Last week on the Don’t Be Caught Dead podcast, Ben Kelly, CEO of the Australasian Cemeteries and Crematoria Association, told me two stories about ashes ending up somewhere they shouldn’t. The first was about someone scattering a loved one’s ashes in the middle of a sports oval during a grand final, “which has happened.” The second was about scattering at the local beach on a busy day, where ashes often sit on the surface of the water rather than sinking, and if the wind picks up, travel a long way. “No one probably wants your grandma’s ashes interrupting their picnic at the park,” he said, “if you haven’t paid attention to that.”
Most people have absolutely no idea what they’re actually
allowed to do with ashes, with a body, with a grave, or with a funeral, until they’re standing in the middle of arranging one. So this week I want to pull together threads from eight conversations, Ben Kelly, funeral director Kelly Scott, home funeral pioneer Bec Lyons, death walker Zenith Virago, anthropologist Hannah Gould, water cremation pioneer Luke Cripps, cryonics founder Peter Tsolakides, and memorial garden co-founder Luke Roberts, because between them they demolish almost all assumptions people carry into deathcare. Here’s what’s actually true.
Myth: You have to call a funeral director the moment someone dies
You don’t. Bec Lyons, President of the Natural Death Advocacy Network and Australian Home Funeral Alliance put it plainly: “There is actually not a lot that you have to do when someone dies. You have to register a death. You have to look after the body in accordance with the state legislation. And you have to organise a body disposal.” That’s it. You can keep your person at home for days, provided you maintain a cool temperature, and there are multiple simple ways to do that, from a hired cooling plate to dry ice.
Zenith Virago, who has been working outside the conventional funeral system for over thirty years, describes the moment she first realised this, standing in a morgue with a friend whose wife had just died. “We can do this ourselves,” she told him. “We don’t need to give her to a stranger.” As she points out, for almost all of human history, families and communities cared for their own dead before handing them to a place of burial or cremation. The funeral industry, in the form we recognise today, is only a few hundred years old.
Bec’s advice for those first hours borrows a line from Zenith directly: “Don’t pick up the phone, pick up the kettle,” she said. “Go and have a cup of tea and just sit with yourself and that person for a little while, because you’ll never get that time back.”
Myth: The funeral industry is tightly regulated, so anyone offering the service meets a high bar
This is the one that genuinely surprised me when I first found out. Kelly Scott, former president of Funerals Australia and a fourth-generation funeral director at T.J. Scott & Son, told me flatly: “There isn’t, as far as what does a funeral director have to have in their premises. There’s no licensing or requirements.” Funeral Australia’s standards, refrigeration, vehicle safety, infection control, are entirely self-imposed by its members, not government-mandated.
Anthropologist Hannah Gould put an even finer point on it. “It’s scary how easy it is to become a funeral director in Australia,” she said. “I could become a funeral director tomorrow if I wanted to be. I think I have actually become a funeral director for a day, because my friends wanted to illustrate how easy it was for a talk I was giving.” Her theory on why nothing changes: “The dead are a pretty bad constituency. They don’t vote, they don’t have a lot of money, they can’t lobby government.” Ben Kelly made a similar joke, from the funding side of the same problem, explaining why cemeteries so often get overlooked by councils and governments: “We joke, you know, they say there’s no votes in cemeteries, dead people don’t vote.”
What this means for families, you should check if the funeral home is a member of an industry association and ask direct questions about cost, training, premises and standards.
Myth: Once you buy a grave, you own that piece of ground forever
You don’t own it, you own the right to be buried there. “You’re buying the rights to be interred there,” Ben Kelly explained, “so that’s why it’s called a burial right, or right of interment. The crown, the cemetery trust or council, they technically own that land.” And that right comes with a catch most people never hear about: in many states, you, not the cemetery, are legally responsible for maintaining the headstone or monument. If it falls and injures someone, the burial rights holder can be liable.
It also means many families are sitting on sites they don’t know they have. “A lot of people probably aren’t aware that they actually may have a site in a cemetery,” Ben said, describing double plots bought decades ago where only one person was ever interred. His advice: if you think a grandparent might be buried somewhere, just ask the cemetery. “Nine times out of ten they’ll provide as much information as they can.”
Myth: A body has to be professionally washed and dressed, and families shouldn’t be involved
Families can be as involved as they want to be, and in Kelly Scott’s experience, that involvement matters. “Families want to be part of that care. They absolutely can,” she said, describing everything from families washing and dressing a parent themselves to something as simple as playing the deceased’s favourite music in the mortuary while staff complete their care. “Some people will never ever be aware that we do that. But I think that’s our point of difference, because we know it in ourselves.”
Bec Lyons runs entire funerals this way, encouraging families to dress their own person, keep them at home, and only call her in for the parts they genuinely can’t or don’t want to do themselves. It’s not for everyone, and both Kelly and Bec are careful to say that. As Kelly put it, some children wouldn’t necessarily want to bathe their own parents themselves, and that’s fine too. Her own aunties nursed her nan; other families feel differently, “so they’re very happy for us to do it.” The point isn’t that one way is right. It’s that most people don’t realise there’s a choice at all.
Myth: A funeral has to be a formal service, in a church, advertised in the paper
None of that is required. “Do you have to have it in a church? Do you have to advertise it in a newspaper? No, you don’t,” Kelly Scott said. “A funeral you can call it a gathering if you like, just to get away from the older terminology.” Hannah Gould’s research backs this up on a national scale: Australia has one of the most secular funeral cultures in the world, largely because of a 1970s legal change under the Whitlam government that allowed non-religious celebrants to conduct ceremonies for the first time. What we think of as a “normal” Australian funeral, the slideshow, the eulogies, the songs, is itself a relatively recent, home-grown Aussie ritual, not a lesser version of a religious one.
Myth: Cremation and burial are your only two options, and the rules are the same everywhere
Not anymore, and not even close to uniform. Ben Kelly runs through the expanding menu: natural burial in a shallow, unembalmed grave; “limited tenure” plots that get reused after 50 years or so (already standard in South Australia, allowed in WA and NSW, but not currently permitted in Victoria); and natural organic reduction, essentially human composting, which was still being reviewed for legalisation in NSW at the time we spoke.
And alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation, isn’t a someday-soon option anymore, it’s already here. Luke Cripps co-founded Alluvium Water Cremations in Tasmania in 2023. Getting there meant satisfying three separate regulators, Tasmania’s Office of Local Government, the local council and the state water authority, and by Luke’s account, alkaline hydrolysis had never before been offered anywhere in Australia with all three of those approvals in place under existing legislation. Instead of a 900 to 1,000 degree flame, a body is introduced to water, a small amount of alkali, heat and time, over 10 to 14 hours, in a process that Luke says is “gentle” by comparison. Because so little is vaporised, families get back 20 to 30 percent more physical remains than they would from a flame cremation. There’s no coffin involved, since a coffin won’t break down in the process, and unlike flame cremation, a pacemaker doesn’t need to be removed beforehand.
The catch, again, is geography. “Theoretically, yes” you can use the service from anywhere in Australia, Luke told me, “in practice, that is more complex,” because each state has its own legislation governing how a body must be prepared to travel by air, typically requiring embalming, which makes arranging a water cremation interstate technically possible but often “extraordinarily expensive” once transport is added. Within Tasmania itself, though, no coffin, no embalming, none of the usual defaults are required.
Every state runs its own rules, with no national standard, so what’s true in Tasmania or Victoria may not be true in Queensland or New South Wales. That, more than any single myth, is the point.
Myth: Cryonics is science fiction, and there’s no legal way to do it in Australia
Not anymore, either. Peter Tsolakides is the founder, director and chairman of Southern Cryonics, a not-for-profit that opened its Holbrook, NSW facility in 2024 and, working with its sister organisation Cryopath, completed Australia’s first cryonic suspension over seven days in May 2024. “Cryonics is the preservation of a patient, a human body, after legal death,” Peter told me, “at very low temperatures, usually in liquid nitrogen. And the expectation is that future medicine, technology, science will be able to restore the patient to health, in a young body.” That last part matters, it’s not about waking up 85, it’s about waking up in a young, healthy body with your memories and, as Peter puts it, “eighty years of experience” intact.
There’s no cryonics-specific law in Australia, so Southern Cryonics worked within what already existed rather than waiting for something new. The facility is legally classified as a cemetery, and the process itself as “entombment,” with formal sign-off from the NSW Department of Health. Nothing happens before legal death is certified, and next of kin sign a separate agreement so the decision can’t be reversed under pressure after the fact.
Cost sits around $150,000, but it’s typically funded through an ordinary life insurance policy rather than paid upfront, working out to roughly $400 to $500 a year in premiums for someone in their 40s. The facility itself needs almost none of the infrastructure people assume, no generators, no backup power. “All you need is liquid nitrogen,” Peter said. A truck tops up the tanks every couple of weeks, and if the power failed for months, “it wouldn’t make any difference to us at all.”
Peter doesn’t oversell the odds. Nobody can promise revival will ever work. But as he put it, that’s not really the comparison that matters: “There’s zero chance versus a reasonable chance, and people are willing to take the reasonable chance,” next to the alternative of burial or cremation.
Myth: A memorial site for someone’s ashes is a sad, static place families visit once and then avoid
Luke Roberts, co-founder of Mornington Green, built his business around proving this wrong. Mornington Green is a natural memorial garden on a former nine-hole golf course on the Mornington Peninsula, and Luke, a former lawyer, describes the aim plainly: “It doesn’t remind them of the end, it reminds them of the life that they shared.” Families choose a tree instead of a plot, and the tree is the point, not a decoration on top of a grave.
The science had to come first. Cremated ash is highly alkaline and will usually damage or kill a tree rather than feed it, which is why memorial tree schemes so often fail. Mornington Green worked with a lab for eighteen months to change that: ashes are mixed with a paramagnetic soil that buffers the alkalinity, so the same trace elements that would otherwise harm the roots, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, instead feed the tree. The placement itself is a small ceremony families take part in rather than watch: a chamber is dug beneath the root ball the day before, the family pours in the ash and treated soil together, and many write a note on biodegradable paper to bury alongside it. “It’s a final opportunity to say something,” Luke told me.
Around 75 to 80 percent of Mornington Green’s clients pre-plan, choosing their own tree well before they need it, which is far higher than the roughly half of Australians who’ve even written a will. And a tree isn’t a solo booking: the largest size is built for eight people, so a couple, their children and even a family pet can share the same tree across generations, something Luke says happens by design. “Often people say, ‘I don’t bring my kids to Pop’s grave, it’s sad and it’s kind of scary.’ This is a place where kids love to come to,” he said, describing families who picnic there, bring kids to help plant bulbs, and turn up for planting days, Christmas in July and even a giant sunflower display, not just on the anniversary of a death.
The one thing everyone agreed on
There’s no single correct pathway here, only options, and permission to keep asking questions until you find the one that actually fits the person you’re honouring. Don’t want a funeral director involved at all? Bec Lyons and Zenith Virago say put the kettle on instead of picking up the phone. Not sure if a grave is really yours forever? Ben Kelly says just ask the cemetery, most of the time they’ll tell you what you need to know. Want something other than a church service, a standard cremation or a plot in the ground? Kelly Scott, Luke Cripps, Peter Tsolakides and Luke Roberts each showed me a different answer to that question, and none of them is more correct than the others.
What matters more than which option you choose is when you choose it. Every person in this piece, independently, made some version of the same point: the planning you do “when you’re well,” as Bec Lyons puts it, is a different thing entirely from the planning you’re forced into “in an acute setting.” Peter Tsolakides frames it as a reasonable chance versus no chance at all. Luke Cripps calls it informed consent, the kind most families are quietly denied because nobody tells them there was a decision to make. Ben Kelly puts it simplest: “there’s nothing wrong” with planning for your own death in advance, it’s not giving up, it’s just being practical.
Ask as many questions as you like. The only real barrier is not knowing what to ask, and the best time to start asking is now, before you’re in crisis.
Take care,
Catherine
