Kevin Hartley had worked in cemeteries and funeral services for 15 years when, at a party in 2007, someone asked what his plans were for his body when he died. He contemplated the furnace he had operated, preheated to 1,000C, from which he raked ash and bone onto a tray before pouring them into a cremulator. “Think of a tumble dryer,” he says, “and you put heavy steel balls into that and tumble the ashes.” What you’re left with is a greyish powder.
“Cremation is an industrial process and to imagine doing that to my body was out of the question,” he says. “That left burial, but I thought, ‘Do I want to be buried in a chipboard box with a false veneer that’s lined in plastic, so that I never really have my body return to the earth?’”
Cremation is the ritual of choice for two thirds of Australians and increasingly popular because it’s much cheaper than burial. In Australia, the average cremation costs $7,500 for a full service or $12,000 with interment in a cemetery, according to funeral home comparison site Gathered Here, while a fully serviced burial costs around $19,000. This buys the rights to a plot, interment in said plot, a grave liner, a headstone and the funeral.
Many families Hartley sat down with as a funeral director asked for burial first. “And you tell them how much. There’s a sort of embarrassed shuffle … and they go, ‘Oh, it’s pretty expensive. How about cremation?’”
Added to that was the environmental consideration. Modern cremators use the equivalent of 40 litres of petrol per corpse, on average – enough to drive from Sydney to Port Macquarie – while older cremators can consume twice that, according to 2011 estimates from the Department of the Environment and Energy. “It’s not that cremation of itself is one of the most massive polluters in our society,” Hartley says. “Motorcars, transport, planes would eclipse it, no problem at all – but when you think about it, it’s just a thing that we don’t need to do.”
Hartley decided that he wanted to provide a full natural burial service at a cost that matched or beat the price of cremation. But to do that he needed land, which proved difficult. His early proposals for burial sites were rejected by both local and state governments.
He isn’t alone. Other new players have been drawn to the industry, targeting what they see as an obvious deficiency in the $1.5bn sector – genuine choice – and have confronted the same problems.
Robert Itaoui, the founder of a startup working to establish secular and environmentally sustainable cemeteries in Australia, views his company as a “game changer” – the cemetery equivalent of Uber. Called Zinnia Group, its team conceived of a memorial park at Bringelly, in the critically endangered Cumberland Plain woodland on Sydney’s western fringe. However, any proposal to acquire land in metropolitan areas to use for the permanent safe-keeping of dead bodies has proved a big ask.
Itaoui won approval for the project in a years-long court battle that ended in January 2013. The environmentally focused designs won architecture awards nationally and abroad, but failed to attract funding to build them. Itaoui sold the site in 2016 but Zinnia remained undeterred, and has since been scouting for new sites in Sydney.
One of its partners, Andrew Hoyne, says: “If there was ever a category that required disruption, it’s this category.”
The problem of space
The decisions made after every death affect not just the grieving process of loved ones, but the architecture of towns and cities. More than 160,000 people died in Australia last year, a figure set to soar with the growing population – and a rapidly ageing one. The number of people aged 85 and older has increased by 133% over the past two decades, while the total population has grown by 34%. Yet maintaining an everlasting memorial to mark a person’s existence has become an ideal signifying respect and propriety.
Of the thousands of cemeteries in Australia, many are full and closed. In Sydney alone, there were more than 9,000 burials in 2016, about 6,500 of which used new plots. The fresh graves consumed about 2.3 hectares – roughly two football fields.
Last year, the Catholic Cemeteries and Crematoria trust bought swathes of land in the west of Sydney, with a proposed cemetery at Varroville projected to make 50 hectares available for burial within a total site area of 113 hectares. To keep up with demand, a report released by Cemeteries and Crematoria NSW in November 2017 predicted that Sydney would need the equivalent of the Varroville development every 15 to 20 years.
Cemeteries have long been preoccupied with the problem of space. There’s been talk of building skyward with multi-storey mausoleums and going subterranean with carpark-like catacombs; upright burials, feet first into deep graves, are on offer in Victoria’s Corangamite Shire. In a world-first trial at Rookwood, 120 pigs have been buried and exposed to additives in an experiment in speeding up decomposition in order to bury more human bodies in the same plots.
Rookwood also decided to adopt renewable tenure of allotments, partly to avoid, in the long run, the same fate as the graveyards upon which Sydney Town Hall and Central Station now stand, which Rookwood was built to replace in 1867.
In recent years, the move towards limited tenure of graves in NSW has been pushed by cemetery managers as a means of staying viable, and reviled by members of the public as desecration. But cemeteries in other jurisdictions have already taken measures to free up space. Rights to plots in South Australia aren’t granted for longer than 99-year periods, and if they aren’t renewed, remains can be dug up, put in a box, and buried deeper in the grave, which is then ready for another body.
Five thousand headstones have been cleared at Western Australia’s Karrakatta cemetery since the 1970s, and new bodies buried between the old graves. In 2012, the Victorian government’s review of cemeteries included consideration of temporary tenure. Waverley cemetery already sells plots for fixed periods, and when a licence for an allotment lapses and isn’t renewed – which happens all the time, according to the manager, George Brun – it can be resold.
“But there’s no appetite for that,” he says. “We’re only interested in selling virgin land, and we do have virgin land still available and I think we’ll be OK for the next 50 years.” He has made a note of the expired plots though, because one day the cemetery will run out of space.
Ethos of sustainability
Hartley believes that many in the industry suffer from tunnel vision. “If you try and think about how to solve the cemetery problem, when you’re within the constraints of the traditional cemetery model, it’s going to be very difficult. You’re going to come up with ideas like lift and deepen, shorter tenure, and ways to maximise this piece of land that’s already filled.”
Hartley had been retired from the death industry for five years and was living in Armidale when it found him again. In September 2015, he introduced a movie about natural burial at a community film night. Afterwards, locals were eager to know how they could have natural burial made available to them. Hartley suggested that it could be achieved as a community-based not-for-profit. The next morning, he received an email from a couple asking if he wanted 50 acres of their property to use for burials. He was dumbstruck.
Five months later, another pair based in Saumarez Ponds, west of Armidale, offered a section of their farm. Once the idea was re-conceived as a charitable one, marshalling resources proved surprisingly easy. Many like-minded locals got together for community initiatives, and word of the project quickly spread.
Hartley founded earthfunerals in 2016 under the auspices of the environmental charity Starfish Initiatives and within months, a startup called EcoGeoSpatial offered to map the proposed sites; Armidale Tree Group, a tree nursery, agreed to provide vegetation.
The first location turned out to be impractical, accessible only via four-wheel-drive and too rocky for digging graves. But the Saumarez Ponds site showed promise.
At about a hectare and a half, it’s tiny for a would-be cemetery, and when I visited earlier this year it was covered by long grass and weeds. The owners, Jane Pickard and Ray South, planted the border with 600 native seedlings last year. Pickard parted a tangle of grass to reveal a yellow box shoot, about 15 centimetres tall with green leaves and a stem the colour of diluted red wine. “We planted a whole row of these and we thought the lot had died, but it’s amazing how they come back,” she says.
The idea of natural burials struck a chord with them, and they’d both like to be buried at the site. South says: “In death, there are lots of really unpleasant chemicals and really unsustainable practices. A lot of energy consumed,” He adds: “The idea of a natural burial site fits much better with the ethos of sustainability.”
Pickard says that they try to recycle all the waste on their farm. “And recycling human bodies is just part of the natural cycle,” she says. “It’s just that we, as humans for the last few hundred years, have taken it out of that cycle and said ‘No, we’re going to do this in cemeteries.’ And we’re never going to grow anything useful in cemeteries. It’s almost like a tip site. And growing trees is something that we’re very passionate about ... We want to put at least half of our 40 acres back to native vegetation, so the cemetery would be part of that plan.”
Hartley wants the project to convey an optimistic message: the earth is surprisingly resilient. Decades from now, if all goes to plan, the pasture would be transformed by 20-metre tall eucalypts, including peppermints and snow gums, as well as tea trees, bottlebrushes, and acacias. People who want to be interred there would have their non-embalmed bodies placed in a biodegradable coffin or shroud and be buried at the minimum legal depth (90 centimetres in NSW) to promote natural decomposition. Native vegetation would then be planted on top and on another acre along Saumarez Creek. The idea is to restore a native wildlife corridor connecting Saumarez Ponds and Dangars Falls, a long-term goal of the Armidale Tree Group.
Hartley says the cost for a fully serviced natural burial at Saumarez Pond will be the same as the price of a fully serviced cremation in the same area. That’s around $6,000 in that area for cremation without a cemetery plot. If sites go ahead elsewhere, the cost would likewise match the cost of cremation in those respective areas.
The environmental mission has its limits. Hartley wants to have a permanent marker embedded at the head of each grave – a small brass or steel medallion inscribed with the name of the deceased and their date of death – despite a plan to precisely map the location of graves. They serve an emotional purpose; Hartley believes it will feel good to point to a personalised memento.
‘Stardust to stardust’
Memorialisation wasn’t the selling point for Queensland couple Susan and Scott Reilly. “The memory of the person stays in your mind,” says Scott, about their desire to be buried at Saumarez Ponds, despite the distance from friends and family. Susan agrees: “Ideally, they’ll remember us as we were and they’ll know that we’ll be incorporated into the earth – stardust to stardust.”
From Hartley’s perspective, a cemetery model that populates desolate areas with native flora has the prerogative to plant up as much space as possible. “There are tons of areas out there that should be saved, revegetated, and this is the perfect way to do that,” he says. He sees Saumarez Ponds as a pilot project that could open the door to natural burial grounds nationally.
He feels that pushing up trees when we die is in line with a logical and beautiful world view, stemming from the natural cycles of life and death. At the core of it is the notion that one person is not more important than the earth as a whole – that if enough people choose to be buried this way, the deficit of environmental damage would begin to be repaid.