THE WEDDING SINGERS: country music stars Beccy Cole and Libby O’Donovan tie the knot
Beccy Cole and Libby O’Donovan’s romance featured all the joy of a country music love song, and on their wedding day, they invited Samantha Trenoweth along to celebrate.
Country music star Beccy Cole and cabaret singer Libby O’Donovan are in a spin. They’re due to be married in 22 hours in a perfectly picturesque vineyard in the Adelaide Hills, but the flower girl’s dress is missing. The flower girl’s name is Maisy. She’s eight years old, strawberry blonde with a dusting of freckles, Libby’s daughter from an earlier relationship and, though she doesn’t know it yet, Maisy will be the star of this wedding.
“As soon as the result of the plebiscite was announced, she went straight into, ‘When’s the party? I’ve invited all my friends to be flower girls. I want a dress with purple spots and can I please be the one who says, you may kiss the bride.’ She was just so into it,” Libby chuckles. “She adores Beccy. She calls her Cowgirl and, now that we’re allowed to, it just seems natural to her that Cowgirl and Mum get married.”
Maisy’s dress should have been delivered at midday but at 5pm there’s still no sign of it. Libby’s friend Michele (the kind of friend to be relied on in an emergency) has made a last-minute dash to Target and now sits in her lounge room in a cloud of polyester chiffon, purple pom-poms and sewing thread. It’s taken a village to pull off this wedding.
“As soon as the legislation was carried in parliament, we set the date,” Beccy explains. “So it’s come together quickly. We didn’t want to wait. Once we were allowed to be married, there was no question that we would do it.”
Beccy and Libby first caught sight of each other seven years ago at
Port Hedland airport in Western Australia. They were both passing through on the way to and from gigs. Their eyes met, sparks flew (Libby famously claimed that she would move to Port Hedland to marry the mystery woman) but neither thought they would see the other again.
Roughly a year later, Beccy came out publicly as a lesbian. She was overwhelmed by the support of her fans and, in 2012, she signed on to perform at Adelaide’s gay pride festival, Feast. Libby was also on the bill. She was flipping through the program and recognised Beccy at once. It took Libby a day or two to get hold of Beccy’s number and, right away, she messaged her to ask if she’d sing a duet with her at the festival.
“Libby’s text message arrived two days after my 40th birthday,” Beccy remembers. “My candle blow-out wish had been, ‘I want to meet someone.’ I read her text, then I looked her up on YouTube and my heart just went crazy.”
At the time, Beccy and her closest friend, fellow country music star, Kasey Chambers, were on a cruise. “Sitting next to Beccy when the messages came through,” Kasey says, “I could tell there was chemistry, and I could tell that this was going to be different from Beccy’s other relationships – that this was real.”
The duet, The Beatles’ Oh! Darling plus Dolly Parton’s Jolene, has become a defining moment in Feast Festival history. No one in the audience that night was in any doubt that they had witnessed something rare, authentic, electrifying. They were an item by the time they left the stage.
“I felt instantly that I could be
100 per cent Libby O’Donovan with Beccy, that I would be completely accepted for who I am, unfiltered,” Libby recalls.
“One of the first things I noticed about Libby was her kindness,” Beccy adds, “her generosity and her beauty. As I got to know her, I found our senses of humour are similar, too. Every day we make each other laugh – every day.”
It’s 10am, six hours to wedding kick-off. Libby is bundling the flower girl, her new dress and a pair of sparkly silver sandals into her car. Maisy’s still unsure why her mother has turned up to spring her from school but as they meander out of town, it becomes clear. Maisy knew that Libby and Cowgirl were planning a wedding – she just didn’t know it was today. When Libby drops the news, you can hear Maisy squeal 1400 kilometres away in Tamworth ... or you could if there was anyone left there. Most of the guests flew into Adelaide from the Tamworth Country Music Festival overnight.
Kasey arrived this morning. The wedding has been squeezed into a gap in her touring schedule. She wouldn’t have missed this for the world.
“I’ve seen Beccy go through a lot,” she says, sitting on a veranda watching lorikeets swoop between eucalypts. “She’s been through some challenging relationships to get to this point, and I’ve been there with her for all of it.
“I was there when Beccy first asked whether she might be gay. She came to me because that’s what a best friend is for. So I feel really honoured to be part of, not just today, but the journey of her finding herself. This feels like a celebration of that journey.”
Kasey says that Beccy smiles more these days, and laughs more. “Since being with Libby, I think she’s owned herself more,” she says, “and that’s a beautiful thing to see in a friend. I wouldn’t say she’s changed because she’s always been this person but sometimes it takes another person to bring that out in you and show you how beautiful and special you are. Is there a better reason to spend the rest of your life with a person than that they bring out the best in you and you bring out the best in them?”
It’s 3pm and the brides are confined to separate quarters in the Creamery, the old sandstone dairy where they’ll spend their wedding night. In many respects this is an unconventional wedding, but there are a couple of traditions the couple have retained. One is that Beccy will legally change her name to O’Donovan (though her stage name will remain Cole). The other is that the brides have not seen each other’s gowns and won’t see each other today until they walk together down a grassy aisle.
The Weekly’s photographers dash from Libby’s dressing room to Beccy’s make-up chair. Right now, they are the only people alive who have seen both dresses: Beccy’s in cream and black lace; Libby’s in purple and moss green silk (a tribute to the suffragettes), both created by local Adelaide designers. The wedding rings, also designed and made in Adelaide, draw inspiration from the Sturt’s Desert Pea, Libby’s favourite flower and the emblem of South Australia.
An hour later, Libby and Beccy cannot stop smiling. They meet beside the winery, clasp hands tightly and charge joyfully down the hill towards the hundred or so family and friends who have gathered beneath an immense and ancient elm tree.
Their friends Lyn Bowtell and Chris E Thomas belt out the old Etta James hit, At Last, which the brides have nominated as “our song” because it was Libby’s ringtone back when all those text messages were flying back and forth. In many ways, this is an old-style country music family wedding. Bands form and dissolve and reform beside the stage as celebrant, Tania Kernaghan, performs the marriage rights. Sara Storer sings You’re My Everything; Kasey Chambers, Duncan Toombs, Kym Warner and Adam Harvey come together for If I Needed You; Gina Jeffreys performs a song that Beccy wrote for Libby, I Love You.
Tanya reads a vow that has subtly changed in recent months: “Marriage in Australia is a legally binding union between two people.” Applause erupts and echoes through the hills. The register is signed and the marriage witnessed by Libby’s sister Estelle and Beccy’s 19-year-old son, Ricky, who has been a staunch campaigner for marriage equality. Libby’s parents, both Anglican ministers, are not yet permitted by their church to officiate at the wedding but armed with bundles of elm leaves and holy water, they bless the newlyweds: “On each step of the journey you take, may you be blessed by God.”
Maisy doesn’t get to say, “you may kiss the bride”, but she is both flower girl and ring bearer and, later in the evening, she brings a whole barn full of family and friends to tears when she and Cowgirl sing a duet: “Like the tree out in the backyard that never has been broken by the wind, our love will last forever if we’re strong enough to bend.” Maisy’s voice is as clear and sweet as a mountain stream.
As the party winds down, the dancing slows and kids curl up on parents’ laps, Kasey reflects on her friends’ wedding. “I’d almost forgotten,” she says, “how poignant this day has been in the grand scheme of things, for Australia. That’s been amazing and I feel honoured to have been part of it. As a friend, though, the most beautiful thing was to look down and see Bec with this massive smile on her face and to know that she and Libby are happy.”