Ocean views, quiet neighbours and a $165,000 price tag: The other property boom
Like Australia’s long-running housing crisis, high demand and land scarcity have led to another – albeit subterranean – accommodation crunch: we’re running out of grave sites to bury our dead.
By Tim Elliott
Sydneysiders have been buried at Rookwood Cemetery since 1867 but there is a shortage of available land for graves – here and nationally – for the newly deceased.Credit: Wolter Peeters
In early September, I did what many Sydneysiders do in spring and went to inspect a piece of real estate. The property, which had been advertised on Facebook Marketplace – among all the pre-loved sofas and inflatable Santas – was in the city’s eastern suburbs, home to some of Australia’s wealthiest people. According to the ad, this particular property was perched high on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and offered “breathtaking views” in a “serene and protected environment”. The only drawback was its size: it was small. Like, really small. Like, just big enough for two people to lie side by side. This was because the property was a burial plot.
“I’m a bit of a novice at this,” says agent Mark Gilden, when I meet him at the entrance of Waverley Cemetery, near Bronte Beach. “I’ve never sold a grave before.”
Gilden, who is 71, is perky and shrewd, with bird of prey eyes, as if always alert for a potential sale. He’s dressed in activewear and a pair of turquoise HOKA runners. (He’s just come from the gym.) Like most estate agents around here, his stock in trade is luxury property: in December he sold a block of apartments in Lamrock Avenue, Bondi, for $24 million. Just half an hour before meeting me, he’d settled on a $2.6 million apartment in nearby Bellevue Hill. He is selling the burial plot for a friend, who inherited it from a distant relative.
We drive through the cemetery, which is spectacular, with sweeping views east over the Pacific and north towards Bondi Beach. This is one of Sydney’s most Instagrammable necropoli: plenty of movies and TV series have been filmed here. But the burial plot itself isn’t much to look at; just a patch of grass, 3.6 metres long by 1.8 metres wide and 1.8 metres deep, and bordered by a lip of carved sandstone. It’s vacant – no one has ever been buried here – and it has capacity for two full interments, four cremation urns and additional ashes.
“It’s got lots of features,” Gilden says, leaning into his pitch. “There’s a tap right next to it for washing your hands or watering flowers, and it’s right by the cemetery’s internal road, so you don’t have to walk over other graves to get to it.” Lots of famous people are buried here: poets Henry Lawson and Dorothea Mackellar (she of “I love a sunburnt country”), and AC/DC guitarist Malcolm Young. “You’d be among esteemed corpses,” Gilden says. “Or esteemed people. Or ex-people.”
It’s not cheap: $165,000, or $25,463 per square metre. (Though Gilden, lowering his voice slightly, says he could do me “a good deal”.) As with all real estate, the plot’s price reflects its location. But there is another, equally salient factor, one that sits at the heart of almost every transaction, and that is scarcity. Vacant burial plots here are vanishingly rare. And Waverley is not alone. This cemetery, like so many in Australia, is running out of space.
That Australia has a housing crisis is hardly a secret. But there is another housing crisis going on, right beneath our feet. In short, we’re running out of places to bury people. Public cemeteries across NSW, Victoria and Queensland are bursting at the seams. One recent NSW government report suggested several of Sydney’s largest cemeteries will be full by August 2027. Some faith groups, including Muslims and Orthodox Christians, which don’t allow cremation, could run out of graves as soon as next year.
“The reality is that we haven’t been building enough cemeteries,” says Australasian Cemeteries and Crematoria Association CEO Ben Kelly. “In Sydney, the Macarthur Memorial Park, near Campbelltown, opened in 2025, but that was the first cemetery built on Crown land in 80 years.”
In Melbourne, meanwhile, about a third of the 20 cemeteries managed by the not-for-profit General Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust are either full or are reaching capacity. The 128-hectare Harkness Cemetery, in Melton West, which is due to open in 2027, will be the largest new cemetery in 100 years. The shortage is particularly acute on the Mornington Peninsula. “We’ve only got 80 spots left,” says Rye Cemetery Trust chairman Ian McBeath. “We’ll run out of space in five years. I’ve written to everyone in state government I can think of, but no one has responded.”
With room running out elsewhere in Melbourne, the 128-hectare Harkness cemetery in Melton West will be the city’s largest new cemetery in 100 years.Credit: Jason South
About 180,000 Australians die every year. About 70 per cent are cremated. But this still leaves tens of thousands of people who need to be put in the ground. You would think that in a country as big and empty as Australia, this wouldn’t be a problem. But it’s not that simple. You can’t just build a cemetery in the middle of nowhere, since the whole point of a cemetery is that loved ones can visit it. You also have to find the right type of land. The soil can’t be too hard or soft or likely to subside. It can’t be too steep (it’s dangerous to use digging equipment). It can’t be at risk of bushfires, or on boggy ground, where the water table is too high, or on land that is prone to flooding. A 1974 flood in Queanbeyan, on the border of NSW and the ACT, washed out 50 graves from the Riverside Cemetery. Some remains reportedly floated downriver and into Lake Burley Griffin. Early this year, excess groundwater scuppered plans for a 30-hectare cemetery – enough for 18,000 graves – in NSW’s Southern Tablelands, which was intended to service Queanbeyan and the growing town of Googong.
There are some short-term solutions. Most graves in Australia are now double- or even triple-depth, allowing for family members to be stacked one atop the other. But it’s hard to scale up this practice, since most families are reluctant to allow a stranger to be buried on top of grandpa. In many other sectors, private industry would step in, but most cemeteries are owned and operated by the government. In Sydney, where grave sites are running out fastest, only 6 per cent of cemeteries are privately run, and Victoria doesn’t allow private ownership at all. (In Queensland, meanwhile, the main players are church groups and governments, both state and local.) This is a problem, since, despite the fact that people keep on dying, most governments don’t consider cemeteries to be essential infrastructure. “It’s not a very sexy topic,” says Kelly. “Politicians don’t like to announce they’re building a new cemetery. They prefer to announce the construction of an airport.”
‘It’s not a very sexy topic. Politicians don’t like to announce they’re building a new cemetery.’
Australasian Cemeteries and Crematoria Association CEO Ben Kelly
For a government to get a big new cemetery over the line, it has to get community buy-in, but most voters are vehemently opposed to the idea of having dead people anywhere near them. In August 2025, the NSW government announced a plan to convert Carnarvon Golf Course, in Lidcombe in Sydney’s west, into a 70,000-plot cemetery. In the best tradition of funerary euphemism, the government is calling the cemetery a “modern memorial park”, pitching it less as a burial ground than a suburban arcadia with native gardens, running paths and picnic areas. Most of the graves will be “lawn interments”, which have lower, less obtrusive plaques instead of headstones; water features, such as lakes and ponds, will provide calm and reflective spaces. There may also be a “death cafe”, an open forum where people can talk about mortality under the guidance of an end-of-life doula. It’s been a valiant attempt to reframe what is essentially an enormous graveyard, but the locals aren’t buying it. Cumberland City mayor Ola Hamed has rejected the proposal outright, and the locals have vowed to fight it.
Ultimately, our aversion to death is hard to shift, because it is deep-seated and cultural. Kelly is at ease with final farewells, and he is fascinated by the mechanics of mortality – the viewing salons and fridge rooms, the next-gen, double-chambered, emissions-reducing cremators – but he’s far from the norm. “Most people don’t often think about death,” he says. “That’s understandable, but the reality is that if this is a low priority for individuals, it’ll also be a low priority for our elected officials, which means that we won’t have enough cemeteries, and we’ll keep running out of graves.”
Humans are the only species to ritually bury their dead, and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. “Before we had tools, we’d put rocks on the body to show reverence,” says Sam Holleran. “It was a way of stopping, of taking the time to mark the passing of someone’s life, as well as protecting the body from predators.”
Holleran is a specialist in the history of cemeteries and a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne, where he writes research papers with titles such as Library of Stone: Cemeteries, Storytelling, and the Preservation of Urban Infrastructures of Death and Mourning. He says the idea of large, public cemeteries is relatively recent: “Until about 220 years ago, most people were buried in local churchyards, according to their denominations.” In the early 1800s, however, medical authorities were taken with the miasma theory – the idea that diseases were caused by bad air, like that seeping from the local graveyard. It was thought preferable that corpses be interred in designated areas, usually on the outskirts of towns. “At the same time, as cities became more industrialised, cemeteries came to be seen as restorative and spiritual, and were planted out with trees and grass.”
But as cities grew, they inevitably swallowed up their cemeteries. Between 1877 and 1922, for instance, Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, in the CBD, slowly built over the top of the Old Melbourne Cemetery, home to some 10,000 graves, including that of John Batman, the city’s founder. It’s thought that as many as 9000 bodies remain, some lying as little as 1.5 metres below the market’s car park. Sydney’s Devonshire Street Cemetery suffered a similar fate: consecrated in 1820, the graveyard was resumed in 1901 to make way for Central Station. Most of the bodies were removed, but an unknown number lie buried beneath the railway lines and platforms, driven to distraction, perhaps, by the 250,000 people who pass through here every day.
Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery: a plot here was listed for $165,000.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Many of the corpses disinterred from Devonshire Street were relocated to Rookwood Cemetery, on what was then the city’s western periphery. Recently I paid a visit to Rookwood, which today is very much in the guts of the city, just 30 minutes’ drive from the CBD. I’d always been told that Rookwood was a big place, but that’s not correct: Rookwood is in fact awesomely huge; some 314 hectares, to be precise, and it is the largest necropolis in the southern hemisphere. There are 1 million people buried here, almost the population of two Tasmanias. It has 51 kilometres of internal footpaths and it is classed as a suburb in its own right.
One thing that strikes you as you drive around its grounds is the amount of activity: for a place full of dead people, Rookwood is remarkably busy: there are men in high-vis vests driving ride-on mowers, workers whipper-snippering the verges and inspecting stonework. In the middle distance, I spot a large piece of earth-moving equipment, no doubt doing what earth-moving equipment does in a cemetery. Rookwood is multi-faith and each religion and ethnic group has its own dedicated area. Each group tends to have a signature memorial aesthetic: seen at a distance, the cemetery approximates an enormous, sprawling quilt of plaques, plinths, mausoleums, sandstone crosses and Gothic statuary.
“Rookwood does 2200 burials a year, the largest number of in-ground interments in Sydney,” says Cemeteries and Crematoria Association NSW chairman Rob Smart, who takes me on a tour in his minivan. “It’s also the cemetery under the most pressure. So what we are doing now is squeezing every last inch out of the land.”
Smart, who is 53, has a closely cropped, salt-and-pepper beard and a gentle, vaguely bear-like demeanour. He has worked at Rookwood since 2014. Having access to public burial ground, he believes, is a matter of basic human dignity and cultural respect, which is why finding space for everyone is a matter of urgency. He takes me to the Macedonian section, where there are plans to convert a small grassed car park into space for more graves. This, together with five other pockets of land nearby, will add perhaps 200 extra graves, enough to give the Macedonian community another 18 months of burials. We then drive through one of the main Chinese areas, where several rows of trees were recently felled to make way for more plots. “We try to avoid cutting down trees where possible,” Smart says. “Canopy loss isn’t ideal, because cemeteries typically have lots of stone in them and can turn into real heat sinks.”
Rookwood, which was founded in 1867, has many disused buildings: old offices, staff accommodation, maintenance sheds. Anything that doesn’t have heritage value may, in the future, be demolished to make way for burials. Rookwood also uses a company called Plotbox to identify unused land. Plotbox, which was founded in Ireland in 2019, uses software, aerial imaging and cemetery records to find old, unmarked graves, or areas that cemeteries thought they had sold but are actually vacant.
Most of Rookwood is under pressure, but it’s in the Muslim section where the shortage of space is most acute. Here, in the cemetery’s south-western corner, the graves go to within a metre of the perimeter fence. “The Muslim community is the fastest-growing demographic we have,” Smart says. “Five years ago, we buried 440 Muslims a year. Now it’s 560.”
Islam doesn’t permit cremation, allowing no alternative to in-ground interment. “It’s a religious imperative,” says Lebanese Muslim Association president Hafez Alameddine. “The idea is that you’re meant to go back to the creator the way you were created.”
Muslims aren’t alone in this: Jews and Orthodox Christians are also spiritually obligated to bury their dead. But the rate at which the Muslim community is growing means it’s running out of plots faster than the others. “We’re also an ageing community,” says Alameddine. “In the next four to five years, the death rate will increase dramatically, which will put more pressure on us.”
Alameddine is lobbying the state government for more allocations in public cemeteries, as well as buying space in private ones. So far, the LMA has secured some 10,000 plots across three sites on the periphery of Sydney that are run by the private funeral and cemetery operator InvoCare. But this is a short-term solution. “Time gets away from you and before you know it, you’re back in the same position.”
In the meantime, he engages in what might best be described as grave trading. “[Catholic Cemeteries and Crematoria] has some excess land at Rookwood that they don’t use, and there have been discussions around them allowing us to use it.”
Such arrangements are not uncommon. About 10 years ago, the Anglican community identified a parcel of land at Rookwood that it had no immediate need for. After some discussion, the Anglicans decided to reallocate the land to the Jewish and Muslim communities. The Jews then agreed to hand over their portion to the Muslims, whose requirements were more urgent, on the condition that Rookwood would make another site available to the Jews at some time in the future.
Former Jewish Board of Deputies president David Knoll, who helped organise the deal, says such agreements have benefited all parties. The Islamic community has “traditionally reciprocated”, he says, but the events of October 7, 2023, have made that “more difficult … A number of the sheiks have taken the view that there should be no co-operation between Muslims and Jews”.
When I ask Alameddine about this, he seems baffled. “That’s not my view at all. We might not agree on everything in life,” he says, “but in death we co-operate quite well.”
The idea of an old-fashioned burial – one with a tomb, a plaque, a carved headstone with an eloquent epitaph – is deeply quixotic. “We like to think of a grave as something that will last throughout time,” says Australian Death Studies Society president Dr Hannah Gould. “That’s why we build monuments out of stone, not paper. It’s a way to try to achieve immortality. But even stone crumbles.”
The illusion of immortality is at the heart of the current crisis. It also explains “perpetual tenure”, which basically means that once a person is buried, they must remain buried, in their grave, undisturbed, forever and ever, until the end of time. Gould describes this idea as “preposterous”. Despite that, perpetual tenure has been the norm in Australia since white settlement. As a result, Australian cemeteries are filled with mouldering, overgrown graves that no one visits, because everyone who ever knew the deceased is also dead and buried. Perpetual tenure is a problem on many levels, not least financially, because while a grave can be sold just once, it has to be maintained, in theory at least, forever.
Fortunately, there are other options. One of them is renewable tenure, whereby a burial site is leased for a limited time, usually 25, 50 or 99 years. Once that time expires, there is an option to extend. If that option is not taken up, efforts are made to find the next of kin or the leaseholder. Depending on where you are in Australia, this can take anywhere between a year or two years, during which the cemetery places a notice on the grave to contact the administration. Similar notices are placed on the cemetery’s website, in local newspapers and on social media. If after that period of time no one makes contact, the cemetery can reuse the grave. The headstone is taken away, crushed, then made into more headstones. The plot is then subject to a “lift and deepen”, whereby the remains are exhumed and the grave is deepened; the remains are then re-interred, further down, freeing up space above for another body.
Renewable tenure is widely practised in South Australia; Tasmania and NSW offer it, Victoria doesn’t, and in Western Australia, it’s mandatory. “Recycling graves is the norm in many parts of the world,” says Sam Holleran. “The Germans would find nothing remarkable about this.” Neither would the Greeks, who, in their homeland, routinely disinter the bones of their loved ones after a few years and place them in an ossuary. In Singapore, where land is especially scarce, renewable tenure is set at 15 years.
Other, more sustainable burial practices are emerging in Australia, but they remain niche. The Kurweeton Road Cemetery, near Camperdown in regional Victoria, offers vertical burials, where people are interred standing up. The cemetery, which has been operating since 2010, has now performed more than 100 burials. Another 1000 have signed up for a plot. You can also be buried at sea, but this requires a permit from the federal government (at a cost of $1675) and a valid reason, such as the deceased having been a fisherman or a surfer or having served in the navy.
Overseas, cemeteries have assumed more creative forms. The Brazilian city of Santos hosts a high-rise cemetery, a 14-storey tower called the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica. The building is singularly depressing – picture an abandoned Travelodge in a developing country circa 1973 – but at a height of 108 metres, the necrópole, which contains 14,000 vaults, is listed in Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest cemetery. The Gold Coast, no stranger to depressing high-rises, briefly entertained something similar, before Mayor Tom Tate ruled it out in 2021. There is also an underwater cemetery, called the Neptune Memorial Reef, off the coast of Miami, Florida, where cremated remains are cast into concrete memorials and placed about 12 metres deep.
Neptune Memorial Reef off Miami stores cremated remains.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
These are novel ideas, to be sure. But they still take up space. For a final farewell with no physical footprint, one Sydney firm allows for one’s “cremains” to be placed in a firework mortar and shot into the sky. Of course, being blasted into eternity isn’t everyone’s bag but it’s an example of what can be done, given an open mind and enough explosives. There are now companies that convert your remains into jewellery, compressing your ashes at high pressure and temperatures to create “memorial diamonds”. Music lovers can have their ashes pressed into bespoke vinyl records. Gardeners can have their “cremains” planted at the base of a tree.
As tempting as these options are – imagine eating an apple that grew from a tree you fertilised with your dad’s ashes? – the reality is that most people who want to get buried are going to do so in a cemetery. Making them sustainable, then, is a priority. If Hannah Gould had her way, renewable tenure would be the default option, Australia-wide. “It would bring equality in states and territories,” she says. “It’s unfair that, depending on where you die, you have different rights as to how you’re buried and how long your grave lasts.”
Reusing graves would also guarantee that we can keep our urban cemeteries alive, as places of active mourning and burial. “You don’t want our cities to become entirely deathless,” she says. “The removal of death from the city is something that should be mourned. And, ironically, cemeteries die when they become full, and when the only people who can get in are the privileged few.”
Even if grave recycling became the norm, certain cemeteries would no doubt be exempt, one of them Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery, which is heritage-listed. This explains why space here is so rare, and why that aforementioned double plot is being advertised for $165,000. Towards the end of writing this story, I get a message from the estate agent, Mark Gilden, to say he’d finally sold it. “It was a local family,” he says. “They’re thrilled.” I had assumed he’d had to lower the price, but he says that wasn’t necessary. Selling the plot was, as with most things in life and death, just a matter of time.
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