TRANSCRIPT
Do you know what will happen when you die?
I don't mean to your spirit, or soul, but to your physical body.
Most people have family or friends around them, who arrange a ceremony or memorial, and a cremation or burial.
But for some people, that isn't the case.
“I often say we deal in death every day because basically we do.”
That's Reverend Bill Crews, Minister of Ashfield Uniting Church, and CEO and Founder of the Reverend Bill Crews Foundation that provides direct assistance to people to address the cause and effect of homelessness, poverty and disadvantage.
For about 50 years, he has been taking care of some of the unclaimed dead in Sydney.
“A lot of homeless and kind of disadvantaged people they die early, way before their time. And it just gradually came into my consciousness that they ended up in a pauper's grave. They get buried in the most undignified way, in batches of 12. And I thought, that's wrong. And I've been kind of advocating about that for decades but nothing's happened much.”
When someone dies that he knows or has supported, Reverend Crews says the foundation steps in.
“We pay all the funeral expenses. We do the whole lot. So that they have a proper, dignified, rest. We spend a lot of time looking for families and trying to find family members and bring them in. Often the person will have disappeared for years and the family don't know what happened to him or her. And it's quite an emotional scene when we have the funeral.”
Exactly what happens to unclaimed bodies in each jurisdiction is unclear.
Responses from state and territory governments indicate that when someone passes away, authorities attempt to contact the next of kin.
If that isn't possible, the body is taken care of by the government, often by the Public Trustee, who assesses any assets they may have and organises the final burial or cremation.
That burial or cremation is known as a pauper's funeral. No government has offered an explanation as to what that looks like.
People working with the dead in New South Wales and Victoria have told SBS the unclaimed bodies are buried in a group grave.
Neither state government could answer the question "are bodies that are not claimed by the next of kin buried in a group grave?" by the time of publication.
The Reverend Bill Crews Foundation takes care of at least one person a month after they've passed away. He says it's hard to grieve when you don't know where a loved one is buried.
“There was a homeless man in the 70s, one of the stolen generation and we became really close friends. And he sat beside me in one of my saddest times. And I never forgot that, never forgot that. And I went off to theological college to study and during that time he died on the street. And by the time I'd got to hear of it, he'd already been buried, and I have no idea where he is. And so I can't go and say thank you. That to me is just really painful.”
Accessing an appropriate burial isn't just an issue for those without next of kin. For some people, it's simply too expensive.
A 2023 report by Seniors Australia found the average funeral cost more than $9,000.
In Victoria, the Sustainable Funerals Group offers no cost funerals for people who aren't able to cover the cost of a funeral, assisting up to 900 people a year.
Headed by Kieran Worthington, the group has been operating for 27 years.
“My father, Ted Worthington was a funeral celebrant for many years. He had a vision of helping people who couldn't afford their own funerals. In the case of Victoria, the government didn't offer any financial assistance to people who needed funerals if they couldn't afford them, people were considered paupers. They would go to the coroner, which is still the case if there's no one to claim a person when they pass away. And the coroner would wait until they had enough of them and they'd put them in a common grave, all of them. And there'd be no way really for anyone to trace or find out where their loved one went, if someone turned up down the track.”
In most other jurisdictions, local governments offer some kind of support for people in financial hardship who aren't able to meet the full cost of a funeral, most often in the form of a one off payment of around $500, although it varies state by state.
Whilst the Sustainable Funerals Group currently only operates in Victoria, it's looking to expand to other parts of Australia.
Mr Worthington believes improving access to affordable funerals will be driven by the community.
“If we're not willing to fix it ourselves, or at least contribute to the fixing or the coordination of the fixing, then we're probably just asking too much generally of governments to be across as much as what we expect. I think what we have to do is, we have to get together as communities and say. Hey, this is what we need. This is what we want, which is what we do. And this is what we're willing to give up to make it work and we want you to sponsor it, we want you to support it. And in that case, the government tends to come to the party, because they recognize you're doing their job for them.”
And facilitating a dignified funeral has flow on effects.
“For community to work, when people fall down, you have to help them up. In the case of when someone has passed away and no one has any money to provide a funeral, it's an extremely emotive issue. And it has unfortunate ramifications if people feel right there, at the worst place that they're in, that they're not looked after in some way. We like to think that by stopping that cycle of debt, at the very least we're helping in some small way, but we're also helping in a large way in terms of assisting them to grieve by not having to worry about the funeral part of it, we take care of that for them.”
Bill Crews says dignity is something everyone deserves in death.
“It's basically human dignity. It doesn't matter who we are, we all are born the same way and we all die the same way, and we should be treated the same way throughout our lives. Why should it be that that some people are treated as if they're just of no account at all? It just seems wrong to me.”
And although he has tried to improve what happens to the unclaimed dead, nothing has changed.
“I have brought this up often. And every politician I know thinks it's dreadful, but none of them have changed it.”
