Wed by the Wayside: A True Story of Love, Family and Community

By Alana Valentine

Can marriage be an act of rebellion? This is the story of Wayside Chapel, a quiet revolution from a side street of Kings Cross, Sydney.


Alana Valentine's mother, Janice, was remarried in 1969 at the Wayside Chapel, run by the charismatic and controversial minister Ted Noffs and his wife Margaret. Many years after her mother died, Alana found the wedding photo, and the longing to speak to her mother about that day drove Alana to seek out others who had begun new chapters of their lives at Wayside.


What Alana found was a remarkable group of people, whose stories are told here with kaleidoscopic effect. Brought together, these Wayside stories reshape our understanding of this country's social history, from a uniquely Australian institution where people have been welcomed for decades in spite of social taboos around race, class, religion and sexuality.


Told with grace and insight by one of Australia's most acclaimed playwrights, Wed by the Wayside is a deeply personal quest, as Alana searches for her own origin story. It is also a celebratory ode to the different, the discarded, the broken and the brave who changed the world from Kings Cross.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pantera Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9780645818000

Alana Valentine

Alana Valentine is one of Australia's most acclaimed playwrights. She is the author of more than 20 published works, including two books of non-fiction. Alana's plays include Wayside Bride (Belvoir), Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan (co-written with Christos Tsiolkas), Wudjang: Not the Past (Bangarra, co-written with Stephen Page) and Barbara and the Camp Dogs (Belvoir, co-written with Ursula Yovich).

Book preview

Can we ever understand the decisions our loved ones make? This is the story of the Wayside Chapel, a quiet revolution from a side street of Kings Cross, Sydney.

Alana Valentine’s mother, Janice, was remarried in 1969 at the Wayside Chapel, run by the charismatic and controversial minister Ted Noffs and his wife Margaret. Many years after her mother died, Alana found the wedding photo, and the longing to speak to her mother about that day drove her to seek out others who had begun new chapters of their lives at Wayside.

What Alana found was a remarkable group of people, whose stories are told here with kaleidoscopic effect. Wayside is a uniquely Australian institution where people have been welcomed for decades in spite of social taboos around race, class, religion and sexuality. Over the years, the likes of Ita Buttrose, Andy Gibb and Jane Powell have been married there, and the Chapel has been supported by famous ambassadors such as David Wenham, Claudia Karvan and Leah Purcell.

Told with grace and insight by one of Australia’s most acclaimed playwrights, Wed by the Wayside is a deeply personal quest and a vibrant chronicle that reshapes our understanding of this country’s social history.

Wed by the

Wayside

ALANA VALENTINE

CONTENTS

About the book

Title Page

Prologue: Yearning grips my soul

Introduction: Members, one of another

Chapter One: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Chapter Two: Taking up the Cross

Chapter Three: The way, the truth, the life

Chapter Four: Love covers a multitude of sins

Chapter Five: Every wind of doctrine

Chapter Six: Disciples of all nations

Chapter Seven: With timbrel and dancing

Chapter Eight: Faithful friends are beyond price

Chapter Nine: Arise my love, my fair one

Chapter Ten: The belt of truth

Chapter Eleven: A fly in the ointment

Chapter Twelve: Remember your history, your long and rich history

Chapter Thirteen: Fearfully and wonderfully made

Chapter Fourteen: New heaven and a new earth

Epilogue: Glory and honour and power

Acknowledgements

Sources

About the Author

Copyright

vi

Powell wedding

1

Prologue

Yearning grips my soul

Psalm 63

I find the scrunched-up veil from the first wedding first: a wad of discoloured illusion bridal nylon tulle, with its distinctive diamond-shaped pattern. I unwrap the stiff, yellowing polyester and spread it out on the bed beside me. The padded ivory satin headband has a row of cheap, pretty pearls. I continue to stroke the bumps and wrinkles of the fabric flat.

I do not lift it onto my head to try it on.

‘Illusion bridal’ is not my commentary on my mother’s first failed union, which ended after pregnancy-induced nuptials (me), a second child (my brother) and divorce. It’s the official name of the fabric. Illusion bridal is the most popular type of bridal veil tulle because it is spectacularly sheer, giving a floating gossamer effect which frames the face and a perky, structured pouf factor when gathered on a comb. It may be one of the only times when polyester is triumphantly, unquestionably, a better choice than cotton tulle, which hangs down and obscures the face in a too-thick blear of white, or even silk tulle, which slides and sags limply like the lactoderm on a cooling bowl of porridge. 2

I am looking through a box of keepsakes from my mother’s past. For a writer, it’s a professional necessity to sometimes schedule big chunks of time to do nothing but daydream. To allow the creative brain to ameliorate the pleasant boredom of wondering what to do next. It’s a way to ask the unconscious, enquire of the universe, question God. Curiosity, certainly, but also a state of mind where one can be unusually brave about opening up to new facts about the past.

It can’t just be me who stores up memories and ideas and realisations and thinks, I will consider that at another time. I’ll come back to it when I feel more stable, more able to be usefully reflective, when I have both emotional and neurological space to deal with whatever I discover. Surely that’s why the cupboards of the world are full of slightly musty-smelling cardboard boxes – humble tissue-lined former shoeboxes, or fancy fabric-covered boxes – that safely house all the memories of people all over the globe.

I have in my hand a photo of eleven people standing in front of a small wire sign that reads, in cursive white letters, The Wayside Chapel. There is an earnest, shorthaired, high-collared girl of eight in the front of the group, and that is me. I look at myself again and again, trying to see the person I am today in her wary, brown-eyed gaze.

Eventually, my gaze moves to my smiling mother and my stepfather, my almost smiling grandmother and my unsmiling grandfather, the other people who I don’t know and cannot remember having ever seen again. The mysteries, the questions, the circumstances of this occasion about which, because my mother and grandmother and grandfather are all now dead, I cannot now ask. 3

I stare at the photo in my hand and I notice that the sunlight is falling directly across the face of my shiny-haired mother. It is my mother’s perspective that I seek, not my brother’s or my stepfather’s, who have their own confidential memories into which I choose not to intrude. I must be the dredger of my own chronicle, trying to conjure the mother who I know would have the salient detail, the intriguing observation, the original remark that would unlock her whole world in a casual comment.

I remember that the little white lump in her hair is a tiny white fabric daisy I saw her place into a set and styled wig on a foam mannequin head. I notice that my brother has short pants and the men all have narrow ties. That all the women have covered-in pumps and the men have dark, polished wingtips.

This book is about all that happened after I looked into a box of old photographs of my mother’s and found this photograph of her second marriage, to my stepfather William Roy Powell, at the Wayside Chapel in Sydney’s Kings Cross. The child me who stares back at me looks bewildered. Such a luminous, liminal state of being. ‘Perplexed’ may be the best way to describe her state of mind at the wedding of her beautiful, adored mother in a strange, unfamiliar place to a strange, unfamiliar man whose friends are all dressed up and smiling endlessly.

And as I look at this child, her white-gloved hands clutching a white handbag, her white ankle socks and white shoes clamped hard together, just like her nearby grandmother’s, and then I look at her mother, in her hand-made faux Chanel suit, I face the fact that I have resisted more deeply researching my mother’s story because, in some perverse way, that kept her story and mine unresolved. Unfinished, as it would be if she were alive. 4

But, and this is the grief that comes years after the event, she is dead. She died at the age of forty-nine, three days before her fiftieth birthday, of breast cancer. My grandmother died five years before that, and my grandfather long ago. I knew none of my biological father’s family; I never met my stepfather’s relatives or any other relatives on either side of my mother’s family. My uncle has recently died, so my brother, two years younger than me, is my only living blood relative.

I look at the gathered wedding party. If I really want answers beyond conjecture, I am going to have to play detective, put the pieces together and confront myself with them.

To investigate and find actual information. I want to arm myself with it. To scratch away the version of herself she hid from me, because a child can’t know and an adolescent doesn’t want to know. Everybody I have ever met wants to unlock some untold part of themselves, and I too have secrets that will need to be disclosed to get the answers I want.

There’s a book’s worth of investigation to write before I can tell you what those answers are. But make no mistake, this is the story of why my mother married at the Wayside Chapel and how the Wayside Chapel, and its brand of rebellious, even heretical, religion still speaks deeply to me. 5

6

Janice Powell 

7

Introduction

Members, one of another

Romans 12

The studios of ABC Radio Sydney in inner-city Ultimo are a lively, nerve-wracking place. Dominated by a shining silver desk, all sliding knobs and low light, I sat behind the upright microphone as Simon Marnie’s shiny mercury voice urged people to call in and talk to his listening audience of up to half a million people about their weddings at the Wayside Chapel.

To provide them with inspiration, Simon instantly had Ita Buttrose on air, explaining that, when she was married for a second time, she wanted a quiet little event at Wayside, conducted by Ted Noffs.

The Ted to whom she was referring was Theodore Delwin Noffs, who was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1952 after attending, in retrospective order, Leigh Theological College, the University of Sydney and Parramatta High School. The year before he was ordained, he married Margaret Tipping and both soon after went to work in the city of Chicago, where they interacted with ideas of practical theology, assistance for the poor and work with the disadvantaged.

Returning to Australia, they founded the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross in 1964 and together they devoted their working lives to what conservative society might call ‘bohemian radicalism’. In fact, the Noffs’ theology is squarely based on a reading of the Christian gospels that advocates standing up for the marginalised, ignored, abused and destitute in whatever form they present themselves. However, the so-called mainstream churches, and even Ted’s own superiors in Methodism, would not see it that way.

‘Little did we know,’ said Ita, ‘that the organist playing at our ceremony, who was a gay guy, within minutes of us leaving, it was all over the gay network that I had been married, that we had been married that afternoon. We had no knowledge of this, so the next morning I went back to work.’

No honeymoon, no fanfare. This was a working woman, a female executive, the very model of what it took to succeed in a man’s world.

Ita went on, bubbling with joy at the memory. ‘Every Thursday I used to have a tennis game booked with a guy called Mel Clifford, also a gay man, and his partner used to work for me. Mel and I are playing tennis and we’re hitting the ball back and forward and Mel says to me, Done anything exciting lately? and I whacked the ball back and I said, No, nothing, what’s been happening in your world? And of course, he knew – everybody knew. Our secret was common knowledge!’ she exclaimed.

‘You cannot fly under the Sydney gaydar,’ Simon wryly observed.

‘I know,’ Ita said, with the sincere respect of someone who has run multiple media conglomerates. ‘It’s a helluva network.’ 9

The producer told me that the switchboard was now lit up with calls and Simon hosted reminiscences from people such as regular talkback guest Fay, who had not only married at the Chapel but had also worked there. She affirmed that Ted was so busy he some days conducted a wedding every thirty minutes. ‘But Ted had this amazing ability to make you feel that you were the first and only people he had married that day. He was so able to relate with people, he never judged anyone: he made them all feel welcome.’

June from Merrylands lovingly described the off-white cocktail dress she’d worn and revealed my first insight into why my mother might have been drawn to Wayside. ‘I was a divorcee and in those days it was hard to find a church that would marry you. So we went to Wayside Chapel. Jane Powell the movie star had got married there and I thought if it’s good enough for her it was good enough for me. I made my wedding dress myself. It was really nice. Forty years later it’s hard to believe you couldn’t get married because you were divorced. I couldn’t find anyone to christen my son because I was a divorcee.’

Along with Ita’s almost casual mention of the fact that this was her second marriage, June’s story highlighted the fact that my own mother had been getting married for a second time. Being divorced ‘in those days’ seemed to be much more frowned upon than I, in the early twenty-first century, could understand.

Jonathan Coleman was not married at the Chapel himself, but called in to tell the story of how he negotiated with Ted to clean up after the weddings as an in-kind payment for the opportunity to rehearse with his band in their theatre space. A gifted comedian, Coleman animatedly described the 10repeated joy of sweeping up swirling piles of rice and confetti, the grit and coloured paper and hard little grains of arborio lodging in his throat as he swept. ‘There were other popular musicians who rehearsed there,’ he said. ‘Margaret Roadknight and other big-name folk singers. There was always the smell of patchouli oil. Bikers with weird names like Skull Wiggins. A passing parade, it was like being in a Sydney [version of a] Fellini film.’

Simon loved the patchouli detail and urged him on. ‘I’ve got very fond memories of all the Noffs and the sound of organ music coming from the Wayside Chapel,’ Coleman said. ‘The religious types: people would ask cynically if there was a special kind of Wayside confetti that can be used over and over again. But we didn’t care about them – Wayside welcomed everybody and anybody, show business people, people who had fallen in love with each other on a bus. Nobody looked down their noses at anyone. And all kinds of music was played there. They taught me how to use the Gestetner machine to print flyers for the band. Even people like Dick Smith and John Singleton supported Wayside. They were people who had more of an understanding of religion being within you, not controlled by the church.’

It was clear that people had been drawn to Wayside through a wide array of personal circumstances – divorced, cross cultural, cross denominational, shunned by family, shunned by their own churches. But there was another line of continuity in this fascinating cohort: their attitude to the theological radicalism of the Noffs – Ted’s ‘Family of Humanity’ concept (which will be explained anon), the outreach to drug-users and long-hairs and bikies who congregated at Wayside. There they were encouraged to ask questions about God, when at other 11churches compliance and submission were still the default setting.

Did they, and by inference my mother, represent a quiet Australian rebellion against the authority of the churches? Could I scratch away at the received wisdom of secular Australian cynicism to glimpse quiet acts of larrikin flipping the bird at the authority, rigidity, conservatism and control of the mainstream Christian churches in Australia?

When I went in to see the City of Sydney historian, Lisa Murray, soon after the radio interview, she told me that the history of religion in Australia was one of the most under-examined areas of our national story. We conjectured about the perception that Australia is, compared to the United States, more secular, that religion plays less of a role in social life. But we both talked about the large number of people of faith active in politics, the huge influence of religious charities on all aspects of welfare in Australia, the still powerful religious lobby groups and religious school alumni in public life.

Does change happen in Australian civil rights movements in an entirely different way from in the American system? I wondered. Australian citizens participate in protests and street marches and passionate activist movements in the same way that people in democracies across the western world (and many parts of the rest of the world) also do, but in Australia are the real foot soldiers of change casually revolutionary? Not screaming or intellectualising, but quietly rebelling against the religious strictures and bigotry of their parents by choosing to celebrate significant life events in a place such as Wayside? I was interested in how real, lasting change happens in Australia, how hearts and minds are transformed one at a time by the sacrifice, commitment and profound faith of visionary thinkers. 12

The last caller Simon took was Dean from Botany, who had been married at Wayside just three weeks before. ‘Yeah, we got married within the service on a Sunday morning. Just stood up and Graham [Long, then pastor at Wayside] said the words. It blew us away because the congregation gave so much to us. And some of them we didn’t know, or hardly knew. One guy had just completed the City2Surf and he had written a poem for us and had it all handwritten in calligraphy and he gave that to us. A First Nations guy stood up at the end and played his didgeridoo and wished us well. And there’s this part in the service where anyone can get up and say anything and everyone who stood up said something to wish us well on our wedding day.’

This was another piece of the detective puzzle locking into place: the ability of Wayside to create a family for those who had little or no family of their own, or who had been rejected by their biological family. The talkback format didn’t allow me to ask Dean if that was his story, but his delight at the warmth of the Wayside congregation made my mind race to those nuptials where renunciation from family was certainly a harsh note playing under the organ’s pretty melodies.

How did people create networks and support structures that were not about the nuclear family, the patriarchy of the church and state and private home? Why were famous people often estranged from their own families and why did they choose to forge connections and intimacies with places such as Wayside? How does a place like Wayside radically defy the persistent myth that blood is always thicker than water? Or was Wayside a place where people wanted to host their family, but on their terms, reflecting their values?

I walked home from the Ultimo ABC studios with the strange feeling a writer gets when questions they thought 13might be personally intriguing begin to resonate like a brass bell struck at the end of a deep meditation. The callers and their consistent enthusiasm about Wayside gave me the understanding that I might be able to fashion a portrait of a hugely diverse Australia – sailors back from Vietnam marrying on their R&R, Vietnamese marrying Anglo Australians, Sri Lankans marrying Catholics, Jews marrying Buddhists, Protestants marrying Baptists, atheists, older women marrying young men and vice versa … the most incredible diversity but all of them united by a love that had blossomed outside the conventions and rules of the past.

I came up with the title Wayside Bride to apply to the City of Sydney for a commission to write the play, under the auspices of the Griffin Theatre Company. I set up a website – waysidebride.com – where people could upload their stories and photos and indicate whether they would be open to an interview. Both the Wayside Chapel and the City of Sydney put out a call on social media for anyone who might be interested to contribute their stories, and the immediate response was overwhelming: testimonies from all over Australia, and indeed the world, were gratefully received. ABC Radio and the Sydney Morning Herald both ran items about the project and even more stories came in. Ted himself claimed he had married some 30,000 people during his time, and the Wayside Chapel had hosted about 50,000 people’s weddings in total in its fifty-year history, so the bounty to be harvested was considerable. Couples wrote to me, their children wrote to me, their grandchildren wrote to me.

I felt like I had lifted the lid on some kind of vintage glory box. Inside was not all the linen and clothes a bride might need for her marriage but the collective memories of generations, 14including my mother, who never received such a thing, but for whom I might prepare a cache full of the tales of loners, misfits, rebels, warriors and fringe dwellers. The ones who always have crazy, chaotic lives and the best stories to go with them.

I have sat across from hundreds of people and asked them to tell their story, certain that, in the telling, we both will be changed. That when the word becomes flesh in a recorded interview, all the contradictions and inconveniences and paradoxes of human nature can be rendered. That people can become many things simultaneously, as they surely are in real life.

I have spent much of my career listening to and dramatising local stories of local communities to answer questions I have not been able, because of the aforementioned loss of almost all my blood relatives at a young age, to ask within my own family. And in turn I have theorised that by asking the questions and listening to the wisdom and attentively chronicling the lives of so many people, I have offered their own lives back to them in a surprising and revelatory style. That, in fact, I gift them the opportunity to view themselves not only as individuals or members of a family but in the context of their city, their country, their culture, their times. To see the choices they made and the changes they fought for in parallel with the days when they were alive, the consciousnesses that were being challenged, the injustices that were being fought against.

I have been motivated from the outset by using my art to unpick the holes and absences and values of my own life. My first play, Multiple Choice, was about a teenage alcoholic, which I was not at all, but perhaps feared I might become due to the example of all around me. It’s only looking back that I can see that, of course, but it strikes me as telling that when my 15grandmother came to see that play, the only play of mine she or my soon dead mother would ever see, both of them asked how I knew so much about alcoholism. I answered coyly, ‘I did a lot of research,’ and so I did, setting off a pattern of reaching out to others to inform my understanding of myself.

So as I age and the questions I wanted to ask my mother multiply and even, one could suggest, begin to fester, it is her choice to be married at the Wayside Chapel that promises a parade of contemporaries I can suture for a blood connection.

Who were the kinds of people who got married at Wayside? What could they tell me about her life and their lives? How could I hunt and gather and find these stories to reflect this community and tell us all something about the people my people lived with? To breathe in ideas that took root not in London or New York or Tokyo but in Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia. To reject received wisdom and second-hand knowledge and dangerous, unsubstantiated falsehoods about what the past and the people who lived in it, including my own relatives, were like. To hear it, not from the horse’s mouth, but from the punters who stood on the sidelines cheering those horses on.

In doing so, I would write a tribute to the always determined, sometimes