Lynn MacLaren and Sarah Holt-Foreman were spending a September evening at a streetside wine bar in Fremantle, Western Australia. The sun was setting, they had a glass each, it was the weekend.

And then Holt-Foreman pulled a little model elephant out from nowhere, with two rings perched on its tiny trunk.

"As a child I collected elephants," MacLaren explained to BuzzFeed News. "It was a joke between my brother and I. I was a little bit heavier than he was, and I just owned it, and had this elephant collection."

The one Holt-Foreman presented was from Bali, where she had also bought the rings some time earlier.

"Do you want to get married?" she asked.

It wasn't the first time Holt-Foreman had proposed. MacLaren had hesitated the past couple of times her partner of seven years had floated the question. But this time, things were different.

Five years earlier, Holt-Foreman had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She had undergone treatment, and spent the last two years in remission. But on 16 September, the day before she presented MacLaren with the ring-adorned elephant, the couple had received devastating news: The cancer was back, and this time had spread to Holt-Foreman's bones.

MacLaren said yes.

"I felt like now is the time we must make the most of our lives together," she told BuzzFeed News.

The next question was a simple one: "Where can we go?"

In Australia, same-sex couples cannot legally marry.