Real Wedding: Vanessa & Liam, Crystal Creek Rainforest Retreat, Northern NSW

For Vanessa and Liam, music has always been part of their story. They met through mutual friends at a concert, then reconnected not long after while both studying audio engineering at university. What started as a shared interest gradually evolved into something deeper — especially after Liam left the country and offered Vanessa his apartment while he was away.

“We weren’t living together in the early days,” Liam says. “But I went overseas, and I offered Vanessa to stay at my place while I was away, and that was it — I came back, and she never left.”

Vanessa, originally from Sweden, hadn’t planned on staying in Australia long-term. “I came here in 2017 and was only meant to be here for a couple of months,” she says. “But then I started working and studying, and things just shifted.” Living together, the couple discovered how naturally their lives fit. “We’re both independent people, so we weren’t sure if it would work,” Vanessa shares. “But it was just so easy. Liam is my best friend in the whole world. We started playing music together and that’s what we do — we just spend our time hanging out, being together.”

The proposal came while visiting Vanessa’s family in Sweden, a trip Liam had been waiting patiently for. “I was plotting, really,” he laughs. “I had a good rapport with her family, and once we finally got there, I spoke to them privately and they were really excited.”

Vanessa had no idea. “We booked a little Japanese bathhouse resort about an hour from Stockholm and 15 minutes from where I grew up,” she says. Liam had planned to propose at sunset, but their robes didn’t have pockets — so the ring had to wait. Back in the room, Vanessa was on her phone when Liam called out, “Ness, Ness,” to get her attention. “I turned around and oh my — I just threw the phone away. He was on his knees, and it was so beautiful. He made this gorgeous speech: ‘We’ve been together for a long time, we’re best friends, I love you so much,’ and we had a little internal joke about making the next five years into 50 more. I just broke down. I was laughing and crying and jumping around him like a rabbit.”

The ring, too, held meaning. “My mum gave me a ring that was my grandmother’s,” Liam explains. “I took it to a little jewellery store where we used to live, and they used the stones and material to create a beautiful new one for Ness.”

After returning to Australia, wedding planning began almost immediately. “We were jet-lagged and couldn’t sleep, so at 4am we just started looking at venues,” says Vanessa. While they initially considered holding the wedding near Liam’s parents in Forster, it quickly felt like too much. “We didn’t know how to organise everything. It just felt overwhelming,” Liam says. That’s when the idea of an intimate celebration took hold — and when they discovered Crystal Creek Rainforest Retreat.

“We found it online within the first few days of looking,” Vanessa says. “We just wanted something simple, somewhere unique and special where we wouldn’t have to worry about food or guests or logistics. Just time with family and time together.” The retreat gave them exactly that — a serene rainforest setting, loved ones close by, and a celebration that felt entirely theirs.

Their wedding day was everything they’d hoped for. “It was better than I ever imagined,” says Vanessa. “I organise things for a living, I’m always prepping for things to go wrong — but this was one of the few days in my life where nothing went wrong. It felt like the gods were on our side.”

Liam’s standout moment came just before the ceremony. “I’d been building it up in my mind that it was going to rain. But the sun came out right at the perfect time, and it felt important — like a sign that I was on the right path.”

For Vanessa, it all hit her as she began walking to the ceremony. “I had been calm all morning, but as I walked down the stairs and saw everything — Liam, the forest, our families — it was so much more beautiful than I’d imagined. All the tears just started coming up.”

There were personal touches woven throughout the ceremony, too. “We’re massive Lord of the Rings fans,” Vanessa says. “There was music from the films playing, and Liam’s brother read an excerpt from Tolkien. The forest, the twinkling lights — it felt like a mythical place. Like a wedding in our own world.”

Vanessa wore a long-trained dress she found in Stockholm — “I knew exactly what I wanted, and when it arrived it fit perfectly.” Even in the rainforest, with the train trailing behind, she didn’t mind. “I tried to hold it up, but I was just in such a blissful moment that it didn’t matter.”

After the wedding, the couple stayed on at Crystal Creek for a quiet honeymoon. “That was one of the big draws for us,” says Vanessa. “We live in the middle of the city and it feels like you’re always on call. But here, we could just switch off. It became our private fairytale world.”

Looking back, their advice to other couples is simple: make the day your own. “Think less about what you should do, and more about what you’d like to do,” Vanessa says. “You can have a beach wedding or one in your parents’ backyard — just make it personal to you.”

Liam adds, “It meant a lot that we could just be in the moment, detached from the city and everything else, and share the day together — simply, in our own way.”