by Mark Blackham
At the Kew Cemetery in Melbourne, I went searching for my ancestors’ graves. I found the grand memorial to my great-great-grandfather, John Halfey — a goldminer, financier, and politician. His grave is the largest monument in the cemetery, an imposing stone column and angel. Also buried there are his wife Annie, and three of their nine children. One died aged ten drowning while swimming in the Yarra River. Sorrow does not respect wealth.
A few rows away, I found the plot of my great uncle and his wife. There was no headstone, no inscription — just an empty space and a scraggy shrub.
I cannot deny disappointment at the empty space. I was denied a literal touchstone with my past. The Halfey memorial allowed me to physically feel the family’s life and prominence.
The emotional contrast between the two graves confronted a central tenet of the natural burials concept; not to add anything synthetic to the landscape. Memorials should not be lasting artificial structures. The memorial to the deceased is the natural area that remains and lives.
Some people worry about the impermanence of wooden memorials. When we first posed the natural burial idea to the Ministry of Health over 20 years ago it was opposed, citing people complaining about not being able to find ancestors graves at old cemeteries due to broken and missing memorials. Minor annoyance to descendants is not a strong reason to deny an individual their wish for a green burial!
The reality is that after five years, the number of visitors to a grave falls below one per year. But during those early years, there are visitors, and they’re grieving. They want something to stand in for the physical person who recently left us.
That’s why we invented the idea of the wooden marker. It is there when needed and will have decomposed when it ceases being needed. We found though that untreated pine fell apart within 18 months. So we use H3 treated pine so it lasts the length of the surviving family members.
Standing in Kew cemetery I realised stone endures way past immediate family members, but (and so) its meaning fades. There is no point in all that stone being there every hour and day of the week, waiting for occasional visits like mine. The cemetery records listed my relatives deceased in the grass plot just that same as those in the memorialised plot.
A far better memorial is a living one. Natural cemeteries are living organisms, feeding and harbouring life continuously – unbroken – no matter who visits. And when visitors do arrive, they are greeted by trees, insects, and bird song. The shrub growing above the unmarked grave at Kew was supporting life, not dead memories. When you stand graveside at a natural cemetery, you stand among your ancestors, and the life they stimulated. There is no better memorial.