I married my king
Lisa Curry
Music drifts across an emerald green valley on a sun-splashed early winter afternoon, as blowsy roses and peonies tumble from antique vases and pink champagne flows. The relaxed, chattering guests would never guess that, just days ago, this perfect pink fairytale bride was dressed in overalls and muddy gumboots, shovelling straw and manure in a colossal effort to prepare the property for her wedding day.
“If you saw it four months ago, it was a mud pile,” says Lisa Curry, in her no-nonsense way, of the 25-hectare property in the Sunshine Coast hinterland that she and the groom, Mark Tabone, bought last August with their wedding day very much in mind. “We wanted to get married on our own property. We looked at this place three times before we decided we could make it work.”
Most critically, the sheds and horse stables needed to be transformed into a venue for the perfect country wedding. “I was shovelling manure out of the barn and sawdust. There was a snakeskin in there,” says the much loved triple Olympian, laughing. Plainly she’s no stranger to hard work or discipline. “And he’s very handy with a drill,” she says of Mark, the singer who stole her heart three years ago.
Lisa and Mark have been working seven days a week on the property for months. “At times we were out there with floodlights until 11 o’clock at night,” says Lisa. “I’ve been up to my knees in mud. My hands were sore, my nails were dirty and broken. Several times I yelled out, ‘I bet Meghan Markle isn’t doing this!’”
She wrote, “list after list after list and you cross it off and then you start a new list. When you do it yourself, it is never ending, but we have such a great group of friends who have come and helped.” Mark was also her rock. “When work was stalled by weeks of rain,” she says, “I would cry and say, ‘It’s not going to be ready’ and Mark would insist that, no, it would be ready, and it was.”
Today, their idea of a “rustic, barn wedding” has come together perfectly. “We had this vision that was so strong and it is exactly how we imagined it,”
says the bride. “We had been talking about it for nearly two years.”
By the time guests descended on it, the barn had polished concrete floors and a glittering chandelier. The colourful, eclectic furniture had been collected from op shops and antique stores on the couple’s travels. There were “very personal” pieces, too. “A few things from my mum; my grandma’s cabinet, which is nearly 100 years old.” A love of vintage cars, retro furniture, caravans and ’60s music were some of the things they discovered they had in common when they first fell in love.
Lisa and Mark met back in 2015 on a gruelling 400-kilometre charity walk from Melbourne to Portland to raise money for children suffering illness and trauma. Mark, an internationally renowned entertainer and Elvis performer who has toured with Presley’s original entourage, had arrived halfway through the walk to provide entertainment.
Just as Lisa arrived at the house where the walkers were staying, Mark wandered bleary-eyed out of a bedroom, where he’d been taking a nap. “My first impression was that he was very good looking,” Lisa remembers, but he was married and she had a partner, too. “Like everyone else on the walk, we were friends and didn’t think too much about it.”
Some months later, Mark performed on the Sunshine Coast and Lisa took some friends along. They met for breakfast the next morning and he told her that he and his wife had separated. “I did a little fist pump under the table,” Lisa says with a mischievous smile. By this time, she was single as well.
For a few months, there were friendly exchanges on Facebook. Then she went to visit him in Melbourne. “He freaked because he wasn’t ready for a relationship at all, and neither was I.” But they went to a Kombi show, a shared passion. “And yeah, we just clicked, it was incredible.”
Two years later, Mark planned his proposal for maximum romance. “If he wants to make something really special, he goes to a lot of effort,” Lisa says. She was a big fan of the TV series Game of Thrones, which she had convinced him to watch. The first time, he’d fallen
asleep, so she’d insisted he watch it again. On the second viewing, he noticed that one of the wedding scenes had been filmed on the island of Gozo, in Malta, where he had lived for nine years as a child. “He decided there and then that was where he was going to propose,” Lisa explains.
So Mark organised a trip with his new love to see his family in Malta. He proposed on a yacht, at sunset, with an old friend playing guitar. “It was very romantic,” Lisa says, beaming.
They had both thought they would never marry again. Mark had been married for 25 years and Lisa, 56, was married to ironman Grant Kenny for 23 years. “Until,” says Lisa, “you meet the right person. A friend’s husband said, ‘If you don’t marry him, I will.’ And I knew he was right.”
So the dreamy, mellow mood of the wedding day was the result of three years of romance and imagination, as well as all that muddy, back-breaking work.
The guests had been asked to wear white, which gave a special warmth to the touches of pink decoration and the bride’s ’60s-inspired powder-pink gown.
Lisa’s “jungle buddies” Keira Maguire, Natalie Bassingthwaighte, Tegan Martin and Julia Morris (whom she met on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!), mingled on the dance floor with Lisa and Mark’s closest family and friends. Harry Gallagher, 94, who was Lisa’s very first swimming coach, was there. And, of course, Lisa’s mother, Pat, wouldn’t have missed this wedding for the world. She was given special dispensation to ignore the dress code because, “the mother of the bride can wear whatever she wants” and she chose green.
The couple’s collection of vintage cars was put into service. A pink and white Kombi van brought the groom’s party to the rose petal-covered carpet that led to the outdoor altar. Mark’s son Jesse was his best man and his daughters Tahlia, Aliana and Leticia were at his side, carrying long-stemmed fuchsia roses. The bridal party arrived in a convertible Cadillac. Lisa’s son Jett wrangled the long pink tulle veil as she alighted from the car in her showstopping dress. Mark had not been allowed to see the dress. “I asked him to draw what he thought I would be wearing and he was way off,” she chuckles.
Lisa had searched for dresses in Sydney and Melbourne, but finally found a French lace in a fabric house in Sydney and knew it had to be the centrepiece of her gown. “They didn’t have much left but I loved it so much,” she says. There was so little fabric that there was no margin for error, and every skerrick was used.
Lisa wanted a very local wedding, so she asked Sunshine Coast seamstress Marilyn Crystelle to make the dress. The beaded lace was embellished with sequins, beads and silk ribbon flowers for the bodice. Marilyn sourced a range of the highest quality French tulles in
every shade of pink for the 15 layers that went into the ball-gown skirt, with a silk chiffon underlay. More than 100 metres of fabric were used.
“Lisa’s brief to me was to encapsulate her most loved colour, pink, and make it shine in all of the shades available,” says Terrianne Foale from Mondo Floral Designs, who created the bouquets. Peonies were imported from France, and roses from around Australia.
Lisa was flanked by Jett, who gave her away, and her daughters, Jaimi and Morgan, who held her baby son, Flynn.
Tears were shed at the altar and by family and friends during the ceremony. Anticipating the emotion, Lisa had bought Mark a hanky the day before. Mark spoke of their unconditional love. “Lisa is beautiful inside and out,” he said. “We share the same dreams and plans. She is my soul mate.”
Then Lisa spoke. “He makes my heart sing. He cares about me, he listens to my stories, even if I tell them to him three times. He laughs at my jokes and fixes anything and everything. He massages me when I am tired and sore, and keeps me peaceful with his reassuring nature.” She promised to “age gracefully with you and continue loving you just a little more every day”. They promised to remember that “neither of us is perfect but we are perfect together”.
Lisa and Mark spoke their vows in Maltese (which Lisa says took her months to learn) and when they were declared husband and wife, Lisa raised her bouquet in the air as confetti swirled. The sun angled low behind treetops, casting long shadows, and a fire was lit, as a pizza van arrived bearing perfect Neapolitan pizzas, antipasto and salads. Drinks were served from a cute retro caravan, and gelato and gourmet donuts kept the quirky country festival atmosphere alive long into the night.
At sunset, coloured lights were switched on and the music was cranked up. Mark treated the crowd to a rendition of Suspicious Minds and a song that he had written for his new bride, Hold On To Me. He has released it as a single and its cover features Lisa and Mark’s silhouettes and their thumbprints making the shape of a heart.
Speaking to The Weekly just days before the wedding, Lisa had said that she thought she’d changed significantly since she and Mark first met. “He is such a quiet, funny, kind, gentle, caring, loving man. He has made me a lot calmer, less reactive and I love my life more. He brings serenity, and the adventures we now have – it makes you realise what life is all about.”