Adelaide Cemeteries boss Michael Robertson urges discussion to legalise human composting
The Adelaide Cemeteries chief says growing public interest demands serious consideration of a bold new burial method. Have your say.
The boss of Adelaide’s largest cemetery group wants the state government to consider legalising human composting as more people inquire about transforming their bodies into soil.
Adelaide Cemeteries chief executive Michael Robertson said he was fielding an increasing number of questions about a process which is now legal in 14 states in America.
Human composting involves the body of a deceased person being placed in a reusable vessel, along with plant material such as wood chips, straw and alfalfa.
The vessel is closed and rotated regularly and over the course of several weeks the body and plant material are transformed into a nutrient-dense soil, which is returned to the family and can be used as a compost.
“Adelaide Cemeteries is certainly at the forefront of responding to the changing end-of-life wishes for people – we do see a growing interest in human composting,” Mr Robertson said.
“We see this as aligning with the trend of a growing number of South Australians for whom the environment is a consideration when it comes to end-of-life planning.”
Mr Robertson said he believed human composting would eventually be an option in South Australia, but legalising the process would require significant legislative change.
“I think it’s really important to ensure that the industry is listening to the changing needs of the community,” Mr Robertson said.
“We need to make sure that people are understanding what’s going to happen and have the controls in place for it.”
Mr Robertson said allowing human composting would require “robust” changes to South Australia’s Burial and Cremation Act, which currently only permits bodily remains to be interred in prescribed burial grounds.
Human composting is not legal in any Australian state or territory, but a petition before NSW parliament is calling for it to be added to the lawful methods of body disposition.
A spokeswoman said the SA Government recognised there were people looking for the option of more eco-friendly burials.
“While reform in this area is not a priority for the government, it has sought further advice (from the Attorney-General’s Department) on alternative methods of burial and cremation not currently allowed for under South Australia’s Burial and Cremation Act,” she said.
Mr Robertson has also called for community discussion about the growing demand for burial space across the Adelaide metropolitan area.
He said Adelaide Cemeteries remained on the hunt for a “significant parcel of land” in the southern suburbs. Four years ago, the organisation flagged the desire to find 20 hectares of land in the south.
Nearly 16,000 South Australians died last year, a figure predicted to rise by up to 40 per cent by 2050.
Adelaide Cemeteries runs four large sites: Enfield Memorial Park, West Terrace Cemetery, Cheltenham Cemetery and Smithfield Memorial Park.
The expansion of the Smithfield site from 19 to 50 hectares in the past few years has left Mr Robinson confident there will be enough grave sites in the northern suburbs “for generations to come”.
GRAVE PLANS TO BRING BUSH BACK TO LIFE
A new natural burial ground on the outskirts of Goolwa promises to be the first in Australia aiming to restore and revegetate land back to its native state.
Wattlewood natural burial ground is a six-hectare site surrounding the historic but long-abandoned Old Goolwa Cemetery. Charity Natural Burial Ground Trust of Australia has leased the land from Alexandrina Council and plans to direct all profit back into the environment, either at Wattlewood itself or at other projects run by partner organisation Nature Foundation.
Natural Burial Ground Trust of Australia founder Kevin Hartley said he hoped the burial ground would be ready to accept its first interment before Christmas.
The site would also be the first public natural burial ground in South Australia not aligned with an existing traditional cemetery.
Natural burials are when a body is returned to the earth in either a shroud or a biodegradable coffin to become part of the ecosystem. Bodies are not chemically preserved through embalming and are not adorned with any clothes or jewellery that is not compostable. There are no headstones at natural burial grounds, but the location of bodies is marked by GPS or computer chip technology.
South Australia is experiencing a mini-boom in public natural burial grounds to complement more established Adelaide Cemeteries sites at Enfield and Smithfield. Adelaide Hills Council opened Martungka natural burial ground at Kersbrook Cemetery last year and Mount Barker Council is assessing several locations, including existing graveyards, for a natural burial ground as part of a broader review into cemeteries.
Son’s death sparked mum’s life mission
An emotional Abby Buckley has no idea why she is sobbing uncontrollably on the phone in the middle of Adelaide.
It’s just after 11.15am on a Wednesday and she’s just rushed out on to the street from a training course she had been attending in Angus St.
There had been nothing unusual about the morning until a few minutes earlier when a wave of emotion inexplicably rose up from her chest until it became a lump in her throat. As this happened, a simple, single word was on repeat in her head: Love. Love. Love.
And now, here she is on the phone to her husband Shane, wondering why the heck she is so upset as passers-by give her polite side-glances before moving on their way.
She manages to calm herself down, gets on with her day and even heads to the shops after catching the train back to Gawler later that night.
But then, when she gets home about 7.30pm, her heart sinks. There’s a police car in her driveway. The officers want to come inside to chat. Before they even say anything, she knows it’s about her son Robbie.
She has time to ponder the strangeness of having armed officers in her house before they tell her the news. Robbie died in a car accident earlier that day. He was 22.
The accident happened in Newcastle, NSW, where Robbie, who had graduated from Gawler’s Trinity College four years earlier, had just finished an architecture degree and was about to embark on his masters.
“I just went into this really weird space,” Buckley says. “It was almost like I could feel myself drifting out (of) the right side of my head … and I just felt nothing.
“I remember having the thought, ‘This is really bad but I have no idea how to respond.’ So I was just sort of there.”
She asked the officers what time Robbie had died. It had been 11.45pm Sydney time, 11.15am Adelaide time. The same time as her previously unaccountable wave of emotion on the streets of Adelaide about eight hours earlier.
The next few days are a bit of a blur as Buckley and her family navigated their way through the process of bringing Robbie’s body home to SA and preparing for his funeral.
It is their first deep dive into the world of death and the beginning of a journey that has consumed her since that dreadful day back in April, 2012.
Buckley, 65, is now one of the state’s leading death care advocates, founder of a program called the Eco Coffin Project and part of a growing movement championing the benefits of returning human bodies to the natural ecosystem in an environmentally friendly manner.
The process is called natural burial, and involves bodies being interred into the earth in a biodegradable shroud or coffin at least one metre below the surface.
It’s an option increasing in popularity, especially in South Australia where there are now three public natural burial grounds connected to existing cemeteries – two in Adelaide and one at Kersbrook. A new site at Goolwa, set to open next month, is the state’s first unaligned with a traditional cemetery and there are moves for another in Mt Barker.
Exploring the question of sustainable deaths, thereby raising awareness of natural burials, has been one of Buckley’s primary goals since her life was turned upside down when Robbie died.
The other was to remove the taboo around conversations about death so that families can have some control over the various processes that occur when someone dies.
It’s a control she felt she didn’t have when Robbie died.
“I just felt, for some reason, that there was a rush,” she says. “There’s this feeling that there was some sort of imposed time limit that we had to do stuff, that we had to do things quickly, which is not the case.
“It’s not my words, but the best advice I’ve read somewhere or someone said was that when someone dies, the best thing to do is put the kettle on. There’s no phone calls to make, nothing has to happen, just take a breath.
“Put the kettle on and get rid of that sense of panic … you can do it in your own time.”
Buckley was running an eCommerce business and studying a masters of education, majoring in social ecology, when her son died.
She describes study as a security blanket, and says she approached dealing with his death from a “left-brain, research point of view” as a coping mechanism to stop herself disappearing into an abyss of grief.
Still, there were days when she couldn’t get out of bed, times when she wondered how she could even be in this world without Robbie and months where she felt like she was “walking through molasses” because everything appeared to be happening in slow motion.
She started studying how people engaged with death around the world, and realised that western culture seemed to actively discourage people talking about the subject.
“We’re more focused about staying young forever, living forever – it’s like we’re afraid of that (death),” she says. “We know it’s on a distant horizon, but you never think it’s gonna be in your next breath.”
She discovered the phenomenon of death cafes, a loosely organised conglomeration of social franchises where people come together to talk about all things death and dying.
She wanted to attend one as part of her own healing process but couldn’t find one near her Gawler home so started facilitating meetings out of a local cafe. She also secured a grant from the Gawler council to create a mobile Before I Die trailer, inspired by a global community art project that started in New Orleans in 2011.
The Before I Die project, which has appeared in more than 75 countries, encourages people to fill in the blanks on a chalkboard with their life goals. As well as affirming aspirations, the walls also force people to come to terms with the finite nature of human life.
“I was facilitating these things because no one else was and I wanted to experience them,” she says. “So I became a participant-facilitator for personal reasons which also seems to have had some community benefits along the way.”
An avid environmentalist, her mindset naturally started to consider the ecological impacts of how various cultures deal with death, in particular how we dispose of bodies.
This eventually led to the 2019 creation of the Eco Coffin Project, a biennial program, initiated with Gawler Environment Centre, that aims to spark conversations about mortality, increase death literacy and raise awareness about sustainable options including natural burial.
The project culminates with participants decorating an environmentally friendly coffin and/or shroud.
The idea of decorating a coffin emerged years earlier when Buckley and her family were preparing for Robbie’s funeral.
She remembered a documentary in which an Italian family was decorating a simple wood coffin on a kitchen table, ran the idea past her daughter (Robbie’s sister) Jessica and invited other family and friends to contribute.
Robbie’s interstate friends emailed poems, letters, stories and paintings to stick on the coffin on their behalf.
Buckley arranged an open house for SA-based family and friends and a steady stream of people attended to help decorate the coffin and share stories.
Robbie’s coffin was made with MDF (a wood product made from wood shavings bound together with toxic resins) and garnished with plastic handles and a plastic lining – all non-biodegradable products which go against the ethos of natural burial but the family’s “death literacy” was too low to know any better at the time.
If she had her time again, Buckley would ask for a coffin made from solid, unvarnished wood with no plastic lining, or buy a flatpack eco-coffin with a beeswax wrap lining using cotton material from Robbie’s clothes and bedsheets to meet the legal requirements to stop body leakage through the container.
Buckley’s death literacy is no longer low.
After Robbie died, she sold her business, had a short stint working in the Adelaide Cemeteries marketing department and became a funeral celebrant. She has spent years studying the industry and can now proudly call herself a Doctor of Philosophy after submitting a thesis on the subject.
She is also part of a growing cohort raising awareness about natural burials.
South Australia has long been at the vanguard of reducing the environmental footprint of burials and cremations.
Adelaide Cemeteries was the first in Australia to establish a natural burial ground – at an area at Enfield Memorial Park called Wirra Wonga – which means “bush grave” in Kaurna.
The basic tenet of natural burials is that the body returns to the earth and becomes part of the ecosystem. Bodies are not chemically preserved through embalming and are not adorned with any clothes or jewellery that is not biodegradable.
Traditional headstones are replaced with native vegetation and the exact location of grave sites is marked via a radio frequency identifier micro chip or GPS coordinates.
Demand for natural burials at Adelaide Cemeteries has been so great it opened a second stage of Wirra Wonga a couple of years ago, and has also established another site, called Pilyu Yarta (“peaceful ground” in Kaurna) at Smithfield Memorial Park.
Adelaide Cemeteries chief executive Michael Robertson, 52, says demand for natural burials, and other non-traditional interments, is on the rise as an increasing number of people consider environmental factors when planning their funerals.
Robertson is also fielding inquiries about human composting and alkaline hydrolysis, but both of these options would require significant legislative change before becoming legal in SA.
Human composting involves a body being placed with wood chips and other organic materials inside a vessel that is slowly turned and aerated over two or three months. Loved ones can then use the soil in a garden. The process is growing in popularity in the US but not legal in any Australian state.
Alkaline hydrolysis, also known as aquamation or water cremation, is legal in NSW and Tasmania and uses water, rather than fire, to cremate a body. The process uses warm water mixed with potassium hydroxide to dissolve the body’s soft tissues over four to six hours. The bones are then reduced to dust in an oven and returned to relatives.
Down at Goolwa, a charity led by semi-retired funeral director Kevin Hartley, 61, is preparing to open what he says is a “groundbreaking” (pardon the pun) new natural burial ground called Wattlewood.
Hartley’s Natural Burial Ground Trust of Australia has leased from Alexandrina Council six hectares of land surrounding the historic but long-abandoned Old Goolwa Cemetery. About 170 people are buried in the old cemetery – the last interred more than 120 years ago.
Wattlewood will be the state’s first public natural burial ground not connected to an existing cemetery and Hartley says it’s the first in Australia where all profits will be directed at restoring land to its native state.
Hartley has partnered with environmental charity Nature Foundation to create what they are touting as a “restoration” natural burial ground, where human burials will help revegetate land with native flora.
There is room for thousands of bodies on the Goolwa site and Hartley has plans to open similar natural burial grounds in the northern suburbs and in Gippsland, Victoria.
He says the difference between traditional and natural burials can be summed up in one phrase: Traditional burials concentrate on death whereas natural burials concentrate on life.
“Sure, an individual has just died, but in choosing this (type of burial), they’re contributing to the planetary life, they are contributing to restoration,” he says.
“Their grandkids know that those trees, some of those trees that are planted there, are courtesy of Grandma.”
Sites at Wattlewood, set to take its first burial in December, will be perpetual, as opposed to the 99-year leases people can buy for a natural burial plot at either of the Adelaide Cemeteries locations.
“What we’re looking at here is not a money-making cemetery but a restoration site, and once we return that to natural vegetation, we don’t want to be pulling it down or clearing it to bury more people,” Hartley says.
“The reality is that there’s virtually no remnant vegetation left in South Australia. Planting trees is a good thing. Keeping them there is a better thing. That’s part of the ethos of it. The beautiful part of this is that once it starts, and that’s the excitement of Goolwa, once it starts it will self-sustain both practically and financially.”
Hartley led the first funeral service at Wirra Wonga about 16 years ago and says the interest in natural burials has grown exponentially.
Aside from the environmental benefits, people are also attracted to the more budget-friendly nature of natural burials compared with their often more expensive traditional counterpart.
Cost is one of the primary reasons about 70 per cent of Australians are cremated, rather than buried. A simple cremation service with no memorial placement, for example, is $765 at Adelaide Cemeteries.
But people can pay as much as $75,000 for a 99-year tenure in a mausoleum and burial sites start at just over $5000 for a 50-year tenure on a lawn site. Cost is the same for a natural burial site at Adelaide Cemeteries, but the tenure lasts 99 years.
Coffins, church and/or gravesite services, embalming, limousine hire and other assorted expenses often push the price of a funeral well into five figures.
Hartley says the full costs of a funeral at Wattlewood, including transfers, gravesite service shrouds and mortuary accommodation and care, will be between $6000 and $8000.
Colleen Milne, 65, runs the niche business Returning Home AUS from her Port Elliott home, selling eco-friendly and biodegradable funeral products (including $450 cardboard coffins) and has been a volunteer helping get Wattlewood off the ground.
Like Hartley, Buckley and Robertson, she’s passionate about raising people’s awareness about the death industry, and removing the stigma associated with conversations on the subject.
“Talking about death doesn’t mean it’s going to kill you any more than talking about having a baby is going to make you pregnant,” she says.
She’s about to take over Buckley’s Eco Coffin Project, and plans to take it on the road so that people in regional SA have the chance to speak with experts in the industry ranging from funeral directors and coffin makers to death doulas (non-medical professionals who help individuals and their families during the end-of-life process). “I love the movement and the fast growing trend towards renewing ownership of rites and rituals,” she says.
“Choosing to use recycled and reclaimed organic materials for the coffin, urn and shroud resonates on a deep environmental and spiritual level for me.
“Following my own end-of-life plans has connected me with deep soulful choices remembering ancient traditions of funeral ceremonies … I want to honour my own life in death with products made from materials that are earth friendly, so that when I return to the earth in death it’s with the least negative carbon footprint possible.”
It’s an attitude shared by Mambray Creek farmer Joy Martin, who started exploring both non-traditional funerals and the concept of families re-assuming control of a process usually outsourced after her mother died nearly 20 years ago.
Martin now co-runs a Facebook page called The Last Gift, which aims to inform people of their death options and also hires out a cold plate that can prolong a body’s preservation ability for people who want to keep their loved ones home longer for viewings or vigils.
Martin, 73, and her husband Russell, 76, had plans to turn some of their farm into a public natural burial site where families could also enjoy barbecues, picnics and even a round of golf.
But bureaucratic red tape and the complexities of making a public burial site an ongoing concern have given them second thoughts. Regardless, the couple are still steadfast in the desire that they will be buried naturally on their farm.
They have council approval and there’s a hole in the ground ready and waiting for them.
“It’s just natural, isn’t it,” she says. “It’s the way it should be. Plant me in the ground and let me rot and let things grow on me.”
Natural burials, including those on private rural properties such as the Martins’, are legal in South Australia thanks to a pioneering Burial and Cremation Act 2013, championed by the late Bob Such.
Natural burial on private land is subject to council approval, only available outside a township or metropolitan Adelaide, must be at least 20m from any building, structure or water well, not on a flood plain and more than 100m from any surface water.
Back in Gawler, Dr Abby Buckleyis not yet sure what she wants to happen to her body when she dies.
She has developed a special connection with the Flinders Ranges after spending years volunteering and helping young people with not-for-profit charity Operation Flinders.
Leading groups of sometimes disgruntled and disadvantaged teenagers to connect with themselves, each other and the environment helped her reconnect with the world after Robbie died.
So if a natural burial opened in the Flinders, it would have a big lure.
But technological advances in cremation in the past few years mean the process is far more carbon friendly than it once was, so if there are still no natural burial grounds in the Flinders when the time comes, she might ask for her ashes to be scattered among the ancient mountain range.
“It would be nice if my body could be food for the environment,” she says. “If you’re buried, at least your body is going to be feeding the soil and be sustenance for plants or whatever. So I really like that idea and I really like the idea of finding a place where it’s not attached to a cemetery – that it really is a wild place.”
Meanwhile, she’s ready to move on to what she hopes will be the final stage of coming to grips with the death of her son.
She has relinquished the Eco Coffin Project and her funeral celebrant roles and is now concentrating on three books she has planned about her death journey of the past 13 years.
The first will be to chronicle the stories of the 50-odd people who decorated a coffin or made a shroud for the Eco Coffin Project. The second will be a children’s book and third, and most difficult, a memoir.
“I’ve realised that for me, gratitude is a big thing,” she says. “I just focus on how grateful I was that I had Robbie for 22 years.
“You can go down the path of thinking, ‘Oh, how old would he be now?’ But I don’t really go there about futures that will never happen. It’s more just being grateful that he was in my life for 22 years. And just the ripples he’s had on other people’s lives.
“It’s taken me all this time to get to the point where now I can sit there and start the grieving, and really feeling it. And I think the writing is going to help me do that and I feel safe to do that now.” ■
Originally published as Adelaide Cemeteries boss Michael Robertson urges discussion to legalise human composting
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