Does 'life imitate art'? Surely it's the other way round. But perhaps I haven't been looking closely enough.
On 2 October this year I was strolling through Melbourne's Treasury Gardens and then past Parliament House and on up Spring Street. It was a luminous, first-day-of-spring kind of late afternoon. The sun, for the first time in months, was warm, the sky vast, blue and high. People in the parks were lounging or dozing or kissing and, in the city streets, straggling along in laughter-filled, ragged groups.
At first, I didn't notice what was really going on. Wandering along in my own particular elegiac daze, I marvelled at what seemed to be a convention of stretch limos.
Usually you see just one or two. But here they were, parked at curbs adjacent to grassy slopes, or in convenient spots near the Parliament steps, gleaming with polish, each with a grey-uniformed, peak-capped driver in respectful alert attendance or flicking a cloth idly across the dustless duco.
Bizarrely, it reminded me for an instant of funerals — the long, hearse-like cars, the uniforms, the waiting — but these were happy funerals and, suddenly, looking across to the lawns and up to the top of the Parliament steps, I saw it all again in different terms.
There were brides everywhere: on slopes of lawn; bathed in spangles of light fragmented through over-arching branches; on the top steps; on the bottom steps, as if just having made a grand entrance down a huge staircase. Dazzling, mostly in flowing white or cream, they posed and smiled and looked down and up and across as a photographer puppeteer pulled his invisible strings.
And milling around uncertainly, their bridesmaids: squeezed into blues and purples and golds, some sashed and hatted, some svelte and curvaceous beneath a precarious tower of hair, others sweating, bulging and secretly vowing to return next week to the gym.
At the edge of each knot of resplendent women stood the groom. Uncomfortable in a suit or a constricting collar or a slightly askew bow tie or colours they'd never worn before and would never wear again if they had any say in it. Many of the grooms looked curiously grumpy. Wasn't this their day of days? What was