Lisa Curry I Married My King

- 

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!’”