Fenced in

Funeral Rights
Chapter 5: Fenced In

The most visible change to Australian cemeteries in the last decade or so has been the appearance of above-ground crypts and mausoleums that now tower over cemetery walls. Until recently, concerns about public health meant that above-ground interment was illegal in most states. However, during the 1990s, coinciding with the corporatisation of the Australian funeral industry, there was a push to reform the law. When the law was eventually changed, it was as if cemetery owners had tapped the mother lode: legalising above-ground interment opened up the rich seam of crypt and mausoleum sales to people of Mediterranean backgrounds. By the end of the 1990s crypts had sprung up in cemeteries all over Australia.

High-rise mausoleum complexes and the crypts they house were hastily erected and sold for phenomenal profits, mostly to Italian families. After the spaces in each new crypt had been sold, a new, more luxurious development would commence.

The process mirrored the growth of inner-city apartments that occurred over much the same timeframe – as with the real estate market, crypt sales boomed. When a new $6 million mausoleum was opened by the Springvale Botanical Cemetery in outer Melbourne, several families camped out overnight to ensure that they would get first pick of the spaces. By morning there were around 100 people gathered, all vying to pay nearly $40 000 for a two-person crypt. And that wasn’t even in the desirable surrounds of the inner city. Melburnians wanting to be at the heart of things were watching developments at the Melbourne General Cemetery. On the first day that its new crypts were available for purchase the crowds were paying $60 000 for a double crypt in the Blessed Mary MacKillop Gallery. This price did not include the extra $1207 required for the body to be interred, but there was a generous discount of $263 being offered, provided that the interment took place on a weekday.

Meanwhile, at Rookwood in Sydney the cost for a private mausoleum or a walk-in vault could easily exceed $150 000.

The trustees or owners of city cemeteries have effectively become property developers, and, as with any gated community, it is important for cemeteries to guard against the arrival of bad elements. Unwanted neighbours could bring prices crashing down – and then 'there goes the neighbourhood’.

Nobody understands property development like a Queensland town council. Imagine the reaction of the Ipswich council when it learnt that the value of the real estate in its cemetery was threatened by the prospect of a brothel moving into the area. Mayor Paul Pisasale said there was no place for a brothel near his cemetery. He quickly took action that saw the offending neighbour run out of town.1 Although Australian cemeteries are becoming more commercially minded, it remains to be seen whether we will mimic the worst excesses of the US. One alarming trend is in evidence at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit. The proprietors of Woodlawn discovered the benefits of having a dead celebrity buried in their cemetery. Think of it as being akin to having Nicole Kidman buy an apartment in your building. Put simply, some people will pay a premium to be near a famous person, dead or alive. The management at Woodlawn got lucky when the well-known civil rights leader Rosa Parks was buried at their establishment.

Management of the privately run cemetery moved quickly, promoting sales around Parks’ gravesite. The existing chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel and the purchase prices of nearby graves were set at dizzying heights. Gravesites closest to Parks’ were set at US$60 000. Sites a bit further away were being let go for a mere US$24 000.2 Rosa Parks’ family was outraged.

Back in Australia, cemeteries are increasingly more profit- focused.

One profitable avenue has been new trends in memorialising people’s ashes; rose bushes and wall niches are now seen as old-hat. Much more profit can be wrung from selling memorials in the form of fountains, bridges, sundials, park benches, rotundas and boulders. At Springvale, having your ashes buried near a bridge costs $24 826, whereas you can have them placed near a fountain for $26 989. Perhaps customers would like the ashes stored in a glass display-case. There are rows of these display-cases at Rookwood. The display-case is a glass-fronted box about half a metre square; the urn containing the ashes is placed inside and the surrounding space is used as a shrine to the deceased. The display-case is window-dressed to create a snapshot of the deceased’s interests and personality.

If the deceased had a penchant for Porsches, then a model toy Porsche could be put in there. If he was a gambler, perhaps his photo could be accompanied by some playing cards or dice.

A person who fancied a tipple could be commemorated with a bottle of whisky. They can sell for around $5000 each.

Cemetery ownership

Cemeteries in Australia may be either publicly or privately owned. In some states, like Victoria, cemeteries are essentially all publicly owned, while in others, such as New South Wales, there are both public and private cemeteries. Apart from cemeteries on church grounds, private cemeteries are usually owned by companies that are also in the funeral business.

It is not always easy to tell the difference between a private and a public cemetery and, to add to the confusion, some are part public and part private, like Sydney’s Rookwood. If you live in New South Wales or Queensland, it may be prudent to check the ownership of any cemetery recommended by a funeral director from the Bledilsoe or InvoCare stables, as the recommendation could reflect a conflict of interest. Bledisloe’s cemetery ownership is concentrated in Queensland, where, for example, it owns a cemetery at Carbrook and a crematorium at Caboolture. InvoCare’s cemetery interests are more extensive and are listed in the Appendix of this book.

It is not surprising that privately owned cemeteries are aggressively pursuing sales, but why this fervent commercialisation from the trustees of the not-for-profit cemeteries? Springvale provides a good example of the trend for Australian cemeteries seeking greater commercial appeal. Springvale has left nothing to chance, not even its name. Those in charge of marketing dropped the macabre-sounding 'Springvale Necropolis’ in favour of the more user-friendly 'Springvale Botanical Cemetery’. Public cemeteries in Australia like Springvale have grown fat on profit. Springvale has an asset base of over $229 million. Its revenue for 2005 was over $43 million3, yet prices continue to go up, not down. The Victorian Auditor-General has concluded that it is likely that overcharging is occurring in Victorian cemeteries.4 One justification put forward by the publicly owned cemeteries is that they are just providing the customers with what they want. Another justification is that revenue inevitably will drop when there is no more space to squeeze in gravesites and no more room to develop high-rise crypts; the profits being made now are in fact investment funds that will be needed to cover future maintenance. This may be so, but it makes it even more surprising that the Auditor-General found that most of the boards of trustees do not have proper mechanisms in place to ensure that they can maintain their cemeteries in perpetuity.

Cemetery management boards

In recent times the management boards of cemeteries have been plagued by allegations of disreputable behaviour. In 2005 it was reported that the Cheltenham and Regional Cemeteries Trust in Victoria had paid around $40 000 in kickbacks to funeral directors to secure customers.5 The board of trustees of another of Victoria’s biggest cemeteries, Fawkner, was sacked after allegations that senior management had misappropriated more than $1 million.6 It is hard to think ill of anybody who would be so generous with their time as to volunteer as a trustee of a cemetery. It must be difficult when you are an unpaid volunteer bearing witness to all that money flooding in. And after having to discuss the grim topic of death for hours on end, who would begrudge these trustees a bit of fun? It is not hard to imagine that when the sun had set and the gates were closed at Springvale, it was not the ghosts of the dead that emerged after dark but the good cheer and laughter of the twenty-four-hour party people otherwise known as the Board of Management. Newspaper reports suggest that they spent $67 000 on parties over a 30-month period.7 Their colleagues at the venerable Melbourne General Cemetery were not going to be left out; they held their own cocktail party – costing $5700.8 By all accounts, it was a successful kneesup.

Even after all the parties, you still have to get home after a long night and these good citizens, are not bloody idiots – be it work or play, they caught taxis. The taxi bill of one cemetery board came to $10 000.9 Some of these would be enough to make even the International Olympic Committee blush. At the 2004 Annual Conference of the Australasian Cemeteries and Crematoria Association in Perth, 17 trustees, managers, their partners and even their children flew over from Melbourne, spending more than $41 000 of public money in the process. Similar conferences attended by trustees and members of their families cranked up another $112 000.10 The trustees, along with senior management, got through more than $1 million in a little over two years. 11 The chief executive of Springvale claimed that the parties and travel could be justified as a way of mixing with 'interstate suppliers’ and 'overseas business partners’.12 It is no wonder that publicly managed cemeteries were reviewed by the Victorian Auditor-General in 2006. The Auditor-General found that a number of the cemeteries he investigated (which were some of Australia’s biggest) had a culture of misusing funds.

Country cemeteries

Some people enjoy exploring country cemeteries. They can be wild and unkempt, as can the older sections of some of the big city cemeteries. Most of us have walked through those areas and experienced a powerful sense of transience. Real lives, real people, here for a short time and then gone.

Although regional cemeteries can get caught up in the drive for revenue, the typical country cemetery seems to be an exception to all of that. Generally, their voluntary board of management consists of a group of old farmers, who are usually there as a result of a genuine desire to serve their community.

Planning to increase revenue by selling fancy memorial sites is not high on the agenda. It is one of the reasons country cemeteries are so much cheaper than those in the city.

The lack of funds for maintenance in older country cemeteries has meant that many areas have barely been touched for years. A typical rural cemetery has stock grazing outside while the cemetery fence ensures that no animals get in where they might walk over graves and cause a nuisance. No grazing, no cultivation, no spraying, no clearing and precious little slashing and burning. This has led to quite unexpected side effects. Biologists have discovered that these areas are often one of the few remaining refuges for endangered or rare plant species. There are cemeteries across Australia playing host to these remnant patches of unique native vegetation.

The Hall Cemetery in the ACT has the only known population of the leek orchid. The perennial herb scaly buttons was once common in Tasmania, but is now found in only two places in the entire state; those places are both cemeteries: the Jericho Cemetery and the Bothwell Cemetery. The Campbelltown Cemetery in Tasmania used to have one of only two known stands of a dwarf tufted herb until farm stock was allowed to graze in the grounds and the stand was lost. In South Australia, the West Terrace Cemetery, the Willaston Cemetery and the Francesca Cemetery all have examples of rare and threatened native plants. Local and international visitors are attracted to the Gingin Cemetery in Western Australia, where there is a rare hybrid of red and green kangaroo paw. The Upper Regions Cemetery near Dimboola in Victoria is home to a very rare species of bull oak. The list goes on. Even Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery has significant areas of rare native bushland, including a colony of Acasia pubescens. Rookwood has now introduced a plan to manage these sensitive areas: the sections near endangered species are hand-weeded, and cutting is left until late spring to allow native plants to flower and seed. Mowing has been intentionally confined to certain paths and walkways.

It is paradoxical that a cemetery established for the dead of one species is acting as a nursery for life for another.

Burial rights

When you buy a grave, you are not buying freehold tenure – you are buying a burial right. In other words, you have a right to use a particular space for the final placement of someone’s remains, subject to the rules of the cemetery. Most people assume that purchasing a gravesite means that the burial right is held forever. They are mistaken: sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Inevitably, as the older cemeteries fill up, management will want to keep the revenue flowing by cramming in more and more bodies. Tasmania and Western Australia both have provisions in place for tenure to be reduced to as few as 25 years.

South Australia does not even have a minimum length of tenure, but does have a maximum term of 99 years; the norm there is tenure of 50 years. New South Wales is now also getting in on the act. The issue was taken up by the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the funeral industry, in which Department of Lands, argued that more concentrated use of existing graves is fast becoming a necessity. Meanwhile, South Australia and Western Australia have already started to experiment with the 'lift-and-deepen’ method.

The lift-and-deepen method is not well known to the average Australian. Most would be staggered to learn that the exhumation of bodies was even a possibility. It works like this: once the tenure has expired, the cemetery may try to contact the relatives to negotiate another term of sole use by asking them to pay more money. If they are not contactable or refuse to pay more money, the cemetery can just go ahead and dig up the grave, lift out the coffin, deepen the hole, put the old coffin back in and then place a new coffin on top.

The cemetery then has the authority to remove the original gravestone, dispose of it and replace it with the one supplied by the new tenant. Once a buried body has passed through the putrefaction and decomposition stage – usually about 10 to 15 years – the grave is considered suitable for this procedure take place.

The lift-and-deepen method, or 'renewable tenure’ has just arrived in Australia but it looks set to stay. Most would raise no strenuous objection if the procedure was confined to family graves – that would be reasonable enough; at least the deceased in the new coffin is a relative and the headstone can be shared.

It is the addition of strangers to the gravesite that will cause alarm. It can confidently be predicted that various religious and cultural communities will vigorously oppose the concept. The question of reuse of graves is particularly vexed for the Jewish and Muslim communities because both faiths agree that a grave should not be disturbed. Ultimately, this may lead to some communities establishing separate cemeteries with their own rules.

The Jewish community already has some exclusive cemeteries and that trend may broaden.

Knowing the rumpus that the lift-and-deepen method could potentially cause, the committee making the recommendations to the New South Wales parliament has suggested that any changes to the legislation should be accompanied by a propaganda campaign, described as a public education drive.14 Another form of limited tenure can occur with the advanced purchase of the right to a burial site. Some cemeteries stipulate that the right of burial must be taken up within a certain period; otherwise you forfeit your right to the grave. In other words, when dealing with some cemeteries, it pays to eat, drink and be merry: if you don’t die within 25 years, you may lose your spot.

Memorials for ashes can also be subject to limited tenure.

People purchasing a place for ashes must make sure that they fully understand what they are buying. At the Springvale Botanical Cemetery, the trustees regularly put orange stickers on cremation memorials, such as wall niches, letting people know that the tenure has expired. A person visiting their deceased mother could arrive at the cemetery only to be confronted with a notice stating that their time is up. They are no longer welcome unless they pay a visit to the office with a cheque book.

Memorials

Many Australians no longer feel the need to have the sort of grand and expensive memorialisation promoted by contemporary Australian cemetery management. Nor do they want to be involved with the rampant commercialisation now so regrettably manifest behind cemetery walls. The overcrowding of cemeteries and the current trend to limit the tenure of gravesites and wall niches are further sources of discomfort. There are plenty of indications that people are ready to buck the system.

More than ever, the bereaved are simply removing the ashes from the jurisdiction of cemetery management. People are choosing to take the ashes with them and scatter them at a place that was of genuine significance to the deceased. The place where the ashes are scattered becomes the memorial, and the whole exercise is free. Roadside memorials are another indication that many in the community would prefer to take matters into their own hands. Often built by the young after a peer has been killed in a traffic accident, roadside memorials are erected without the authority of church, state or the funeral industry. They are a show of people power, of seizing back of control – where the place of memorialisation becomes more important than the memorial itself.

The trend away from memorialisation opens the way for a new form of burial. Natural burial grounds emerged recently as an initiative in the UK, where they are now thriving. The deceased’s body is buried in a biodegradable coffin under a tree where it can act as a fertiliser. Individual memorialisation is no longer central: the burial is permanent and the natural bushland becomes the memorial. Chapter 9 provides more detail on natural burial grounds and discusses other alternatives to cemeteries.