Six twangy notes of guitar were all it took for every man in a one hundred metre radius to unbuckle his belt and drop his pants. Stevie-Jean Harrison sighed and clipped the lens cap back on her camera; she’d shot enough country weddings to expect this response to “Eagle Rock”. While she loved collecting colour from the dancefloor, this sight was one that every Queenslander of a certain age already has burned into their memory. The in-laws wouldn’t be interested in seeing it immortalised in the wedding album.
Now listen! Hmm we’re steppin’ out! Under an endless, inky sky crumbed with stars, the groom’s brother and his best friend swayed in their boxers with their arms around each other, bow ties unclipped and collars loosened. Their eyes were closed in ecstasy as they sang along with Daddy Cool, a cigarette dangling from one’s lip.
At 31, Stevie had seen this scene play out at weddings and wakes, 18ths, 21sts and B&S balls since she was old enough (legally or not) to hold a stubby. But it still brought a smile to her face, the literal abandon of men young and old dancing a shuffling two-step, hobbled by the pants spilling over their boots.
Stevie recognised a cousin of the bride racing away. At the portaloos she stopped, grasping her mother’s shoulder, her face sunburned under a fascinator. Her eyes filled with tears as she inspected her feet in their strappy designer heels, now caked with red dirt like chocolate truffles. Not a local, then.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on over there,” she wailed, her fascinator pointing back at the dacked denizens of the dancefloor, “but I’ve gotta get out of here and there’s no phone service, let alone Ubers!”
Stifling a laugh, Stevie swung her camera strap around her body and followed, maintaining eye contact strictly above the men’s chests. She was glad she’d pinned up her frizzy hair; the sun had long set but the heat of Queensland in late January lingered.
There was barely a breath of breeze to stir the leaves of the eucalypts, or the strings of coloured light bulbs stretched above the hired dancefloor. The band were clambering back onto their stage, the back of a hessian-draped flatbed truck parked on the bride’s parents’ property. Floodlights beamed down over the Lions Club-run bar, where clusters of people were chatting and drinking. A few kids were still racing around, hiding from their parents’ attempts to put them down to sleep. Beyond the halo of the lights was a darkness so thick you could almost touch it, alive with unseen creatures, swallowing fields and trees and channels and dams and tracks into one unfathomable expanse…
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