Australian cemeteries today
While more than 70 per cent of Australians choose cremation, many are still being buried, some out of preference and others due to religious beliefs.
As populations grow and people continue to choose to be buried and have their graves marked out in a traditional cemetery when they die, more and more land becomes locked away from use.
Architect David Neustein said historically not a lot of forward planning had gone into Australian cemeteries. He cited Sydney’s earliest cemetery which was located where the Town Hall now is and “then then next one had to be removed to make way for Central Station and in Melbourne their earliest cemetery is under the Queen Victoria Markets.”
“We didn’t make them large enough, they were just done in a slapdash manner and we found ourselves quickly scrambling to try to find new space,” he said.
Natural burials outside of cities
While Australia’s cities are heavily populated, the country as a whole is sparsely inhabited and Mr Neustein believes regional land outside of cities is the ideal place for cemeteries to be located, but not cemeteries as we now know them.
He would like to see more land provided for natural burial grounds without large gravestones, which could be eventually used as public open space.
“It regenerates the environment, it reduces carbon, it’s a much less carbon intensive solution for burial and relieves the pressure on urban space,” Mr Neustein said.
This is in contrast to traditional burials, in which the environmental impact is greater at each stage of preparation, burial and for years after as decomposition takes place.
“Outside the cities, there’s a lot of very poor conditioned land because of our single use farming practices. So theoretically, natural burials are really well suited to regenerating that environment.”
“When you have the chance to visit a natural burial ground and you have that experience where you journey somewhere and you have a very particular experience of place, you get it,” he said.
Mr Neustein said natural burials could take orientation of the body in to consideration to adhere to certain religious beliefs.
“The faiths that have particular views about burial go back a long way and typically the earliest forms of burials were natural burials, as in the technologies around coffins, embalmment and gravestone, those things have come later, so people of certain faiths, there’s really no reason why they couldn’t have a natural burial,” he said.
Mr Neustein said if planned and managed well, natural burials could prove sustainable for generations to come.
“The rates of decomposition in healthy soil you typically need sort of 25 to 50 years and in 200 years that ground won’t see evidence of where people were buried.
A Jewish perspective on natural burials
President of the Rabbinical Association of Australasia, Rabbi Yaakov Glasman, indicated it could be possible for Jewish communities to embrace natural burials of the type suggested if certain factors were accounted for.
“According to Jewish law, the body is allowed to be buried directly into the ground, provided it’s covered in shrouds or prayer shawls and that is a common practice in Israel,” he said.
“It certainly isn’t the existing practice here in Australia and a lot of other countries, there’s a plain pine box, but technically, according to Jewish law, natural burials are permitted.”
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“There would be no Jewish legal impediment to having a Jewish cemetery in regional areas of Australia, it’d just really require a concerted effort by enough Jewish families agreeing to have their burial or their loved one’s burials take place within that cemetery,” he said.
Rabbi Glasman pointed out it was Jewish tradition to bury Jewish people together, separated from those of other faiths, so if natural burial areas had faith specific areas like most cemeteries already do, the alternative method may align with community expectations.
He said the marking of a grave with the person’s Hebrew name and the date they died was considered respectful in the Jewish community.
Natural burials with a twist
For those who like the idea of natural burials and want to go a step further, there are a some interesting innovations in natural burials.
American Actor Luke Perry, who died in 2019 is understood to have been buried in a suit made of mushrooms.