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The last nail of Hubert Ebker-White’s enormous
coffin pierces the pale wood with a resounding
bang. No-one cries and there is not an undertaker
in sight. Just the scream of the dust extractor,
the cyclonic clouds of sawdust and a bemused Ebker-White,
who adjusts his red plastic ear muffs and lets
the nail gun fall to his side.
The 48-year-old former PE teacher is apologetic
that his coffin looks so conventional compared
with those of the rest of his class. He explains
that, while it will be available to whomever in
his family needs it first, “I am the tallest
so I made the measurements to fit me.” After
a moment’s thought, he adds: “I am
also the oldest so I may indeed be the first one
to use it.”
Ebker-White can’t stop to talk now, though.
He and the rest of the Mullumbimby coffin-making
course have to finish their caskets by 3 pm and
most haven’t even started on their lids
yet. Spirits are high, though, and they may just
finish up before the rain, before the heavy bank
of black clouds behind the mountains stops crying
wolf and starts throwing punches.
Ebker-White and many like him came to this place
seeking quality of life. Now, as these same people
who demanded the right to personalise the process
of childbirth in the ‘70s move into an altogether
different phase of their lives, the buzz term
on the North Coast of NSW has become “quality
of death”. And this time the result is not
the home birth. It’s the home funeral.
While not everyone feels comfortable transporting,
preparing and burying a body themselves, many
express a wish to participate in part of the process:
whether that be making a coffin, digging a grave
or - as happens in Lismore - physically pushing
a casket into the furnace during cremations.
Grief counsellors say that having a more open
and participatory approach can only do our death-denying
society good. But while the Australian funeral
industry pays lip service to these ideals and
has shifted to adjust to the growing demand for
ethnic and nonreligious funerals, its notorious
“closed shop” approach continues,
making it extremely difficult, if not impossible,
for amateurs to triumph over the professionals
and reclaim the lost rituals of death.
THE flyers for Adult Community Education (ACE)
Mullumbimby’s term four courses raised more
than a few eyebrows. There, among the lessons
in patchworking, creative writing, computer keyboarding
and snake identification, was the Customs Coffins
Workshop. ACE Mullumbimby’s co-ordinator,
Trude Helm , says the course came about partly
due to a request by Amitayus , a local hospice
care service that helps people die in their homes,
and partly because three members of the region’s
Osho spiritual community had recently died in
violent circumstances: two in a light plane crash
and one in a fall from a cliff in the Himalayas.
Funeral organisers were dissatisfied with the
traditional arrangements available, particularly
the pre-manufactured coffins.
Mullumbimby is a close-knit community and the
coffin course became a running joke. Nick Shand,
the roguish editor of the independent newspaper
The Byron Shire Echo, found it amusing. He and
a friend who was planning to enrol in the course
were laughing about it the day before Shand died
in an accident on October 27.
While Shand’s home funeral and “backyard”
burial (his family and friends did everything
except the autopsy) did not start the North Coast
DIY funeral movement, it did epitomise its objectives
and unite its ambassadors.
The organiser of the funeral and a close friend
of Shand’s, Paul Jameson, says teams of
people were delegated tasks: some to do the paperwork
and seek permission for a home burial, others
to dig the grave (they elected to work by hand
rather than use machinery) and a local carpenter,
Ken Enstone, to build the coffin. Once the autopsy
was complete, negotiations began with the local
hospital, which eventually agreed to store Shand’s
corpse. The hospital also allowed his wife and
children to come in and wash and dress the body.
The day of the funeral, Shand’s open coffin
was loaded into the back of an open truck and
driven in a slow procession to a nearby community
hall for a memorial service involving more than
1,000 people. Later that day, Nick Shand was buried
beneath a mound of flowers and wine bottles behind
the multiple occupancy where he had lived. The
only cost to the family was the hiring of a portable
lavatory.
Asked what he thought the funeral would have
been like if they had hired a funeral director
and done things traditionally, Jameson says: “You
want a quote? F---ing awful. We did things our
way and I have no doubt that it helped those who
were left behind.”
Trude Helm’s coffin-making students were
not put off by the death. If anything, it heightened
their realisation that you never know who will
be next.
The Herald drops in during the last Saturday
of their course, as Ken Enstone pulls the five
caskets-inprogress out of storage in his ceiling
and arranges them on his workshop floor. The carpenter,
who is acting as instructor, admits that his first
coffin was the stunning Tasmanian oak casket he
made only a few weeks earlier for Nick Shand.
“It’s quite a pleasant thing to make
a coffin but on the day of the funeral I had this
incredible paranoia about Nick falling through
the bottom,” Enstone recalls. “I used
the best glue I could lay my hands on but he was
about 14 stone and they did move him about a lot
more than most.”
As the students (most of whom are in their 40s)
arrive and start work, the atmosphere is anything
but funereal. Black jokes abound and the plastic
earmuffs lend a surreal touch. Everyone agrees
that the primary objective when building a coffin
ahead of schedule is to make it multifunctional.
Christine Wilcox, an artist, has built an Ikea-style
demountable glass coffin because she wants people
to have to literally face up to her death. The
big black box made by Suvira, another artist,
will be painted a “beautiful burnt orange”
and used as an arts supply cabinet, while that
of Amare Pearl, a herbalist, has a detachable
back rest and drink trays so that it works as
a chair. Ebker-White wants to use his as a toy
box for his three children: “Although my
wife hasn’t seen it yet so it might end
up having quite a different use altogether.”
The fifth coffin - a stunning camphor and red
cedar-lidded chest known as “the beast”
- belongs to Alia Kazan, who isn’t with
us today. She has breast cancer and has sent Sarito,
a friend of hers, along to build it for her because
she is too weak to use the heavy machinery. “Alia
was diagnosed with cancer 10 years and was a client
of Amitayus for more than a year,” says
Amare Pearl , a founding member of the hospice
group. “We’re thinking of giving her
a notice of failure.”
The primary activist in the North Coast home-funeral
movement is Zenith Virago , a Byron Bay paralegal
who - like everyone else interested in this area
- became involved after the deaths of close friends.
Over the past three years, as a “funeral
consultant”, Virago has helped organise
about 40 funerals for clients who range from full-on
hippies to farming families and surfers. She is
about to open The Natural Death Centre and plans
to market recycled cardboard coffins that could
cost as little as $100 each. “Many people
don’t know what their rights are,”
she says. “For instance, there’s nothing
that says you have to be buried lying down. You
could be upright or on a slope or even in the
lotus position in a pyramid-shaped coffin if you
were a yoga practitioner.”
Virago has a wealth of tips on how to run a home
funeral. Water frozen in milk cartons, air-conditioning
and drawn curtains can help keep a body cool in
summer, for instance, while stiff corpses can
be manipulated into new positions with heat and
oil.
John Merrick, the senior grief counsellor at
Glebe’s Institute of Forensic Medicine,
also encourages people to take a more active role
in death and doesn’t think it morbid to
plan for it. “It’s very, very healthy;
it means people have got a handle on their own
mortality. The funeral industry is run by professionals
and I think now people are starting to think,
‘Hold on a sec, why are we being excluded
from this process?’ It’s about people
trying to gain some control over their rites of
passage.”
Unfortunately, trying to self-manage a funeral
means negotiating a minefield of regulations and
dealing with the largely unhelpful - if not actively
obstructive - funeral industry. It’s hard
enough on the alternative North Coast, but in
a city such as Sydney it is near impossible. Trying
to unearth the relevant laws, for instance, is
a bureaucratic nightmare in which opinions conflict
and queries are shunted from one department to
the next. One can only imagine what this type
of fact-finding would be like while in shock or
grief.
According to the 1991 NSW Public Health Regulations,
it is legal for a member of the public to transport
a body in his or her own car (provided it is contained
in a legal “receptacle”) but it is
illegal to keep a body out of refrigeration for
more than eight hours or to wash or dress a body
in a private home. This makes finding a co-operative
hospital or funeral home essential.
On the North Coast, this is not a problem. Denise
Paitson, from William Riley and Sons in Lismore,
is one funeral director who happily accepts home-made
coffins, offers a body storage-only service and
encourages people into the mortuary to dress bodies
themselves. Kris Whitney, the manager of the council-run
Lismore Lawn Cemetery and Memorial Gardens, also
accepts home-made coffins and allows mourners
out the back to push coffins into the cremator
themselves: “It’s all about giving
your customers what they want.”
But not everyone in the industry shares their
view, as Paul Brennan discovered when he tried
to self-manage his father’s funeral in Sydney
in 1981. Newspapers refused to publish his “incorrectly
worded” funeral notices, coffin manufacturers
said they sold coffins only through funeral directors
and a union rep told him it was against union
policy to let him drive the hearse. “The
real obstacles to a fully self-managed funeral
were not the laws but a combination of compelling
circumstances supported by folklore and superstition
which are perpetuated by all sections of the funeral
industry for the benefit of the funeral industry,”
Brennan wrote in The National Times at the time.
His experience was used as a case study last
year in Redfern Legal Centre Publishing’s
Rest Assured - A Legal Guide to Wills, Estates
and Funerals, and a spokeswoman for the centre
said “the incredible boys’ club”
was still as strong as ever.
Those within the funeral industry complain bitterly
about being shafted by a vindictive and misunderstanding
media, without once acknowledging that their own
behaviour and attitudes may be a contributing
factor. Aiden Nye, secretary of the NSW Funeral
and Allied Industries Union, for instance, claims
that people who want to run their own funerals
are just a publicity-seeking minority. “I
hate people who try to gain on these sorts of
situations,” he says. “As soon as
the media leaves, our people have to come in.
The public just aren’t capable of dealing
with it. Building the coffin is the easiest part
of the exercise of a funeral, let me tell you.
We can manufacture those things like sausages.”
Ken Maurer, national president of the Australian
Funeral Directors Association, agrees it is a
minority thing. “If that group of people
in that northern NSW area choose to do it then
it’s entirely up to them,” he says.
“But there are 40,000 deaths in NSW each
year and if 100 people want to do it I would be
very, very surprised. I don’t think it’s
a thing the industry will get horribly nervous
about.”
Back in the industrial estate on the fringes
of Mullumbimby, the politics of death are not
nearly as interesting as the exciting discovery
that lying in a finished coffin with the lid on
is incredibly relaxing, even if it does fill your
eyes with sawdust.
Now the coffins are complete, all are anxious
to test-drive their work and as most caskets were
built a tad too short there is much discussion
about whether their corpses should be arranged
with knees folded inward or outward. Wilcox says
she plans to be at least 100 by the time she’s
dead, so she will have shrunk. Sarito fixes a
tiny brass keyhole to the front of Alia’s
coffin as a finishing touch, and Ebker-White cracks
open a bottle of home-made low-alcohol stout to
celebrate.
As the class sit on the coffins in a circle around
the room, banging their plastic cups together
and congratulating each other, Pearl calculates
that his has cost a grand total of $20.
Still, no-one really came here to save money.
“When we were younger we went to 21st birthday
parties, then it was weddings, then it was christenings
and now it is funerals,” Pearl says as the
first heavy drops of rain drum down on Enstone’s
corrugated iron roof. “The way I see it
is that we are part of the ‘60s baby-boomer
generation and we have tried to do everything
differently. Now we are having to look at illness
and death we are going to do that our way as well.”
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