Meet Sydney’s funeral workers
MEET the people who help us say goodbye to our loved ones, from grave diggers who prepare the ground for the last farewell to embalmers who dress your beloved departed.
Local
Don't miss out on the headlines from Local. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Grave concern: Sydney is running out of space to bury its dead
- Gallery: Sydney’s 10 most famous graves
- Drone footage: Sydney cemeteries fly-over
TODAY we meet the people who help us say goodbye to our loved ones.
There are currently around 1,887 funeral workers working in NSW, from the grave diggers who prepare the ground for your last farewell and the embalmers who dress your beloved departed so you can see them one final time.
Then there is the florist who picks the flowers you will leave at their graveside, the stonemason who will carve their eternal marker, and the undertaker who can help ease the burden of many decisions that need to be made at this difficult time.
Australia’s $1 billion death industry wouldn’t work without them.
Suzanne and Stephen Lambert, morticians and embalmers
SUZANNE and Stephen Lambert are a regular married couple who prove every day that death won’t part them.
You see the couple work together as morticians and embalmers in Sydney’s west. As far as they know are the only husband and wife duo in Australia to do so.
It is their job to preserve, sanitise and prepare the bodies of deceased people for presentation and burial using special embalming fluids that are injected into the body to slow its decomposition.
Mrs Lambert said embalming was about problem-solving, and make-up made up only about two per cent of the job. If the family wanted a viewing then they must work out ways to make the person look like they did in life — even if the body was traumatised.
Mrs Lambert said the job of preparing a body for burial was especially challenging after incidents of severe trauma.
Everyday items such as golf and tennis balls, wire, coat hangers, or even playdough, could be used to mould features on a deceased person. “Sometimes we get a photo if we’re lucky,” she said.
Mr Lambert said after 21 years he’d finished “being confronted” by death and was never surprised by requests from bereaved families.
With full arterial embalming, which is required by law if the body is to be buried in an above-ground crypt, he said the blood is removed from the body via the veins and replaced with solutions via the arteries.
With cavity embalming, a long metal tube attached to a suction hose is used to puncture the stomach, bladder, large intestines, and lungs. Gas and body fluids are withdrawn before cavity fluid is injected into the body.
Mr Lambert said they worked with about 1100 dead bodies every year.
He used to be a security guard and his wife was a professional bodybuilder, triathlete, and fitness instructor. The pair met at an open day at Rookwood Cemetery.
Mrs Lambert said she kept expecting the first dead body she worked on to breathe. “They’re just so still,” she said.
They’re still, and they’re extremely pallid.
Mr Lambert said they used Introfiant, a very light purple fluid, to put the colour back in a deceased person’s cheeks. Often that was enough.
■ Embalmers complete a Certificate IV in Embalming, currently only on offer in Melbourne, Victoria.
Sydney cemeteries fly-over
Tony Sprem, the undertaker
HIS is not an easy job.
Kellyville’s Tony Sprem helps grief-stricken relatives when death comes knocking at the door.
A funeral director conductor with Blessed Funerals, he helps the relatives left behind — sometimes as often as 10 times a week — make many of the decisions needed to be made at this very emotionally fraught time.
“We arrange everything, from the transfer of the deceased — sometimes if they die at home (the body) may go to a coroner — to booking the chapel, arranging celebrants, the hearse, music, memorial cards and flowers.
“We conduct the service on the day. We also arrange viewings, and assist with wakes after the service.”
Mr Sprem said it could be particularly confronting planning a funeral for a parent who had lost a baby or where a young teenager had committed suicide.
“They’re really hard,” Mr Sprem adding, “but it can also be quite rewarding, helping families at a difficult time.”
He works across Sydney’s North Shore and Inner West, as well as in Western Sydney.
“Americans say ‘undertaker’ but we say ‘funeral director,” he said.
He said the profession required a calm, compassionate and understanding disposition.
“Sometimes people ask, ‘Why do you need a coffin to be cremated?’ You need the body to be in a coffin to push it onto the cremation rollers.”
Cremators generally comprise of a main cremating chamber, a secondary air chamber and a holding chamber. The coffin is cremated within the main chamber, with only one coffin placed inside the main cremation chamber at any one time.
“The oven is about 1400-1800 degrees,” Mr Sprem said.
“On average it takes about three hours for a body to be cremated.”
He said across the funeral industry, funerals start at $2000-$4000 “for no service, no attendance”.
A spokesman for InvoCare, who own and operate 14 cemeteries and crematoria in NSW including Minchinbury’s Pinegrove Memorial Park, spoke of a western Sydney family who had recently spent $1.5 million on a custom memorial for their loved one.
“Like a wedding, funerals can be a couple thousand (dollars) to the sky’s the limit,” Pinegrove family services manager, Michael Bridges, said.
“I’ve seen a service in (our) Rookwood Cemetery section that was $130,000.
“They spent $40,000 on flowers, the casket was imported from Vietnam for $37,000 and they had very elaborate limousines.”
InvoCare’s state general manager Vijay Singh reasoned, “You have three houses in life: the one you’re born into, the one you marri into, and the one you reside in for eternity — and you will invest in them all.”
Matthew Johnson, the stonemason
MATTHEW Johnson works at Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery as a stonemason.
When he isn’t constructing new monuments, and repairing, restoring and preserving historical ones on site, he completes monumental conservation projects outside the gates of Rookwood.
There were 14 such projects at Rookwood in 2015/16.
“We’ve worked on First Fleet monuments, pioneers of the area, WWI and WWII veterans, and the foundation stone of the Sydney Harbour Bridge,” Mr Johnson, of Hurstville, said.
Most recently the 29-year-old spent a week restoring Australia’s oldest known surviving stone memorial to British explorer Captain James Cook (1728-1779), a milestone obelisk showing distances to Sydney and Campbelltown normally found in Bigge Park, Liverpool.
He said where possible he uses a hammer and chisel to carry out his work.
“It has that hand feel to it that a machine can’t replicate,” he explained.
He said a typical preservation project would take two people a week to complete. The monuments they handle would typically weigh 1200 kilograms.
A carpenter by trade, Mr Johnson also holds a Master of Heritage Conservation.
‘Leaves from the Tree’: The story of Rookwood
Yulia Roytblat, the cemetery florist
FORMER electrical engineer Yulia Roytblat is proud to be Rookwood Cemetery’s on site florist.
“I love everything about it (floristry),” Ms Roytblat, of Lidcombe, said.
The Ukrainian-born senior florist said she felt especially honoured to be bring some small comfort to the relatives and friends of the deceased in their time of grief by providing funeral and memorial flowers with which to send them off.
For her assistant, Annie Tombs, it was deeply personal. “My mum’s (buried) here,” she said.
The pair make about 150 flower arrangements a week at the Village Flower Shop, including wedding arrangements.
“If we’re busy, like Mother’s Day, we will have about 40 orders for the one day,” Ms Roytblat said.
On their most popular day of this year, Father’s Day, they sold out.
Most requested is the white lily. Its flower meaning is ‘purity’.
“For most cultures (they will choose) white, cream or pastel; not too bright, happy,” Ms Roytblat, of Lidcombe, said.
She said parents who had lost a child often chose a “delicate posy in soft pink or blue” to lay at the gravesite. Sometimes parents asked for the child’s favourite toy, or a photo of the child, to be attached to the personalised floral composition.
“For children you feel a little bit more emotional,” Ms Tombs said, adding “Julia and I are both parents”.
The pair buy the flowers they use fresh from Flemington Markets daily.
Despite symbolising ‘sorrow’, no one has yet asked for a black rose.
“I had in my memory one surprise — one lady called and asked for lotus flowers,” Ms Roytblat said. “I personally love them ... that was a very unusual request.”
Ms Tombs, who is also from Lidcombe, said she had seen her colleague make a funerary flower arrangement in three minutes.
But Ms Rotblat modestly played down the idea, saying “it’s all about experience”. She has 16 years’ worth.
■ A typical funerary flower arrangement, including wrapping, takes 12-15 minutes to make.
■ Village Flower Shop prices range from $5 for everyday flowers and $65 for classic bouquets, to $95 for a lilac collection box and $95 for an Australian native wreath.
■ The shop’s deluxe wreath, The Elegant Delphinium, includes delphinium blooms styled with contrasting floral blooms including gerberas. It costs $120.
■ Natives were the most longlasting, and the purple statice. Statice is the shop’s bestseller.
Mark Bundy, the gravedigger
NOT many people can say they’re in a dead zone when they pick up the phone, and literally mean it.
But then they haven’t met Mark Bundy, the head grave digger at Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, also known as the ‘Sleeping City’ where over one million people now reside.
“It’s the biggest conversation starter, ‘Where do you work?’” Mr Bundy said.
In death, burial fees include the operator’s costs of digging the grave, backfilling the grave (which is done by hand in the case of Jewish faith burials at Rookwood), and re-landscaping.
As his title suggests, Mr Grundy digs these graves before funeral services can take place.
He sometimes refers to himself, tongue firmly planted in cheek, as an “underground engineer”, adding the correct title nowadays would be “funeral technician”.
He said no one had ever fallen in a fresh hole under his watch, in 25 years.
“If the gravediggers were doing their job, they’d hold them back,” he said.
He went on to explain it was near on impossible to topple in.
“A lot of people do love having a stickybeak, but we have two points of entry,” Mr Bundy said.
“(Grave diggers) put a board over the top (of the hole) first, which is a metal board that will take my weight. They’ll then put witches hats on top and, sometimes, they put a crossover on top of that.”
He said he was yet to see a ghost but did relate a funny anecdote of a man who bought a coffin he kept by his bed. “He’d joke to his wife, ‘If I croak in the middle of the night, just roll me into it’. “He was eventually buried in that coffin (12 years later) at Rookwood.”
Mr Bundy said when Haslam’s Creek Cemetery (modern-day Rookwood) became operational in 1867 each religion had its own grave digger, making reference to the old Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Catholic, Church of England, Jewish, and independent sections.
In 1869, a railway line was extended into the cemetery by a spur line from Lidcombe, travelling south along Barnett Ave, and a railway station was built in the centre of the cemetery, he said pointing to the remnants of the No. 1 Mortuary Receiving Railway Station in the heart of Rookwood. There would eventually be four such stations.
Funeral trains carried up to 30 coffins and mourners from the Mortuary Station at Central to Rookwood. Twice-daily services operated and tickets were one shilling each way. Corpses travelled free.
“To stop the funeral train you’d hold out a red flag,” Mr Bundy said. “The families would help take the caskets off the train, and you would then go meet your grave digger. Half an hour before the train would leave you would hear a bell ring.”
He said it could be confronting dealing with grief-stricken and sometimes very angry mourners.
“What they see is ‘you’re the last one to touch our loved one’,” he said.
“My dad even said to me years ago, ‘the dead can’t hurt you; only the living can’.”
Heartbreak could also stop a staff member from wanting, or continuing, to work in the field.
He described a long-serving Rookwood gravedigger who lost the will to do the job after he lost two babies.
Exhuming a body to cremate it, or relocate it, was another challenge. Depending on the level of decomposition, you may be passing parts of a body up to another grave digger, he said.
Studies show the body starts to become stiff after around three hours in death, as a result of rigor mortis, before relaxing again after 30 hours. When buried six feet down without a coffin, in ordinary soil, an unembalmed adult normally takes eight to 12 years to decompose to a skeleton.
The coffin type slows down this process, as does the type of soil in which it is buried.
Mr Bundy said bodies were known to break down a lot quicker in sand, making reference to the Palmdale Lawn Cemetery & Memorial Park and the Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park in Botany. He said in contrast, the shale in Rookwood’s soil served as a body preservative.
He recounted exhuming the mother of a woman, with whom she wished to be buried, and finding the mother’s wedding ring. He said it was touching reuniting the daughter with the family relic.
“We’ve had ones (exhumations) where the police were involved,” Mr Bundy said, making reference to murdered Sydney prostitute Sallie-Anne Huckstepp who blew the whistle on crooked cops. “Police wanted to check under her fingernails for any DNA evidence.”
Rookwood has 92 full-time employees, including 16 grave diggers who attend three to four funerals daily. They are currently looking to employ one other.
A rare opportunity for an apprentice gravedigger at Rookwood
Grave diggers stay for the entire burial service, even if it lasts several hours, and then backfill the grave after the last member of the immediate family has left the graveside. They also place people’s ashes in the earth, crypts, and mausoleums.
The cemetery offers more than 130 culturally specific and non-denominational interment areas and practises 14 burial types, and has three training graves where people can be taught the correct way to lower a casket. “I’d rather people learn here than going to a gravesite ... and getting their hands caught,” Mr Bundy said.
Grave diggers complete a Certificate III in Gravedigging, Grounds and Maintenance at TAFE which teaches how to dig graves (manually and using machinery), how to exhume burial sites, and how to deal with grief, among other things.
Mr Bundy, also the general manager of operations at Rookwood General Cemeteries Reserve Trust, starts them off in maintenance and then slowly introduces them to funerals to see if they are comfortable. As part of their TAFE training they also learn how to deal with soil conditions, cultural differences regarding burials, and how to dispose of bodies in compliance with the NSW Health Department.
Mr Bundy said Jewish faith burial plots were backfilled by hand, while the Islamic burial guidelines required bodies be buried facing west towards Mecca. Both faiths forbade cremations.
“The Muslim faith are buried in underground tombs, by 5.30pm in daylight savings,” he said. “We always have two graves ready to go because their belief is to be buried in 24 hours.”
■ famous grave diggers include British serial killer Peter Sutcliffe and Abraham Lincoln, later President of the United States, who worked as a sexton in a churchyard in Indiana
■ 4 tonnes of dirt goes into a new grave at Rookwood
■ a mini excavator dig takes 30 minutes, versus all day for a hand dig
■ there are currently around 1887 funeral workers working in NSW, taking home $1,024 a week on average (before tax)
In pictures
WE lift the lid on Sydney’s most popular gravesites, from the freakiest resting place in Sydney’s west to arguably the most unusual headstone in the eastern suburbs.
