Celebrant (Australia) - Lionel Murphy: Radical Achievements

Lionel Murphy: Radical Achievements

With regard to the marriage celebrant program - Messenger summarised Murphy’s achievement as follows: He shocked the system.

• His first shock to the social system was the appointment of women — at a moment in history when, for hundreds of years, the only ceremony providers were men. (Paradoxically this Murphy decision is commonly acknowledged as having substantially supported the women in the churches who wished to become priests and bishops.)

• Shock two. Also unheard of was the provision that the couple can choose their own ceremony (the legal requirement was minimal and flexible)

• His third shock to the social system was the appointment of Aborigines as civil celebrants … The prominent aboriginal activist, Faith Bandler, I recall, was one. (They had only been counted as citizens in the census some six years before.)

• His fourth shock was the appointment of young people to perform ceremonies. Lois D’Arcy (see picture) was a 26 year old mother of two babies. Another among the first 100 celebrants authorised was Carol Ditchburn (later Astbury), aged 24.

• His next shock was that citizens could choose their own celebrant—unheard of until then, both with church and with state.

• His next shock, a now obvious truth but still not fully absorbed, was his assertion that celebrating the milestones of life was just as important for secular people as it was for religious people.

• Shock seven. He acknowledged unbelievers and secular people as having a place of equal respect in society.

• His overwhelming conviction was his belief that culture and content—really matters. He particularly encouraged the use of poetry in ceremonies from the very beginning.

According to Messenger and D'Arcy (opera.cit), the pioneer civil celebrants believed they were part of an innovative cultural challenge. They developed a deeper understanding of the purposes of ceremony, and believed celebrants should pursue excellence in every ceremony and in a variety of ceremonies.

To raise the general standard of civil ceremonies, given what they saw as the excessively legal cultural context they had inherited, they encouraged each couple to see more creative possibilities in the ceremony than the two of them might originally have envisaged. In this context the celebrant, as a resource person, needed to educate himself/herself in the artistic treasures of western culture appropriate for ceremony creation i.e. in poetry, prose, music, choreography, storytelling and symbolism i.e. the components of ceremony.

Since the Federal Government introduced celebrants in 1973, the appointment has been valid at any time, in any place anywhere in Australia. Up to 2013, the Marriage Celebrant Program has enabled over a million couples to be married in civil ceremonies. Celebrants were originally appointed based on geographic location and the perceived need for a celebrant in the area, but after 2003 their appointment was dependent on being a bureaucratically approved "fit and proper person".