Conference Program
Session times in Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11).
Conference sessions at Arts West, University of Melbourne. Opening night reception at 75 Reid St, Fitzroy North.
Attendees will be sent a link to access the live stream before the conference.
Thursday 27th October
08:30 Registration desk opens (Arts West foyer)
09:00–09.30 Conference welcome (Arts West foyer)
09:30–11:00 Session 1 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Ben White (Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Queensland University of Technology)
Participants: Casey Haining, Ruthie Jeanneret, Lindy Willmott, Madeleine Archer (Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Queensland University of Technology)
This panel session reflects on the patient and family experience of voluntary assisted dying in Australia, with a comparative Belgian study. Presentations transcend the death course including the patient experience of accessing voluntary assisted dying, how this prompted some family members to become “regulatory actors”, and their experience of grief after their loved one’s death.
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Chair: Simon Wong (Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust)
Participants: Fraser Allison (University of Melbourne), Priscilla Hough-Davies (Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust), Adrian Compton-Cook (Nature Research), Isabel Zhang (Bastion Insights), Cale Donovan (Bare)
The complexity of choices and decision-making in Deathcare has increased markedly as Australian society sees changes to social connections, demography and digital innovation. What are the major trends impacting consumer and community choices, and how are different organisations responding to this? This session will present research from three different organisations as they tackle these trends from different sector viewpoints.
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Chair: Bjørn Nansen (University of Melbourne)
Participant: Susannah Goddard (Greater Metropolitan Cemetery Trust), Martin Jackson (PlotBox), Sam Loy (Freelance audio producer), Sonia Vachalec (ModUrn Group)
This panel brings together leading industry and academic representatives to discuss the development and implementation of digital technologies augmenting the experience of cemeteries and memorial spaces. Building on the Future Cemetery project – led by the DeathTech research team in partnership with the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust – this panel will include presentations on key emerging cemetery technologies followed by discussion about their significance and implications for cemetery spaces and memorial practices.
11:00–11:30 Morning tea (Arts West foyer)
11:30–13:00 Session 2 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Hannah Gould (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Tamara Kohn (University of Melbourne), Michael Arnold (University of Melbourne), Alex Broom (University of Sydney) - audience participation invited
This participatory workshop brings into conversation scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss how we might define and comprehensively study the concept of a ‘good death’ within contemporary Australia, with consideration for the operationalisation of this standard within healthcare and industry settings. Responding to the absence of high-quality, holistic, and national-level research into Australian death, participants will collaboratively develop a research design to address the history, demographic diversity, and institutional and legislative context of contemporary Australia.
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Chair: John Noel Viana (Australian National University)
Participants: Mark Howard (Monash University), Zongyuan Ge (Monash University), Brett Scholz (ANU), Imogen Mitchell (ANU), Sujatha Raman (ANU), Joan Leach (ANU)
Multi–omics and digital technologies can improve prognostication accuracy and health monitoring for end-of-life care. However, they raise ethical and equity issues, requiring interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral collaboration. With ethicists, scientists, practitioners, and consumer advocates, this roundtable will discuss salient concerns in the design, testing, and application of these novel technologies.
13:00–14:00 Lunch (Arts West foyer)
14:00–15:30 Session 3 (Arts West basement + level 2)
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This roundtable explores the process and challenges of formalising standards for quality and safety within the Australian deathcare sector.
Chair: Kate Falconer (QUT)
Participants: Adrian Barrett (AFDA National President), Lynne Gallucci (Executive General Manager for Australian Funerals, Invocare), Lauren Hardgrove (Vice President, Australasian Cemeteries & Crematoria Association), Tom Williams (NSW Branch Organiser, AWU), Joe Sehee (Executive Director, Social Health Australia)
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Chair: Ross G Menzies (University of Technology Sydney)
Participants: Philip Bachelor (Box Hill Cemetery), Vida Ivan (Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust), Freia Lily (Community Palliative Care), Rebecca Lyons (You n' Taboo, Solace End of Life Services)
This panel discussion will explore contemporary solutions to a range of issues that inevitably arise in deathcare. The panel will examine, among other things, innovative approaches to trauma and grief, the role of cemeteries in our communities, the parentification of children during the dying process, and the value of death acceptance. The discussion will cover insights from a range of diverse practices and disciplines including psychology, sociology, social work, philosophy, palliative care and cemetery management.
16:00–17:00 Keynote 1 (Arts West level 1)
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Ruth E. Toulson is a Cambridge-educated cultural anthropologist and mortician. She is Professor of Anthropology at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, USA. Her forthcoming book, ‘Transforming Grief’ takes readers behind the scenes in a Chinese funeral parlor in Singapore, a place where the way that death is marked has transformed entirely in the space of a generation. Why, she asks, are some practices clung to, becoming orthopraxy, while other rituals are abandoned seemingly without regret? And what role does the state have in this transformation? Her focus is what she labels "the necropolitics of the ordinary." What can we learn from seemingly ordinary deaths of ordinary people? From those who grieve for them, and those who tend to them?
17:30–20:00 Opening night reception (75 Reid St)
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Join us for drinks, canapés and networking at the opening night reception, which doubles as the opening night of the Endline photo exhibition.
Endline is a photo series documenting deathcare in the Covid-19 pandemic, created by Bri Hammond in collaboration with Hannah Gould and Samuel Holleran of the DeathTech Research Team.
The venue, 75 Reid Street, is a short taxi ride or 35-minute walk from Arts West.
Friday 28th October
08:30 Registration desk opens (Arts West foyer)
09:00–10:30 Session 4 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: John Troyer (Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath)
Participants: Heather Conway (Queen’s University Belfast), Georgina Robinson (University of Durham), Kate Falconer (University of Queensland), Philip Olson (Virginia Tech University),
The Redesigning Future Dead Body Disposal Technologies panel of experts will discuss contemporary concerns around ecologically sustainable dead body technologies. How ecologically sustainable is death? More importantly, why are some final disposition methods considered green and others natural? The panel will examine, for example, the alkaline-hydrolysis process, aerobic decomposition, and old-new systems such as organ donation and cryogenics.
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Chair: Tamara Kohn (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Urszula Tataj-Puzyna (Center of Postgraduate Medical Education, Warsaw), Tina Braun (University of Bern), Michael Erard (Maastricht University)
Researchers from midwifery, linguistics, anthropology and design will present on different contexts in which communication is problematised at the end of life. The papers consider: parental farewells to babies that die at birth; representations of dying in palliative care unit design; and a linguistic unpacking of last words.
10:30–11:00 Morning tea (Arts West foyer)
11:00–12:30 Session 5 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Kate Woodthorpe (Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath)
Participants: Ruth Toulson (MICA), Stass Jones (The Last Hurrah Funeral Home), Stephanie Longmuir (celebrant), Kate Woodthorpe (University of Bath)
This panel will explore global funeral trends, before inviting the audience to share their views on change within their own country or continent. It promises to be a lively comparative discussion between presenters and the audience that brings together an international community interested in present and future funeral practice.
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Chair: Marc Trabsky (La Trobe University)
Participants: Dave Ranson (Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine), Belinda Carpenter (Queensland University of Technology), Rebecca Scott Bray (University of Sydney), Natalie Maystorovich Chulio (University of Sydney)
Medico-legal investigations into sudden, unnatural, violent and accidental deaths require coroners to determine the cause and manner of the death. But what role does deathcare occupy in death investigations? In this roundtable, academics and practitioners will discuss how taking care of the dead has become a key element in the coronial jurisdiction.
12:30–13:30 Lunch (Arts West foyer)
13:30–14:30 Keynote 2 (Arts West level 1)
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Caitlin Doughty is a mortician, advocate, and bête noire of the traditional funeral industry. Her educational webseries "Ask a Mortician" has been viewed almost 250 million times and all three of her books were New York Times bestsellers. She founded a Los Angeles funeral home as well as the funeral reform collective The Order of the Good Death, which spawned the death positive movement.
The Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust (GMCT) is honoured to announce the inaugural Deb Ganderton Memorial Address – a keynote speech as part of the forthcoming Redesigning Deathcare Conference.
Deb joined GMCT in August 2017 as Director Service and Engagement and in September 2019, Deb was appointed CEO, which she remained as until her passing in March 2022. One of Deb’s key achievements was the formation of GMCT’s partnership with the team at DeathTech and the University of Melbourne. Her foresight recognised the need to bring the deathcare industry and academia together, a partnership focused on destigmatising, innovating and educating.
GMCT is proud to continue this partnership and of the opportunity to celebrate what she stood for through the Deb Ganderton Memorial Address.
The inaugural address will be delivered by the indomitable Caitlin Doughty. Like Deb, Caitlin is a strong advocate for death literacy and transparency. Deb epitomised these values alongside GMCT’s own organisational values of compassion, respect, innovation and sustainability. Always an unwavering advocate for the sector, Deb prioritised making GMCT’s gains and learnings, sector-wide gains and learnings. The Deb Ganderton Memorial Address is another significant opportunity to build on that ethos through sharing knowledge, ideation and the desire for genuine growth and change.
15:00–16:30 Session 6 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Fraser Alison (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Sam Bagnato (Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust), Samantha Teichman (Simon Fraser University), Katy McHugh (University of Queensland), Gaudenz Urs Metzger (Zurich University of the Arts), Sarah Kaur (Portable)
This session explores how online digital media are being used to facilitate social connection, information-seeking, commemoration and grieving, before and after a death. Researchers and designers from three different continents will present their work on the products, practices and cultural values that are emergent in this space, followed by Q&A.
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Chair: Bronte Price (The Equality Network)
Participants: Hini Hanara, Andy Fernie (Become Funerals), Fran Webber (Tobin Brothers), Annetta Mallon, Alex Antunes
Safe, appropriate deathcare for queer people is almost non-existent in Australia. The LGBTIQ+ community has been consistently erased, structurally and institutionally, by the deathcare industry. The LGBTIQ+ community has specific deathcare needs. In this session, we explore some of those needs and what should be done to re-design deathcare for the LGBTIQ+ community.
This session is a panel session. The Panel Chair will present a 10 minute overview of the deathcare issues that currently exist for LGBTIQ+ people in Australia. Then, he will informally ask each of the panel members a range of questions, broadly focussed on the following areas:
1. What is the evidence that deathcare remains overwhelmingly heteronormative and why is this so?
2. What are the taboos that remain for LGBTIQ+ people in deathcare that arise from gender and sexuality? How can we rethink them?
3. How can we reimagine deathcare for queer people – how can we make it better?
4. How can we queer the rites, rituals and disposal of LGBTIQ+ people?
5. How can we queer grief and the mourning of LGBTIQ+ people?
6. What are some ways we can queer the thresholds between life and death? How can we better queer spirituality and absence after death?
7. How can we make queer people more visible in death – eg by Registries of Births, Deaths and Marriages, medical professionals, deathcare professionals, end-of-life care professionals; funeral industry, memorial parks and cemeteries?
8. What are some of the particular ways in which the memories of dead LGBTIQ+ people keep affecting the lives of living people? [beliefs and hopes re spiritual afterlife; wishes regarding disposal; property sharing / inheritance; anniversaries etc]
9. What about queering support systems for those left behind, after a person (LGBTIQ+ person or not) has died? What can be done better?
16:30–18:00 Session 7 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Samuel Holleran (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Hayley West (Castlemaine Cemetery Trust), Mariske Westerndorp (Utrecht University), Hamish Coates (Manager Future Design, Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust), Isabel Lasala (Lasala & Lasala Design Studio, RMIT)
This session examines the design, maintenance, and community-activation of cemeteries, drawing on international and Australian-specific examples. Presenters will discuss new programs that bring live music, virtual tours, wayfinding, horticulture, beekeeping and more into urban cemeteries. A major theme will be the balance between ‘site activation’ for surrounding communities and the necessity of maintaining a somber and respectful space for families.
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Chair: Avril Maddrell (University of Reading)
Participants: Brenda Mathijessen (University of Groningen), Anna Halafoff (Deakin University), Avril Maddrell (University of Reading), Margaret Gibson (Griffith University)
Our deathcare infrastructure faces spatial, environmental, technical, social and funding challenges. Starting from the premise that cemeteries, crematoria, funeral homes, and other facilities are public services which serve their local communities, this panel explores diversity and justice issues, including strategies relating to changing cultural practices, majority norms and minority religious obligations, as well as the impact of Covid-19 regulations.
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Chair: Tamara Kohn (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Catherine Bell (Australian Catholic University), Laura Woodward, Eric Jong, Leah Heiss, Elizabeth Hallam (Oxford University)
Artists and designers at this roundtable will show images and discuss their works. They will consider how we might reimagine processes of dying, death, and disposal and ask how art and design can invite audiences and consumers to explore new ways of approaching and dealing with death and its aftermath.
18:30–19:30 Keynote 3 (Arts West level 1)
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Annie Louey is a multi-talented comedian and presenter who moves seamlessly between television, radio and stage. She is a recipient of the Moosehead Award to support her new Comedy Festival show ‘Annie Louey is Flirting With Death’, in 2022.
As a child, Annie attended more funerals than birthday parties. As a teenager, she had a near-death experience. As an adult, she worked at a funeral home during a pandemic. Having been brought up in a culture that keeps death on the down low, Annie is about to blow the coffin wide open.
Twitter & Instagram: @AnnieLouey
19:30 Drinks at University House
Join us for casual pre-dinner drinks at University House on campus.
Saturday 29th October
08:30 Registration desk opens (Arts West level 2)
09:00–10:30 Session 8 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Rebecca Lyons (You n' Taboo, Solace End of Life Services)
Participants: Hannah Fowler (Producer of ‘The Last Ecstatic Days), Annetta Mallon (Gentle Death Education and Planning), Sam Hooker (University of Bath), Jennifer Moran Stritch (Technological University of the Shannon)
This panel addresses the approaches to and outcomes of home dying, death and the role of Doulas at end of life. International panellists, Annetta Mallon, Samantha Hooker, Hannah Fowler and Jennifer Moran Stritch will present on their work and invite questions from the audience and viewers.
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Chair: Hannah Gould (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Jenny Schwarz (Aged Care, University of Melbourne), Rebecca Lush (University of Queensland Integrated Pathology Learning Centre)
Healthcare systems and medicine’s professional culture have been described as ‘death phobic’, with death too often viewed as a ‘failure’. This framing has significant psychological impacts for families and clinicians alike. What is the current position of end-of-life and death care within Australia’s medical education programs? How might we better teach death and dying to medical professionals? On this roundtable, educators, physicians, and students discuss their experiences and dreams for a better system of death education.
10:30–11:00 Morning tea (Arts West foyer)
11:00–12:30 Session 9 (Arts West level 2)
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Chair: Michael Arnold (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Shereef Metwally (INVIROPOD), Shea Evans (Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust), Ross George (Austeng), Veenat Arora (Sociology, PG Government College for Girls, India)
It is true that funerals, burials and cremations contribute a very small proportion of a person’s environmental impact over a lifetime, but it is also true that we are in an environmental crisis that requires us to take all measures that can be taken – big and small. What can cemeteries do to mitigate the crisis?
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Chair: Tamara Kohn (University of Melbourne)
Participants: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University), Eric Green (Green Pet-Burial Society), Alicia Kennedy (Cherished Pet Care)
This session explores how we care for and grieve dying and dead animal companions. Participants explore changing popular desires for the commemoration and handling of dead animals, and what changes are required to our deathcare systems to meet these needs.
12:30–13:30 BBQ lunch (The System Garden)
13:30 Cemetery tours depart
A limited number of places is available for guided tours to Fawkner Memorial Park and Springvale Botanical Cemetery, supported by the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust and the Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust. Tours will depart from the University of Melbourne. Please register your interest at registration.
Concurrent Programming
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Artist: Bri Hammond
Endline is a photo series by Bri Hammond, created in collaboration with the researchers Hannah Gould and Samuel Holleran. It pays tribute to the diverse people who work in deathcare, from palliative care clinicians and funeral directors, to morticians, religious celebrants, crematoria operators, and cemetery staff.
While restrictions on funerals has highlighted concerns about memorialisation during the ongoing Covid crisis, the daily labour of end-of-life professionals has gone largely uncredited. This series takes the audience into the ‘backstage’ of deathcare, a sector that is mostly hidden from public view and is often stigmatised. In intimate portraits and in the small details of working environments, these images reveal death work to be an essential service and a practice of care, not only for the dying and dead, but also for the bereaved and the wider community.
Endline will be exhibited at 75 Reid Street Auditorium, 27th October - 29th October 2022. The venue will host the Redesigning Deathcare Welcome Drinks on the evening of the 27th October.
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Artist: Pia Interlandi (RMIT University)
Letters Unsent explores the ephemerality and tactility of death, questioning the ongoing relationship we have with those we can no longer touch.
Audience members are invited to write a letter to someone who has died. This can be done at any point during the conference.
The paper on which the letter is written is dissolvable.
When the letter is finished, it is placed onto a community shroud that adorns a horizontally suspended transparent mannequin. The letter is sprayed with water, the paper dissolves and the ink stains and colours the garment underneath. Over time this garment, which will eventually be worn for burial, carries a patina of message to the dead.
Letters Unsent is part of ongoing, iterative creative practice research by Dr Pia Interlandi which considers contemporary rituals of death and community engagement. Previous iterations have been installed at Melbourne Knowledge Week, MPavilion, the Engaging for Impact Conference, Melbourne Festival of Death and Dying, VicForum: Digital Humanity and the National Home Funeral Conference (US).
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Artist: Cari Beaulieu (Simon Fraser University)
This short digital animation tells the stories of my grandparents' four very different end-of-life experiences and what they taught me about a good death. Through narrative art therapy, I reflect on how their deaths inspired me to dedicate my career to aging, dying, and opening conversations for healing.
Conference attendees will be able to access the animation through the conference online portal.
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Producer: Hayley West
DEAD AIR is a socially engaged artwork for the airwaves. As a death literacy advocate and artist, Hayley West aims to empower the community by sharing practical knowledge about death and dying. Community broadcasting is a tool and a means to reach local community (live) and beyond (uploaded). Normalising the discussion around death and dying will ultimately encourage more compassionate communities, equipped to look after their dead and dying members.
Conference attendees will be able to access episodes of DEAD AIR through the conference online portal.
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Public Exhibition hosted at the Science Museum, at the University of Melbourne. Conference attendees may be particularly interested to visit the “Euthanasia Coaster” designed by Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas.
From the website:
Enter SWARM, a space that uncovers the very essence of human behaviour and questions what drives us to be social.
There are more of us now than ever before – 7.9 billion people across the entire globe – with most of us now living highly urbanised lives in an ever-growing network of cities. We are also increasingly connected through a technological frenzy of social media and digital interfaces, allowing us to share our lives to hordes of followers, to crowdsource ideas, digitise workforces, and be part of global political movements.
Humans are not alone in our collective social behavior. From swarms of social insects, murmurations of birds, to molecular movements, swarming behavior underlies nearly everything. We are also seeing swarm algorithms driving our future lives, in which we will see swarms of drones and nanorobots helping (or hindering) the very essence of what it means to be human.
Through a series of collaborative exhibits and projects, SWARM delves into the science and art behind what it means to be part of a pack. You’re encouraged to reflect on your role in the collective. Will you go it alone? Or join the swarm?
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Current exhibition at the Australia Museum (Sydney). Broad online content available, including the “virtual autopsy” experience.
From the website: “Death is a process rather than an event. Learn more about the process and the many natural and human processes that occur after our death.”https://australian.museum/about/history/exhibitions/death-the-last-taboo/