You're not planning a performance. You're getting married.
Britt’s husband, dad to three kids, and a former breakfast radio host who unexpectedly found more meaningful work helping people get married. This is how I got here, why marriage matters to me, and how those beliefs shape every ceremony I create.
The short version
How I found this work
Breakfast radio turns you into a local B-grade celebrity. That means you end up hosting almost every event your town can invent: Christmas carols, New Year’s Eve, awards nights, music concerts, and, once, a festival with 50,000 people in front of me.
It gave me an extraordinary apprenticeship in being an MC and professional speaker. A breakfast show also requires you to arrive at 5am and be interesting, relevant, opinionated, and entertaining every day, regardless of how you feel or what else is happening in your life. Weddings ask for much the same thing: show up prepared, read the room, and give people something honest when the moment matters.
I became a celebrant in May 2009 while I was still working in radio. I never intended to leave broadcasting, but when 4BC in Brisbane began downsizing in 2013, my boss told me I needed to choose: talk radio or weddings. He was encouraging me to stay in radio. But celebrancy felt too real, too useful, and too fulfilling to keep treating it as the side project. I chose weddings and became a full-time celebrant.
Why marriage matters to me
That belief is personal. As a child, I watched my own family, and many families around us, experience the pain of marriages falling apart. It left me convinced that a healthy marriage reaches much further than two people. Great marriages can give children a safe place to become awesome people, and those people build stronger families, communities, and societies.
Britt and I married in 2012. Our marriage is the well I draw from as a celebrant—not because it is a performance of perfection, but because it is where I keep learning what commitment, forgiveness, delight, sacrifice, friendship, and choosing each other actually look like.
When I talk about “breathing your marriage to life,” I mean it. The language comes from Genesis 2 and Ezekiel 37: breath and words giving life to what matters. We speak, and we move mountains. Your marriage will exist because of your words and your breath. What you say at your wedding is not filler before the party. It matters.
“Our marriage is the well I draw from as a celebrant.”
What changed my approach
Everyone at the wedding already knew the story, and they knew it from the inside. I was the outsider pretending to know the couple better than their closest people did. So I stopped performing a biography and started creating a moment about why this marriage matters and what the couple is choosing for their future.
I’ll never forget a bride crying with anxiety before her ceremony. It had nothing to do with her groom or the marriage; she was overwhelmed by the event she was about to host. She had never wanted a wedding. She simply wanted to get married. Her experience inspired Britt and me to create pop-up weddings in 2012, which later became The Elopement Collective. It also taught me that comfort is not a small detail. The wedding should fit the people getting married.
Luna once told me that a friend treated her “like glass.” When I asked what she meant, she said he treated her as though she was fragile. I loved that. Immediately before two people marry, the moment feels important, valuable, and fragile. It is an honour to hold it carefully—to give it confidence and warmth without squeezing the life out of it.
How that becomes your ceremony
I listen for your values, your language, and the reason you are choosing marriage. Then I create the ceremony from scratch. No template, no recycled paragraphs, and no attempt to turn your relationship into content for me.
Radio taught me how to read a room, find the right tone, recover when plans change, and speak without hiding behind a script. Professional speaking lets me hold everyone’s attention without making the ceremony about the person holding the microphone.
Most of my ceremonies settle at around 18 minutes. That shape was partly inspired by what I admired in great TED Talks: disciplined length and delivery that can be professional, fun, and encouraging at once. It is long enough to say something meaningful and short enough to keep the room with us.
The goal is not to make you perform. It is to breathe your marriage to life in a way that feels real, honest, and recognisably you—so both of you can feel completely comfortable inside the moment.
The rest of my life
When we realised my work would mean spending most weekends flying to Sydney or Melbourne, Rome or Rio, Britt and I decided that home should be somewhere extraordinary. That is why we chose two acres in Tasmania’s Huon Valley, where we live with Luna, Goldie, and Jack. We had nine chickens, then quolls took three, so we are currently a six-chicken household. Britt homeschools the kids; I spend too much time thinking about grass height, coffee grind settings, technology news, and Foo Fighters.
Travelling to weddings sounds glamorous, but hotel rooms can be lonely. I miss bedtime stories, school pickups, and family breakfasts. I still get nervous before ceremonies, and even after thousands of weddings I sometimes wonder whether my words will land. That feeling keeps me attentive. It reminds me that this is someone else’s once-only moment.
I have set up for the wrong wedding and said the wrong names. They are the kinds of mistakes you only make once, and luckily for me they are more than 15 years behind me now. I have also smashed more iPhones than I care to admit and cried during Pixar films. I am not interested in presenting a polished fictional version of myself. I would rather arrive as a real person and make space for you to do the same.
If this sounds like your kind of ceremony
We can talk about what matters, what makes you uncomfortable, and what would make the ceremony feel completely your own.
Check my availability
