Origin of Civil Celebrancy in Australia
Civil celebrancy was established by the Australian Commonwealth Attorney General Lionel Murphy on the 19th July 1973, when his first appointee, Mrs Lois D’Arcy, was categorised as a Civil Marriage Celebrant. Later, as civil marriage celebrants branched out into the performance of other ceremonies such as Funerals and Namings the term was shortened to Civil Celebrant. According to the pioneering civil celebrant Dally Messenger the third:
The civil celebrant program is almost entirely the result of one man’s vision. Murphy himself told me the story of how he was opposed by his own staff, the public service, his fellow Members of Parliament and officials of the Labour Party. He defied all, and, on July 19, 1973, in the dead of night, typed the first appointment himself, found the envelope and stamp, walked to a post box and posted it himself.
In fact the enabling legislation, the Marriage Act, had been passed in 1961 but Murphy’s personal involvement in using the Act's powers and bypassing the bureaucracy made him a hero to the first civil celebrants. Lois D’Arcy, in a 1992 address to celebrants, recollected Murphy's own account of his authorising the first appointment:
(Lionel had) returned to his office one evening. There he had taken a piece of paper with his letterhead, typed my authorisation, and then placed it in an envelope, which he then posted to me. What other person in such a high position would have done such a thing. No one other than Lionel Murphy!
Murphy’s stance on marriage reform (and on divorce reform) was part of wider desire to free Australians from restrictive laws. High Court Justice Michael Kirby remarked in 2000:
Lionel Murphy was a big figure on the stage of Australian public life. He pursued with energy, imagination and determination a vision of Australian society which was not warped and gnarled and inward-looking. It was one which reached out to everyone, particularly the disadvantaged.
Read more about this topic: Celebrant (Australia)
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