• Do you need a funeral director?

• How much do funerals cost?

• Should you get a prepaid funeral?

• The future of funerals

• What to do when somebody dies: A helpful guide on what you need to do when somebody close to you dies

• Online will kits compared: Pros, cons and what you need to know

• Deaths in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics)

• Life expectancy in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare)

• Leading causes of death in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare)

Collection of online articles relating to death and dying

With her handmade coffin, Mary Flynn is eager to spark conversations about death and natural burials

‘My life will be short. So on the days I can, I really live’: 30 dying people explain what really matters

Buckley, A. (2022). Creative practices for becoming-with death while vitally alive (Doctoral thesis, Western Sydney University, Australia).

Abstract

This dissertation is an emergent philosophical exploration of our socio-political-ecological relationship with death in the context of climate change and mass species extinction. The sudden death of my son led to the initiation of doctoral research in Gawler, South Australia and a creative practice of becoming-with death while vitally alive. The original contribution to knowledge is to theorise, through a post-qualitative lens, my lived experience of facilitating community events that increase death literacy, raise awareness of natural burial and generatively engage people with death through creative practice. Community events include Death Cafes, making memory quilts and the Eco Coffin Project.

Noonan, K. (2018). Renegade stories: A study of deathworkers using social approaches to dying, death and loss in Australia (Doctoral thesis, Western Sydney University, Australia). Retrieved from https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:48592/datastream/PDF/view

Abstract

In Australia, our population is ageing, our morbidity rates are low, and our health and aged care services are under pressure to modernise. This is a very particular and urgent time to critically examine the care and support available to people who are dying, and their families. It is a period of revival and innovation on the one hand (Swerissen & Ducket, 2014; Walter, 1994) and a space that continues to be dominated by a conservative and largely professionalised death system on the other. Despite the best efforts of the reformers and activists you will meet in this research, end-of-life care and deathcare has not fundamentally changed since the last critical turn, the modern hospice movement that began in the late 1960s. Renegade Stories is a qualitative and critical examination of the lived experiences of 12 deathworkers in Australia who, despite the dominant biomedical paradigm, are guided by a social approach to dying, death and loss. In examining their lived experiences, this thesis embodies the change that is occurring about how people experience death. It does this by asking: What are the stories and experiences of deathworkers who have a social approach to death, dying and loss? How is this deathwork shaped and influenced? And, How are they making a difference? Renegades, like many other activists in the end-of-life and deathcare space are struggling to find ways to have their perspective and experiences heard above the dominant approach toward death and dying. This thesis, in a small way, provides a space for their experiences to be heard.

Interlandi, P. (2012). [A]Dressing death: fashioning garments for the grave (Doctoral thesis, RMIT University, Australia). Retrieved from https://researchrepository.rmit.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/ADressing-death-fashioning-garments-for-the-grave/9921861391801341

Abstract

This research explores the ways fashion design can directly approach the realities of the dead body, specifically, the moments between death and disintegration, and in doing so, seeks to contribute to the ways in which fashion design can play an important role in the way we approach the dead body and the rituals surrounding death. Fashion designers largely cater to living bodies. While there has been an increasing use of death related imagery within the fashion field, most notably in the area of advertising and digital media, this is vastly different from approaching the actuality of ‘the dead.’ While the dead body may be absent of life, it becomes part of a series of cultural, material, emotional, and ethical processes that have been largely neglected by fashion design. Generally, the dead body is approached by dressing and wrapping to cover and shield it (and the living) from its vulnerable, transient state. A key aim of the research has been to seek alternative ways to dress the dead body – both through the design of actual purpose-built garments, and in the way the act of dressing the body with these garments can affect our approach to death and the dead body. The research has been undertaken through a series of creative projects involving fashioned processes and garments. Projects have been produced and have evolved in response to the moments between death and disintegration in three primary ways. Firstly, through the design of garments that literally, dissolve as a way to explore the disintegration of the garment as an aesthetic process. Secondly, it is examined through exploring processes of growth and formation in the earth, where plant roots are grown in body moulds. The third body of work explores the realities of decomposition, engaging directly with the visceral nature of ‘disgust,’ through the dressing, burial and exhumation of pig bodies, done in the context of a scientific experiment. Ultimately, this research becomes the beginning of a new type of fashion practice, catering to the care and dressing of the dead. It makes contributions to ways in which we might deal with dead bodies, and to thinking about the potential role of fashion design as the fashioning of processes, rather than simply the design of garments.

West, H. (2016). Remnants of the dead and demands on the living: Enduring grief through artistic endeavour (Master thesis, Charles Darwin University, Australia). Retrieved from https://cdu.academia.edu/HayleyWest

Abstract

In this project I explore the realities of grief through personal experiences and artistic practice. My research considers how remaining objects and memories of the deceased are interconnected and can be re-imagined as artworks to deepen commemoration. It also explores an acceptance of the inevitability of one’s own death, and considers impacts on loved ones still living. The result of this project is a moving image work and a collection of sculptures. I also propose the use of artificial grottoes as spaces that invite viewers to contemplate loss of life and confront their own mortality. Contextual research draws on the work of contemporary artists dealing with death. The video works of Sophie Calle and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook are particularly discussed in relation to my moving image work, 1 million years. When recounting the death of my brother-in-law, I consider an installation work by Tracy Emin and reflect on a photographic series by Anne Noble. Sculptural works by Mike Kelley and Callum Morton are examined in relation to artificial grottoes as devotional spaces. My art practice has also been informed by Martin Heidegger’s philosophical notion of Dasein as a way of accepting all the possibilities in life, including death. Progressive discourse regarding death, including alternative funeral rites and ways of dying, is still in its infancy in Western societies. However, talking about death is increasingly becoming less taboo. Over the course of this project, a methodological opportunity for information sharing at Death Café events has been invaluable. While questioning societal concerns with death, this project acknowledges that the conversation currently rests in a transitional space anticipating further development. My final series of works, together with this exegesis, contributes to this conversation on death and memorial through the medium of visual art.

Noonan, K., Horsfall, D., Leonard, R., & Rosenberg, J. (2016). Developing death literacy. Progress in Palliative Care, 24(1), 31-35. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09699260.2015.1103498

Abstract

Death literacy is defined as a set of knowledge and skills that make it possible to gain access to understand and act upon end-of-life and death care options. People, and communities, with high levels of death literacy have context-specific knowledge about the death system and the ability to put that knowledge into practice. Positioned within a public health framework, death literacy is considered an outcome of people’s experiences of and learnings about, death and dying. Death literacy also appears to be a resource that individuals and communities can use for their own benefit strengthening their capacity for future caring. This purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of death literacy using the evidence from a 6-year research project. We do this by examining how it corresponds to, and differs from, existing concepts and practices such as death education, health literacy, and community development. Our aim is to introduce new thinking into public health approaches to palliative care, offer practice development pathways in this arena and propose that death literacy offers a useful conceptual framework for both describing and understanding the outcomes of a public health approach to palliative care.

Horsfall, D., Noonan, K., & Leonard, R. (2011). Bringing our Dying Home. Retrieved from here

Abstract

Overwhelmingly people’s desire is to experience dying and/or death at home, suggesting an urgent need to examine community-based approaches to end-of-life care. his study does just that as we shift the attention from the needs of the terminally ill person and carer to the wider, informal
caring community. his report documents the “Bringing our dying home: Creating community at end of life” research project, a two-year qualitative project undertaken by the Social Justice Social Change Research Group (UWS) in conjunction with HOME Hospice and Cancer Council NSW.

• Death Literacy Conference