A note before we start: this piece names and describes people who have died, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, shared with me for the podcast with their families’ permission.
Over the life of this podcast I have had four conversations that, on their own, are each about something different. Kaneesha Wise, who works for the Aboriginal Advancement League and supports the Victorian Aboriginal Funeral Service, talked to me about what actually happens in the days after an Aboriginal person dies. Aunty Jill West, a Bunurong and Palawa woman, talked to me about heritage, grief and the Dreaming. Nikki Domeney, who discovered her Gamilaroi heritage only eighteen months before her mother died, talked to me about what it means to grieve someone while also reclaiming a culture you were never raised in. And Professor Prue Vines, the UNSW legal academic behind the Aboriginal Wills Handbook, talked to me about wills and the burial disputes that end up in court. Put next to each other, the four conversations turn out to be about the same thing, seen from four different seats: Aboriginal death is treated as something that belongs to the whole community, not just the person who has died, and Australian law and Australian funeral practice are still catching up to what that actually requires.
Sorry Business, From the Inside
Kaneesha’s job title barely covers what she actually does. She started at the Aboriginal Advancement League as a home and community care worker, then moved into the Victorian Aboriginal Funeral Service, a program the League has run since 1995 and which is entirely community funded, supported by donations, a small weekly contribution from League staff, and organisations like Pay the Rent. As Kaneesha put it to me: “It’s not free to die. It doesn’t matter who you are, what colour you are, where you come from. It is not free. But with that, nobody should be buried like a pauper.”
She described Sorry Business, the term used for the period of mourning, in detail. Men and women are washed and dressed by their own. “We bathe them ourselves. We dress them ourselves. We have our gum leaves. We have their favourite songs playing in the background.” The gum leaves matter for a specific reason. “For me, gum leaves are a way of releasing the spirit from the body. And then the smoking is a signal to help them along the way to find the ancestors, to find their loved ones.”
Being buried on Country, on the land a person or their family belongs to, came up again and again. “Going home to Country for our mob is vital to our people,” Kaneesha told me. “A lot of mob believe that if you aren’t on Country, it interferes with the journey that you go on after life, to your ancestors and to the Dreamtime.” Where that isn’t possible, a smoking ceremony stands in for it, a way of the land’s traditional owners saying it’s alright for someone to rest there.
Some of what she described was about restraint rather than ceremony. Many families avoid saying the name of someone who has died, or showing their photograph, until enough time has passed. “By saying their name, you’re bringing their spirit back to their body, or back surrounding you,” she said. It’s also why you’ll sometimes see a warning on Aboriginal media that it may contain images of people who have died.
One moment in that conversation had nothing to do with ceremony at all. Kaneesha’s daughter once told her she wanted to go to a friend’s father’s funeral but hadn’t received an invitation. “I said, bub, you don’t get invitations to funerals,” Kaneesha told me. “If you know that person, you want to pay your respects to that person and to their family, you just go.” It’s a small thing, but it says something bigger: in the community Kaneesha describes, a funeral isn’t a private event you’re let into. It’s open to anyone who cared.
The Dreaming as a Way Through Grief
Aunty Jill West, a Bunurong and Palawa woman, was 28 when her father, Japanangka errol West, died suddenly of a heart attack at 53. He’d remarried when she was 13 and was living interstate with a second family, so she describes losing him twice over. Around 500 people came to an open casket ceremony before he was cremated. “That he hasn’t really gone, because we believe in the Dreaming, in the Dreamtime,” is how she remembers thinking as she stood over him.
What that actually means, she explained to me “Dreaming and Dreamtime is a continuous cycle of life, birth and death,” she told me. “In death, a person returns to their spiritual Dreaming and Dreamtime.” Her father was cremated, but that doesn’t change where she believes he is now. “When I talk about my Dad and he’s in the Dreamtime, it’s a living world that he’s living in. It’s like he’s back traditionally where he is.”
This is also why, she explained, some families won’t say the name of someone who has died. “When we say the name of that person, we’re calling them back, and they can’t go to the Dreaming and Dreamtime.” She’d seen how far that runs into ordinary bureaucracy. Training Centrelink staff on how to close the record of an Aboriginal customer who had died, she had to teach them not to repeat the name back. “You had to actually write that name and then not say it.”
Her family held her father’s ashes for seven years, unable to let him go, until an elder told them it was time. What followed was a ceremony in Tasmania she still finds hard to put into words. The men and boys of the family went into a cave for men’s business; when they came out, she said, they were changed, and none of them has ever spoken about what happened inside, nor has she ever asked. Later, by a bonfire at the edge of the Bass Strait, her brother set alight a handmade bark canoe carrying their father’s ashes and sent it out onto the water. “That canoe could have gone anywhere,” she told me. “But it went straight to Flinders Island, and we watched it go. That was him going home.”
Aunty Jill’s own way of grieving has been to keep talking about her father out loud, in her cultural training work, every day. On what she wants for herself, though, she was candid that she hadn’t got around to it. “I don’t have a will,” she told me partway through our conversation. “I’ll do a will after this podcast, actually, because it’s important.” She wants to be cremated and returned to Bunurong Country, and until we spoke, none of it was written down anywhere. She’s not unusual in that. Only around sixty percent of Australian adults have a valid will, and for people under thirty that figure falls to just ten percent.
Reclaiming What Was Taken
Nikki Domeney’s story starts somewhere different again. Nikki, who works at the social enterprise Social Engine and sits on the board of Black Duck Group, grew up not knowing her mother and grandmother were part of the Stolen Generation, cut off from their Gamilaroi culture and Country in New South Wales. Her mother only found out, through a family tree her brother-in-law was piecing together, about eighteen months before she died. Newly found cousins visited before the end. “I think before she passed and having them on Mum as she passed was such a beautiful kind of way of her being held by her ancestors as well,” Nikki told me.
Nikki made her own trip to Country not long after, to a town called Dirranbandi, and walked into the local information centre saying she thought she had family there. Within minutes a cousin she had never met arrived. “The next minute my cousin and her husband walk in, and it was the most profound moment,” she said. “I’m actually giving them back the stories that they didn’t know about Aunty, that was her aunty and my mum. And I’m looking at this woman, and she looks like my mum.”
Nikki now uses an earth centred wellbeing practice called Wayapa Wuurrk, built around fourteen elements, tree, sun, moon, water, animals, to help people process grief, including in Victorian early childhood centres and corporate workplaces. It works, she told me, because “there’s something about the capacity to use these elements, from being the tree with solid roots and then just feeling that connection to earth.” It’s her own version of what Kaneesha and Aunty Jill each described to me independently as totems, a piece of the natural world that keeps showing up and telling you someone is still with you. She described guiding an early childhood leader through the death of a student this way, telling her, “the first thing is the relationship you have with grief. How can you connect to your grief and make sense of it?”
Nikki is candid that her own journey has come with guilt, having grown up with lighter skin and without the lived experience of racism her Indigenous relatives carry. “There’s a guilt that can sit there,” she said. Her answer to it is close to what Aunty Jill’s father taught his daughter about accepting difference rather than needing to fully understand it. As Nikki put it, using an analogy she’d seen shared in her community, however much milk goes into the tea, “underneath, the essence of us is still Black.”
The Law Is Only Just Catching Up
If Kaneesha showed me what Sorry Business looks like, Aunty Jill showed me what it means to carry all of that, and Nikki showed me what it costs to come to culture late, Prue Vines showed me how badly Australian law has handled all of it. Prue has spent decades helping Aboriginal communities write culturally appropriate wills, and she estimated that around sixty percent, maybe more, of the burial disputes that end up in Australian courts involve an Aboriginal person. “That is actually reflective of how important Sorry Business is for our Aboriginal communities,” she said, “and how important taking account of the cultural concerns of our Aboriginal communities is in relation to the deaths of their loved ones.”
The reason so many of these disputes exist comes down to dispossession. Many Aboriginal people no longer live on their own Country, and a family can end up split between wanting someone buried where cultural law says they should be, and wanting them buried somewhere a partner or children can visit. Where going home isn’t possible, Prue has seen communities adapt in the same spirit Kaneesha described: smoking the body, then bringing home a handful of earth from Country to bury with the person instead.
The single biggest reason Prue’s Aboriginal clients wanted a will, she told me, had nothing to do with money. It was that making a will means appointing an executor, and an executor is the person with the legal right to decide what happens to your body. “Many of these women Elders would say to me, could you make me a will now?” she said. “They had gone from white fella wills are nothing to do with me, to this is a way that I can actually stop having to worry about this.”
By this point in my conversation with Prue, I had already heard the same thing twice, from two people who had never met each other. Kaneesha had told me families avoid saying a name or showing a photograph so they don’t interrupt someone’s journey to the Dreaming. Aunty Jill had told me almost exactly the same thing, in almost exactly those words, and had described training Centrelink staff around it. Prue confirmed it a third time, from the legal side. “Some Aboriginal communities really don’t like the name of the deceased being used after death, or their photograph,” she said, and a solicitor who doesn’t know that going in can get a will badly wrong. She made a similar point about Kinship: “In many Aboriginal communities, I would also think that my sister’s children were my children as well. Kinship dictates obligation.” That’s close to word for word what Kaneesha had told me: “My sister’s kids are my kids. They’re my nephews and my nieces, but they are my babies. I treat them as my own. They can come to me and my house is theirs.”
What This Actually Means
None of these four conversations were really about death in the abstract. They were about a community that has held onto a set of practices, washing your own, going home to country, not saying a name too soon, in spite of everything working against it. They were about what happens when that connection is severed and has to be found again, sometimes only at the very end. And they were about a legal system that is only now, slowly, starting to build room for those practices rather than assuming every family looks the same.
If there’s one thing to take from all four, it’s Prue’s: appointing an executor, someone who knows what you want and will actually do it, is the single thing most likely to stop your family ending up in the kind of dispute she sees in court. Even Aunty Jill, who has spent her career teaching other people about ceremony and Country, told me she didn’t have a will herself until our conversation prompted her to finally write one. Whoever you are, and whatever your beliefs about what should happen to your body, that part applies to everyone.
Connect and Learn More
Victorian Aboriginal Funeral Service, via the Aboriginal Advancement League
Professor Prue Vines, UNSW Faculty of Law
Aunty Jill West’s work, via Nomuckerlener Indigenous Training
Nikki Domeney’s work, via Black Duck Group and Social Engine
Wayapa Wuurrk: wayapa.com
Aboriginal Wills Handbook: A Practical Guide to Making Culturally Appropriate Wills for Aboriginal People, by Prue Vines, NSW Trustee and Guardian
Will making statistics: Tilse et al., University of Queensland, cited in ALRC Report 131
Remember, you may not be ready to die, but at least you can be prepared.
Take care,
Catherine
