Spend on the champagne, not the coffin: How Aussie death rituals are changing
For some, surviving a potentially fatal illness would turn them off the topic of death entirely. But when Kate Morgan was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, she leant in, deciding to become a funeral celebrant. Morgan completed her qualifications and gained experience the way most celebrants do – in a traditional funeral home – but the experience left her feeling that something was missing.
“It didn’t align with my idea of what ceremony is and what people need in our current age,” she says.
“So many Australians these days aren’t [religious], but they go ahead with these quasi-religious chapel places in these funeral parlours on the side of a highway that are just soulless. It’s one in, one out, all day.”
While weddings have evolved greatly over the past few decades, Morgan thinks our funeral traditions still remain overwhelmingly rooted in the past.
Dr Hannah Gould, a cultural anthropologist who studies death, religion and material culture at the University of Melbourne, says Australian funeral traditions reflect our colonial history, with the introduction of Christianity transforming death rituals in the country. Over time, our practices have evolved, with secularisation and multiculturalism playing a role. Gould says that increasingly, Australian funerals are characterised by pragmatism, personalisation and a mixing of traditions.
Credit: Jim Pavlidis
‘A David and Goliath situation’: Taking on Australia’s funeral industry duopoly
Tomorrow Funerals, the company which Morgan co-founded in 2020, is an antidote to the cold, impersonal funerals most of us will be familiar with.
Since starting the business, Morgan has held memorials all over Australia, in everywhere but the traditional funeral parlour – in homes, pubs, galleries, event spaces and even one at the MCG for a footy lover.
Cindy Stocken is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne researching the changing ways we ritualise death. She says today’s funerals – such as those performed by Morgan – have an “increased focus on a celebration of life”.
“There’s really a focus on looking at how that person lived and celebrating what they enjoyed and what was meaningful for them,” she explains.
She says today’s funerary practices are characterised by creativity and improvisation – honouring a person’s individuality is more important than tradition. While the casket is the typical centrepiece of a service, she says many people today choose to platform important items from the deceased’s life, such as a collection of books or their favourite scarves. Food, eulogies and visual presentations are also ways in which people may choose to personalise a funeral.
Indeed, while the practical elements of end-of-life – coffins, urns, mortuary care – have traditionally comprised the bulk of funeral costs, this new guard of funerals focus on the celebration itself. Tomorrow Funerals offers a standard, eco-friendly coffin and cremation service for all its clients.
Funeral celebrant Kate Morgan says there is a knowledge gap in Australia around death care.Credit: Leo Farrell
While Morgan says more modern funerals are growing in popularity, she still thinks there’s a knowledge gap in Australia around death care.
Part of this is structural – Australia’s funeral industry is dominated by just two companies that own familiar brands including White Lady Funerals and Le Pine Funerals. Such giants often have strong relationships with hospitals and aged-care homes, making it hard for small businesses like Tomorrow Funerals to introduce themselves to families who might need their services.
“It’s a bit like a David and Goliath situation. We’re independent and small, and we’re able to expand – we can go Australia-wide – but until they find us, it’s impossible for them to understand what is offered,” says Morgan.
The other barrier, she believes, is cultural: Australians are generally not comfortable talking about their own death. And, as Gould points out, most of us will only organise one or two funerals in our lifetimes.
In changing how we ritualise death, Morgan says funerals play an important role in how we grieve – and ultimately heal.
“It’s about coming together in communities, families grieving together, crying together,” she says. “People agonise over the smallest decisions to find the right music, for example. And I believe that by doing that it’s a healing process.”
Preserving stories for future generations
Dan Thomas, right, founder of All About Me Films, helps people preserve their life stories.
In 2022, Dan Thomas founded All About Me Films, a company that helps preserve people’s life stories for generations to come. The idea for the business came after Thomas realised he only knew a handful of stories from his late grandparents’ lives.
While our digital footprints mean our waking lives have a longer tail than previous generations, Thomas says for the most part, we don’t know that much about those who came before us. “Unless you’ve done something ridiculously huge, like Napoleon or Jesus, then you are forgotten in two or three generations; it’s like you never lived,” says Thomas.
Thomas visits his subjects in their homes, where he spends up to three hours interviewing them about their lives. The result is a professional-grade film that Thomas hopes will be a living, breathing document of someone’s being – capturing not just the chronology of their lives but their mannerisms, the affect in their voices or the particular slant of their smiles.
“I think it would be so meaningful for my grandchildren or great-grandchildren to not think of me necessarily as this old person, but as a human and to have a sense of the link to their own selves and maybe see themselves in my body language and my voice,” he says.
Thomas, whose oldest interviewee was 97, says older subjects can be reluctant at first to talk about themselves. Oftentimes, older people are overlooked and undervalued in society, but Thomas says having a film made can be a way of “telling your parents how much you mean to them.”
“It often becomes quite a meaningful event for them. Particularly for men because they are less used to talking about themselves. A lot of the time men avoid that emotional side of their lives. Sometimes with men I’ll just say, ‘Tell me about your mother’, and they’ll just burst out crying.”
Starting conversations about death young
While we tend to think about our own mortality more as we age, it’s not something we typically think about in our teens and 20s.
Last week, in line with Dying to Know Day, northern beaches-based community organisation Proveda held their inaugural Young Adult Death Cafe.
Death cafes, which are informal gatherings where participants are encouraged to talk about end of life, have been around since the 1970s, but typically attract an older demographic.
Jessie Williams, Proveda’s community programs manager, says they saw a gap in the death cafe landscape to engage with Australia’s youth. The organisation reached out to students in UTS’ bachelor of creative intelligence program, recruiting four students for a six-week internship. At the end of the six weeks, the group organised and led their own death cafe, inviting young adults aged 18 to 25 to attend.
Williams believes talking about death is a key part of solving our youth mental health crisis. “When we talk about death, actually, we’re talking about humanity and what’s important to us in our relationships, which is the antidote to loneliness.”
Amanny Mohamed (centre left) is a university student who helped organised Proveda’s inaugural Young Adult Death Cafe earlier this month.Credit: Conor Ashleigh
She also believes it will help prepare them for when the time does come.
Engaging our youth in conversations about death, Williams adds, also better equips them to help older generations navigate end of life, particularly as our Baby Boomers enter their twilight years.
Twenty-year-old Amanny Mohamed, one of the four interns who organised the Young Adult Death Cafe, says the experience was incredibly “uplifting”.
Mohamed, who also has a bachelor of midwifery, thinks that young people can offer a unique perspective in conversations about death. She says while participants were a little hesitant at first, by the conclusion of the cafe it was hard to stop people from talking.
“We had people tell us they couldn’t even speak about it at home with their families because it is such a taboo subject. So being able to have a safe space where they could come and sit with strangers, those walls immediately broke down, it was so safe and comfortable that the conversation just flowed.”
“[With the death cafe] we really wanted that ripple effect to inspire a bit of a cultural change, to break the stigma around death. It’s great to have young people involved in the conversation because death can happen at any time to anyone.”
A chance to say goodbye
As our death rituals evolve, many are choosing to not just take control over what happens after they’ve passed, but while they’re still alive. Living wakes are growing in popularity as a way for people to celebrate their lives and bid farewell to loved ones before they’ve passed.
The spirit and shape of living wakes is incredibly varied, says Stocken, pointing out even the names used for them vary, from celebrations of life to living funerals.
Some, she says, are held by the elderly – something that was particularly popular in Japan in the 1990s as an ageing population sought to relieve their children of the burden of a funeral.
Others are those she describes as “imaginings of dying”, which are hosted by people of all ages and stages of life. Originating in South Korea as a response to rising suicide rates, these living funerals talk participants through the process of dying.
The third kind of living wake – the focus of Stocken’s research and the most common kind in Australia – are held by those for whom death is imminent. These, she says, are a way for people to say goodbye to their loved ones, and an opportunity for “the person who’s actually dying to really lead the way in what they want.”
Rhonda Jansen with her husband Mark, who had a living wake before passing away from bowel cancer in 2019.
Rhonda Jansen, a mindset coach and clinical hypnotherapist from the Sunshine Coast, held a living wake for her husband five months after he was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer in 2019.
One night, after receiving his terminal diagnosis, Mark told Jansen he had been visited by his late father.
As Jansen remembers, he told her his dad sat down on the side of his bed and said to him, “It’s OK, son. When it’s time, I’ll be here to hold your hand.”
While Mark was not a spiritual person, the visit was a turning point for him.
“He was really angry and upset and sad and worried about me and the boys, but after that, he was at peace,” she says.
After this, Mark started talking about the idea of having a living wake. The memorial was held at a local power boat club, where Mark could farewell those close to him and photos and mementos from his life were shared. Loved ones who were unable to attend sent in pre-recorded video messages.
“To see him so happy and feeling so loved was really special because when people have a funeral, and they’ve already passed over, they don’t get to feel the love in the room. Mark got to feel the love.”
Nine days after the wake, Mark passed away. He was cremated as per his wishes, and his ashes scattered by his motorbike friends from Corona bottles (his favourite beer) along one of his favourite riding routes.
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