ALEXANDRA + ALISTAIR

A YOUNG COUPLE CELEBRATE LIFE AND LOVE ON THE LAND WITH A SWEEPING COUNTRY WEDDING IN MANSFIELD, NORTH-EAST VICTORIA.

After a sweet proposal on her family property in north-east Victoria, a vet and a grazier say I do.

A SHEEP PADDOCK may not seem the most romantic setting, but throw in a golden sunset and a mutual love of life and work on the land, and you have the makings of a great marriage proposal. Or so thought 27-year-old grazier Alistair Leonard when he got down on bended knee to propose to his partner, Alexandra Fish, 25, a veterinarian. “We were out checking the sheep and he asked me to get the gate,” remembers Alexandra, who had met Alistair 18 months earlier at Sheepvention, the annual sheep expo at Hamilton in south-west Victoria. “I turned around and he was down on one knee and my first thought was, ‘Oh god, he’s twisted his ankle in a wombat hole!’” Luckily, there was no mistaking the sparkling three-stone diamond engagement ring in Alistair’s hand. Designed and made by Alexandra’s grandfather, Blair Catanach, it had been given to her mother, Amanda, the fifth generation of famed Catanach’s Jewellers, by her father, Nigel. “I love the ring and it’s really nice to have that bit of history behind it,” says Alexandra, who teamed her Italian silk tuile and embroidered floral lace Judith Valente wedding gown with an antique diamond tiara from the early 1900s — another family heirloom. “That was my ‘something old’,” she says. The couple celebrated with a ceremony and sit-down dinner for 150 guests on the family’s 162-hectare property, Janiemont, overlooking the rolling hills of the Mansfield district in north-east Victoria. Seeing each other for the first time on the day remains a special memory, although surprise fireworks later that night “were pretty amazing,” says Alexandra.