When Herald photographer Kelly Manwaring visited Wallendbeen markets last Sunday she took a lovely portrait of two Wallendbeen denizens, Chris Dorman and Hazel Hall, who tied the knot in Melbourne in June after living as a couple for "nigh on" 40 years.
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Last summer, Chris fell on one knee and proposed when they were crossing a footbridge across Connaughtman's Creek at the end of King Street in Wallendbeen, taking his beloved by "great surprise" on a Sunday morning.
She agreed to his proposal, "Then he got up again," said Hazel.
At a stylish wedding at St Mark's Anglican Church in Fitzroy, Melbourne, on June 8 (Chris's 80th birthday) they had seven grandchildren to walk them down the aisle.
Both previously married, Chris has a son and daughter and Hazel a son. They met at Monash University, at violin classes, where both were doing PhDs, Chris in mechanical engineering (wind speeds in building design) and Hazel in music education.
Both have traveled widely and had long and varied careers, Chris as a civil engineer, including a stint in PNG, and then a schoolteacher teaching electronics and physics at Daramalan College in Canberra.
Hazel worked as a music teacher and lecturer in Asian music at the Canberra School of Music, while together they got bachelor degrees in health science and advanced diplomas in naturopathy and a certificate in massage and worked in those fields.
Hazel's consuming passion now is poetry: she has a book of poetry Moonlight over the Siding in Cootamundra Library and organises regular poetry readings at Manning Clark House in Canberra.
The couple share their time equally between a house in the Canberra suburb of Aranda and their cottage in Lackey Street in Wallendbeen, which they bought as a weekender in 2012. Although matrimony and winter have kept him otherwise occupied recently Chris is also a regular bike rider with the Cootamundra Bicycle Users Group (BUGS), while Hazel is organist at St Clement's Anglican Church, Wallendbeen.
