In Australia, celebrants or civil celebrants are people who conduct formal ceremonies in the community, particularly weddings – which represent the main ceremony of legal import conducted by celebrants – and for this reason are often referred to as marriage celebrants. They may also conduct extra-legal ceremonies such as naming of babies, renewal of wedding vows, funerals, divorces, becoming a teenager, changing name, significant birthdays, retirements, and other life milestones. Officiating at a marriage requires that the celebrant be an authorised marriage celebrant under Australian law, or the law where the marriage takes place, but officiating at non-legal ceremonies does not.
Marriage celebrants Many Western nations permit civil celebrants to perform basic, legal, marriage ceremonies. However Australia was the first nation whose government appointed non-clergy celebrants with the intention of creating ceremonies which aspire to be as culturally enriching and, if required, as formal, as church weddings. That is, civil and religious wedding ceremonies would be of equal cultural status.
An "authorised celebrant" is authorised by the Australian Government to perform legal marriages according to the Marriage Act 1961.MARRIAGE ACT 1961Marriage Amendment Bill 2002 Bills Digest 112 2001–02 The celebrant may be a representative of a religious organisation (a religious marriage celebrant) or someone providing non-religious weddings (a civil marriage celebrant). In Australia, only authorised (registered) marriage celebrants have the authority to perform marriages.
In 2020, 80.3 per cent of Australian marriages were performed by civil celebrants. However, the rate of civil marriages varied between states and territories, with a civil marriage rate of 75.5% in New South Wales, 81.2% in Victoria, 84.3% in Queensland, 79.7% in South Australia, 84.1% in Western Australia, 86.8% in Tasmania, 83.9% in the Northern Territory and 82.7% in the Australian Capital Territory.
Marriage by independent civil celebrant has spread in other English-speaking countries. Its early establishment in Australia was largely due to the support of the reforming Attorney-General Lionel Murphy in the 1970s.
Descriptive definition A civil marriage celebrant is authorised by the government to perform legal civil marriages in a dignified and culturally acceptable manner, for those who choose a non-religious ceremony.
Civil celebrants also serve people with religious beliefs but who do not wish to be married in a place of worship or by a clergy person. In contrast to the established ceremonies of religious or registry office weddings, the couple in celebrant ceremonies make almost all decisions about the content. Thus, the civil celebrant has the role of a professionally trained ceremony provider who works in accordance with the wishes of the client couple and advises them. The task may be likened to an architect who is charged with designing a dream home for a couple who need expert help. In this sense the celebrant is not just the one who performs the ceremony according to law, but its facilitator, the couple's guide, the resource person, the co-creator of the ceremony, and the rehearsal-director.
The celebrant does not come from the standpoint of belief or unbelief. Trained celebrants usually operate professionally on the principle that their own beliefs and values are irrelevant.
Motives for reform Commentators such as Geraldine Doogue have suggestede.g.Geraldine Doogue (Presenter)- Peter Kirkwood (producer) -Noel Debien (researcher), Secular Soul-Part 2-Ceremonies, Compass Program, Australian Broadcasting Commission (Television-Australia), 30 June 2002, Transcript Retrieved ca.August 2002 the following reasons why civil celebrancy was introduced, and why it succeeded so quickly:
The 1970s in Australia was a time of questioning established institutions and profound social change. There was great dissatisfaction with the "registry office" marriages of the time. Couples, who could not or would not use clergy, often found registry office weddings perfunctory, undignified and humiliating. The Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, the major denominations at that time, discouraged or forbad remarriage of divorced people. The alternative was the Registry Office. The proceedings seemed liable to add to the distress of couples who were defying their own church's rules.Quote "The Catholic partner of a mixed marriage promises to do everything possible to preserve the faith and have all children of the marriage baptised and brought up in the Catholic Church." in the "Penny Catechism" (Catechism of Christian Doctrine)(1850–1970) – a summary doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. There was dissatisfaction with the main Christian denominations of the time, especially the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, especially the treatment of divorced persons and of those who chose partners of other denominations ("mixed marriages"). There were strong [and sometimes militant] objections to marriage and the marriage ceremony wording by feminists.A number of the feminist writers depicted marriage as a state oppressive to women e.g.Greer, Germaine, quoting Forum Vol 2, no.3, in The Female Eunuch, Paladin, London, 1971 p.199 :see also Segal, Iza, "The Immorality of Marriage", The Australian Humanist, December 1969, p.7: see also Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (eds), Australian Women-Contemporary Feminist Thought, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994 p.282 National census figures showed an increasing percentage of people declaring themselves "No religion".See the excellent graph, entitled "Major religious affiliations described in Australian censuses" in Christianity in Australia. Note the almost exclusive dominance of Christianity, especially Roman Catholic and Anglican (ca 60%) in Australia in the years 1971–1976, and the dramatic increase of the No religion/Not stated category to 2011. Divorces, though common, were expensive, traumatic, and involved legal apportioning of blame. This indirectly tainted the institution of marriage.Messenger III, Dally (2012), Murphy's Law and the Pursuit of Happiness: a History of the Civil Celebrant Movement, Spectrum Publications, Melbourne (Australia), 2012, p.24ff
Origin of civil celebrancy in Australia
Civil celebrancy was established by the Australian Commonwealth Attorney General Lionel Murphy on 19 July 1973, when his first appointee, Lois D'Arcy, was categorised as a civil marriage celebrant. Later, as civil marriage celebrants branched out into the performance of other ceremonies such as funerals and namings the term was shortened to civil celebrant. According to civil celebrant Dally Messenger III:
The civil celebrant program is almost entirely the result of one man's vision. Murphy himself told me the story of how he was opposed by his own staff, the public service, his fellow members of parliament and officials of the Labour Party. He defied all, and, on 19 July 1973, in the dead of night, typed the first appointment himself, found the envelope and stamp, walked to a post box and posted it himself.
In fact the enabling legislation, the Marriage Act, had been passed in 1961 but Murphy's personal involvement in using the Act's powers and bypassing the bureaucracy made him a hero to the first civil celebrants. Lois D'Arcy, in a 1992 address to celebrants, recollected Murphy's own account of his authorising the first appointment:
[Lionel had] returned to his office one evening. There he had taken a piece of paper with his letterhead, typed my authorisation, and then placed it in an envelope, which he then posted to me. What other person in such a high position would have done such a thing. No one other than Lionel Murphy!
Murphy's stance on marriage reform (and on divorce reform) was part of wider desire to free Australians from restrictive laws. High Court Justice Michael Kirby remarked in 2000:
Lionel Murphy was a big figure on the stage of Australian public life. He pursued with energy, imagination and determination a vision of Australian society which was not warped and gnarled and inward-looking. It was one which reached out to everyone, particularly the disadvantaged.as quoted in Hocking, Jenny, 1997, Lionel Murphy – a Political Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge UK (and the Bibliography found in Hocking J., 1997) , p.vi.Blackshield, A.R., Brown, D., Coper, M., and Krever, R. (eds) The Judgments of Lionel Murphy Primavera Press, Sydney, 1986.Coper, Michael and Williams, George, (Eds) Justice Lionel Murphy, Federation Press, Sydney 1997 Scutt, J.(ed), 1987, Lionel Murphy: A Radical Judge, McCulloch, Melbourne, 1987Venturini, G. (ed), 1994, Five Voices for Lionel, Federation Press, SydneyVenturini, G. (ed), 2000, In the Name Lionel, Never Give in Press, Morewell Victoria, FILM: Dellora D.,1991, Mr Neal is entitled to be an Agitator, 58 Minute Documentary Film, Film Art Doco Pty Ltd, Aust.
Lionel Murphy: radical achievements With regard to the marriage celebrant program – Dally Messenger III summarised Murphy's achievement as follows: Lionel Murphy was a real radical. I am still amazed at his vision. He shocked the system.
His first legal reversal was the control of ceremony. The marriage ceremony, up to this point, was that mandated by the religion or civil authority – resulting in constant complaints of hypocrisy. Couples in celebrant ceremonies were now totally in charge of the words and actions of their own ceremony. His second U-turn within the social system was the appointment of women —at a moment in history when, for hundreds of years, the only ceremony providers were men. (Paradoxically this Murphy decision is commonly acknowledged as having substantially supported the women in the churches who wished to become priests and bishops.) His third shock to the social system was the appointment of aborigines as civil celebrants. Faith Bandler, I recall, was one. (They had only been counted as humans in the census some six years before.) His fourth change of direction was the appointment of young people to do ceremonies. Lois D'Arcy was a 26 year old mother of two babies. Carol Ditchburn, now Astbury. was 24. His next was that citizens could choose their own celebrant— unheard of until then, both with church and with state. His next turnaround, a now obvious truth but still not fully absorbed, was his assertion that celebrating the milestones of life was just as important for secular people as it was for religious people. His overwhelming conviction was his belief that culture matters A framework of ceremonies communicating society's best performing and visual arts, is vital to a mentally healthy community.
According to Messenger and D'Arcy (opera.cit), the pioneer civil celebrants knew they were part of a radical and innovative cultural change. As time went on they developed a deeper understanding of the value and purposes of ceremony. They believed they should develop a variety of ceremonies. They further believed that celebrants should pursue excellence and best practice in every ceremony.
To raise the general standard of civil ceremonies, given what they saw as the excessively legal cultural context they had inherited, they encouraged each couple to see more creative possibilities in the ceremony than the two of them might originally have envisaged. In this context the celebrant, as a resource person, needed to educate himself/herself in the artistic treasures of western culture appropriate for ceremony creation i.e. in poetry, prose, music, choreography, storytelling and symbolism i.e. the components of ceremony.