts of people with his work. One of them invited him and his wife onto her yacht when it docked in Melbourne in 1954. It was the Queen, on her royal tour.
Her Majesty wanted to thank Blackbourn personally for a portrait he had taken of her. He got on well with the Duke of Edinburgh, who invited him for a drink two years later when he was covering the Duke’s tour of the Snowy Mountains Scheme after opening the Olympic Games in 1956.
When Ray retired in 1988 the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, sent him a message. He had lost his first wife, Sylvia, to illness. It was the end of a love story that had begun when she visited wounded soldiers in the Repatriation Hospital in 1947.
In 1988, he married again, to Lyn. He told friends he’d been twice blessed. His two sons and grandchildren blended with Lyn’s into a happy family.
If anyone lived happily ever after, it was “Blackie”. Surviving the bomb blast made him determined to enjoy his second chance at life. Which shows that adversity can bring out the best in people – including all those Victorian couples who have swiftly shuffled their wedding plans this week to suit the new rules.
Eastern suburbs lovebirds Bruce Fitzgerald and Rhiannon Clews had invited friends and family from all over Australia – and some from overseas – to their long-awaited big day in “neutral territory” in the Hunter Valley.
The logistics of getting guests to the wedding was Rhiannon’s job. The honeymoon in France was Bruce’s. Now, all that has been scrapped – at least until their first anniversary next March, which might be a chance to make their personal vows in front of a crowd.
First, Bruce cancelled the Paris trip. Then they contemplated driving to the Hunter Valley to marry with a reduced list of guests but the risk of the border closing and compulsory quarantine killed that. So, early last week, they cancelled the social wedding – but not the legal marriage.
On Monday at 11am they went to a park in Canterbury with a celebrant, best man Grant and his wife Michelle. Three minutes later, the legal contract was complete. The vows can wait until they round up the original guest list for “take two”, maybe next year.
Grant produced the champagne and Michelle a perfect bouquet. And the drizzly rain that had fallen that morning stopped right on cue.
Welcome to the new world of the micro-wave wedding. It could catch on, according to Docklands property man Phil King, and his American bride Adriane Stachmus, an insurance industry expert from Oklahoma. Think of the money saved.
Phil and Adriane met at a mutual friend’s wedding in Hawaii two years ago and started a trans-Pacific romance. The big day was supposed to be yesterday but their celebrant warned them that another tightening of the rules could scuttle that plan, so they did the ceremony on Thursday on a balcony in Docklands with a couple of family members.
“It’s going to make an interesting story for the kids!” Phil said afterwards of the mini-ceremony he immediately tagged “The Lockdown in the Docklands”.
Bricklayer Zac O’Shannessy and his partner Hayley Clark have a house and two little girls together at Armstrong Creek, near Geelong. They have been engaged for five years, so the wedding scheduled for yesterday at Bennetts winery on the Bellarine Peninsula was going to be a landmark event.
Instead of cutting back to a skeleton crew of witnesses they decided to postpone. The deciding factor was that Hayley’s parents have been on holiday in Thailand and couldn’t attend because they would be in isolation.
“It’s a pain,” says Zac, “but we’ll book again – who knows when!”
It’s not all bad, he says. “My sisters are both pregnant so they’re happy because by the time we have the wedding they’ll be able to have a drink. And our youngest, Neve, is only 11 months old, so next time she and her sister Ada can both be flower girls.”
The other reason to be cheerful, he says, is that his boss has plenty of building work locked in. “Two healthy kids and a pay cheque. I’m happy.”
When Toni Slater from Mill Park met Christopher Wilkinson from Kent in England just five months ago, it went so well that they moved in together a month later.
They had planned a small wedding at the Stolberg Hotel in Preston for Thursday but when their celebrant Benn Stone suggested that even that was likely to be impossible, Toni happily switched to her father’s backyard in Doidge St, Bundoora, where her family has been for three generations.
“Five people and pizza at Dad’s. No worries!”
But there’s one condition, she warns. Next year “or whenever” they will have a proper ceremony in Bali so her Aussie family can meet Chris’s English ones.
For Benn the celebrant, it was the second ceremony for the day. With the Registry office closing indefinitely, he says, some couples are postponing their big day, but others are happily using his office in Prahran to get married at half the cost.
All you need is two witnesses and you’re spliced. Just don’t call it a skinny little geek wedding.
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