More Australians than ever before are rejecting church weddings in favour of civil ceremonies, new figures show.
Men and women also were older when getting married and more couples were living together before tying the knot.
According to a report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), civil celebrants performed 55 per cent of all registered marriages in Australia in 2002.
Civil weddings were not generally permitted in Australia until 1973 when the Whitlam Labor government introduced the Civil Celebrant Program.
"Twenty years ago only 39 per cent of marriages were performed by civil celebrants," the report said.
The report found the trend towards couples living together was continuing, with 73 per cent cohabiting before marrying, compared to 30 per cent in 1982.
The age at which Australians married continued to rise with the median age at which men married rising from 26 years in 1982, to 31 years in 2002.
Of the population aged 15 years and over, 8.4 million were married, 4.9 million never married, 940,000 widowed and 1.1 million divorced.
"The largest proportional increase over the past 20 years was in the divorced population, increasing by 172 per cent between 1981 and 2001," the report said.
There were about 760,000 lone parents in 2002, up from around 670,000 in 1996.
The report found there were 37,700 persons living in same-sex defacto marriages.
This represented 0.5 per cent of all persons living in married or de facto marriage relationships.
But the ABS was unsure about the accuracy of this figure, because it believed some people might be reluctant to admit they were living in gay relationships, or unaware they could register the fact in the census.