As a celebrant, part of my job is to tailor a ceremony form to fit the individualised needs and desires of my clients. As such, it’s difficult to lay out with a great degree of precision how much things will cost before I meet with you and determine what you’re looking for. All of the prices listed below, therefore, are estimates only – to serve as a guide to inform your planning, not as a quote for a specific service. I’m more than happy to provide a quote after a consultation, be it face-to-face or over the phone.
Obligation-Free Meeting
Hiring a celebrant to design and officiate your ceremony is usually the result of a great deal of thought. For all the time, emotional investment, and money you’re spending on your ceremony, you want to make sure that your celebrant is a good fit for your personality, and can deliver the service you want in the way that you want it. As such, I’m more than happy to introduce myself and get to know you a little bit over a coffee, lunch, or whatever you prefer! We can chat about ceremonies if you like, but the main purpose for a meeting like this is to give you an idea of the sort of person that I am, and to help you figure out whether or not I’m the person you want as your celebrant. There are no obligations, no pressures, and only one rule: be yourself! I got into this profession because I enjoy meeting people, and I look forward to hearing something of your story in the process.
Standard Inclusions
As a Commonwealth-registered civil celebrant and a sole trader who wants to do right by my clients, there is a certain standard you can expect of me regardless of the service you’ve asked me to perform. For instance:
- I will do my utmost to arrive at the ceremony venue at least an hour before the ceremony is scheduled to start. That way, I can make sure that all tech is working well, help to reassure and calm key participants, and observe OH&S requirements well before the big moment arrives!
- I will maintain a sense of professionalism throughout our time together. This will be reflected both in my appearance and in how I work with you to bring your ceremony out of your ‘mind’s eye’ and into the wider world.
- I make my portable P.A system and microphone sets available to all of my clients for use in their ceremonies.
- I make myself available to my clients to discuss any queries or concerns they may have. Whether it’s a little question or a proposal for a serious revision to a ceremony, I’m only ever a phone call or email away!
- I will place my expertise at your service in all things. I may be designing the ceremony, but it is ultimately your ceremony, after all.
Services and Packages
Weddings
I offer two main service packages for weddings: Legals-only and All the Bells and Whistles.
Legals-only ceremonies are just what they say on the tin: a ceremony which ticks off all the legal requirements to get married in Australia, but without extras like readings, ritual elements, or an elaborate ‘Story of the Love’ segment. This package is for couples who are just so damn excited to get married that they don’t have time for anything which gets in the way of the moment they’ve been waiting for! Alternatively, a legals-only wedding might be paired with a more expansive commitment ceremony down the line to accommodate extended family, budgetary considerations, and so forth.
For those who want a ceremony to match the scale of their love, only All the Bells and Whistles will do – accept no substitutes! As the name implies, this package allows you to include everything but the kitchen sink into your ceremony. Readings, ritual elements, a re-telling of the story of your love to your precise specifications, and anything else that will help to make your wedding day one to remember fondly throughout your life; as the saying has it, the sky (and the time allotted by the venue) is the limit! The All the Bells and Whistles package also includes a wedding rehearsal, ideally held within the week before the scheduled ceremony date.
If you’d like to book an appointment for a consultation, please click the button below or call me on 0421 392 548.
| Legals Only | Price to be fixed at consultation |
| All the Bells and Whistles Package | $900-1,000 |
| Extras | |
| Speech coaching services (writing and performance) | from $150 |
Funerals
When you’re caught in the throes of grief and bereavement, the last thing you’re interested in doing is comparing the inclusions of different packages. As such, I offer the same service across the board for funerals. This includes:
- Meeting with family/friends to discuss preferences for funerary arrangements.
- Providing assistance with the writing of the eulogy. If needed or desired, I can write the eulogy from scratch to tell the deceased’s ‘life story’.
- Creating an order of service and liaising with the venue.
- Delivering the ceremony, including the provision of support for speakers who find themselves overcome with grief.
In addition to providing a space in which it is safe to openly grieve, a funeral is a kind of testament: an expression of the intrinsic value of the life which has ended, and of the myriad ways in which that person has shaped the lives of those who loved them. My goal in providing funeral services is to ensure that this function of the funeral is not overlooked. Whether you prefer to look at a funeral as a celebration of a life, or a time to mourn for what has been lost (or both), my goal as your funeral celebrant will be to make sure that the story of the life of your loved one does justice to their memory.
If you’d like for me to serve as your funeral celebrant, please click the button below or call me on 0421 392 548.
| Funeral Ceremony | $800 |
Vow Renewals/Anniversaries/Commitment Ceremonies
These three ceremony types have two main things in common. Firstly, they are all forms of celebrating romantic love, the force of nature which binds people in that enchanting state of shared self-hood to which so much of our culture is devoted. Secondly, unlike weddings, these ceremonies involve no legal requirements which need to be observed and have no necessary material to include. That is, you can (and should!) shift your creativity into overdrive as we work together to come up with a ceremony which reflects the power of the love driving you!
The differences between these ceremonies are slight, but important nonetheless.
Vow Renewals are ceremonies centered around a ritual re-commitment to or ‘update’ of the vows that the members of a married couple made to each other during their wedding.
Anniversaries are fairly self-explanatory – they are ceremonies commemorating the couple’s achievement of a milestone in the history of their relationship.
Commitment Ceremonies are very similar to weddings in their form, but lack the legal components required to register the relationship with the state. In essence, they exist to publicly celebrate the commitments that people choose to make to each other. As such, they serve well for couples who have previously eloped, but wish to celebrate their relationship with pomp and ceremony later on. They also work well to celebrate the love of those in polyamorous relationships, as Australian law currently disallows more than two people to be married to each other.
If you’d like to book an appointment for a consultation, please click the button below or call me on 0421 392 548.
| Vow Renewals | $700-800 |
| Anniversaries | $700-800 |
| Commitment Ceremonies | $700-800 |
Memorials and Living Wakes
In contrast to the funeral’s focus on farewelling the beloved dead, memorials are more about recalling their memory; of taking the time to cherish and reflect upon those lives which have touched our own. One advantage of memorials is that the ceremony form is less-heavily influenced by tradition than the funeral. Memorials can take place at any time, in any venue, and have no real constraints on what form they take (this is also true of funerals, incidentally, but that’s a more involved conversation). The flipside of this flexibility is that it makes a generic price estimate very difficult – how much a memorial service will cost really depends upon how elaborate you’d like it to be and how much work has to go into preparing everything.
The same is true of living wakes, a ceremony form in which the celebration of a life takes place with the bearer of that life in attendance! Living wakes hold amazing potential as death rituals. A person approaching their death can see out the conclusion to their story with a party, sharing the goods of life in the company of those they love. By their nature, living wakes are more celebration than ceremony, and as such there’s little in the way of a common structure upon which to base a price estimate. The final quote will ultimately depend on just how grand a party you’d like for your loved one to say goodbye as they hopefully lived – surrounded by family, friends, and maybe having eaten more cake than they’d planned!
If you’d like to book an appointment for a consultation, please click the button below or call me on 0421 392 548.
| Memorials | from $700 |
| Living Wakes | from $700 |
Naming Days/Blended Family Ceremonies/Gender Affirmation Ceremonies
These three ceremony types are all variants on a theme: the creation and celebration of a new identity.
With regard to Naming Days, this is about as literal as you can get; as a secular derivative of the ‘Christening’ ceremony, this ceremony is all about welcoming a new life into the world.
Blended Family Ceremonies, by contrast, focus on highlighting the new bonds of love which bloom when two families come together to form a unified whole.
Gender Affirmation Ceremonies, a relatively new practice, involve bringing together community and ritual in order to celebrate the identities of trans and non-binary people.
As with most ceremony types, there are no legal requirements constraining the form of the ceremony. As such, the bulk of my work will consist in collaborating with you to draft the structure of the ceremony and performing the role we agree that I should play within it. At the conclusion of the ceremony, I will present the relevant person(s) with a certificate to keep as a memento of the day’s celebrations.
If you’d like to book an appointment for a consultation, please click the button below or call me on 0421 392 548.
| Naming Days | $600 |
| Blended Family Ceremonies | $600 |
| Gender Affirmation Ceremonies | $600 |
Private Graduation Ceremonies
Historically, the graduation ceremony celebrated the achievements of a cohort of students rather than those of each person individually. While this made sense historically, this can strike us as somewhat ill-suited for a cultural moment like ours, in which the individuality of students is increasingly emphasised. The COVID-19 pandemic has also added a wrinkle or ten to this picture, as many students find themselves compelled to attend virtual graduation ceremonies which, speaking plainly, just kind of suck. Years of determined, hard work should be celebrated with a little more pizazz than a passing acknowledgment garbled by an unreliable internet connection, shouldn’t it?
This is why I’ve chosen to offer private graduation ceremonies, in which individuals or small groups of students can join with their friends and family to celebrate their accomplishments in a more meaningful, personalised ceremony, tailored to reflect their real experiences throughout their studies. Through the sharing of memories, stories, and partaking in ritual elements designed to strengthen the bond between students and those who have supported them throughout their journeys, this private graduation ceremony seeks to provide what all good ceremonies should. Namely, an opportunity to reflect on how your experiences have helped to shape the person you have become, and how the support you receive in the present empowers you to look with hope to the future.
As with most ceremony types, there are no legal requirements constraining the form of the ceremony. As such, the bulk of my work will consist in collaborating with you to draft the structure of the ceremony and performing the role we agree that I should play within it.
If you’d like to book an appointment for a consultation, please click the button below or call me on 0421 392 548.
| Private Graduation Ceremonies | from $500 |
Custom Ceremonies
If you have an idea which could benefit from a celebrant’s help but doesn’t correspond to any of the ceremonies outlined above, then I’ve got some good news for you: we can work together to create a custom ceremony, designed from the ground-up to satisfy your particular need. If you’re interested in creating something wonderful together, please don’t hesitate to get in touch by clicking the button below and let me know what’s on your mind!
Liam Kelly - Civil Celebrant 