By LISA CLAUSEN /MARYBOROUGH

or more than half a century, Wal Richards rarely missed a Maryborough wedding. He wasn't often on the guest list, but he turned up anyway, waiting with his camera outside the stone churches of this Victorian country town. He went to so many Maryborough weddings, says Shirley Maher, who married there in 1963, that "if he didn't turn up at your wedding you would wonder what was wrong with you." Wal snapped the wedding-day celebrations of two generations, and when he died last year he left 20,000 photographs squirreled away in boxes in a shed at the back of his small green cottage.

Among them were some striking images, all the more remarkable because of the man who took them. Physically and mentally handicapped, unable to read or write, Wal couldn't load a film or tell how many shots he had taken. Yet he managed to photograph 2,000 weddings. The backdrop for nearly all of them was this town of 8,000 people northwest of Melbourne, an unassuming place where Wal, youngest son of the local chemist, found enough to fascinate him for a lifetime.

It's only now, nine months after his death at 66, that the depth of Wal's affinity with the camera is coming to light, through an exhibition of 4,000 of his pictures. To most locals he was just dear old Wal, good-natured but simple, impossible to understand because of a speech impediment, tall and thin, with a misshapen nose, a lazy eye, a lolloping gait and a big brown hat. As he sailed along on his rusty blue-and-white racing bike or sat on his favorite bench near the intersection of the town's two busiest streets, people would smile and wave; Wal would smile back. But he was cut off, forever an observer on the edges of his small world.

Perhaps that is why, sometime in his late teens, he picked up a camera. None of his family know why he started taking pictures. But with friends to load the film and put the snaps in albums for him, Wal found in photography a way of visiting the lives of those around him. Almost always, he chose the same doorway: weddings. In his passion for them, he would ride his bike to towns 20 km away. If a local married in Melbourne, chances were that Wal would be there too: up before dawn to catch the 5:40 a.m. train to the city, not returning until after dark. On Saturdays when more than one wedding was scheduled, Wal would cycle furiously around town, arriving out of breath just as the bride stepped from the car. It wasn't the trappings of the ceremony, the flower arrangements or the churches that transfixed him; it was the people. And to reach them he would lean over onlookers' shoulders, nudge them aside, even hop into the front seats of bridal cars.

Wal rarely talked about his photos or showed them to anyone. And while everyone had heard of his collection, not many were interested in it. "No one thought the pictures would turn out," recalls Ron Rich, whom Wal photographed with his new wife Dawn in 1958. If he couldn't read, people thought, how could he take a photo?

But the images did turn out, and they form a tender history: grooms chuckling outside pubs; brides fighting flyaway veils on the porches of brick bungalows; bridesmaids bunched in front of fruit shops; a dark-haired bride looking around shyly to the camera, as if someone has just whispered her name. In Wal's shaking hands, the camera lost its power to intimidate. "Nobody posed for Wal," says his niece Janice. "They just accepted him being there." And so he was free to capture them, candid and joyful.

"He has left us the most amazing treasure," says Nadia Reid, who has wanted to exhibit the photos since she arrived in Maryborough two years ago to run the Central Goldfields Regional Art Gallery. People discouraged her, saying Wal was too protective of his collection. It wasn't until he died that his family agreed to the project.

When the exhibition opened this month in the old town hall, crowds had to be turned away at the door. Wal's photos are finally telling Maryborough everything he learned about it over a lifetime--wisdom he could not share in any other way.