Inside Look: Castlebrook Memorial Park

    CastlebrookMemorial Park is located in Western Sydney.  It is a relatively new place and there is actually little information about it.  Other than my personal experiences and opinions (which I describe below) it is unknown and un-described.

    Castlebrook  is InvoCare owned and operated.

Undertakers & Planning Their Funeral

    A common question certain people ask those in the funeral industry is if they have thought about or prepared for their funeral.  Thinking about it I noticed something interesting and odd.  How those in the funeral industry saw and experienced the inside of the industry yet their attitudes to their own funeral were not what I expected.

6 Feet Deep

    There is a popular idea that all graves are generally dug 6 feet deep (or 1.8 meters).  It is so common that we can see it in many songs, movies, TV Shows, books, poems and so on.  Yet, like with many other common assumptions with the funeral industry it is wrong.  A grave can easily be deeper or shallower than this depending on the circumstance.  So in this post I will address this common assumption and look at how deep a grave can be or actually is dug in NSW.

Survey Data - First Round

    This is the results of my survey so far.  If you have not taken the survey yet please do so by clicking >>this link here<< or copy and paste the url provided below.  And a massive thank you to those who have done the survey!  It was very informative and helpful :)

    Unfortunately there are not many participants, so while the data is interesting (even surprising) it is not very accurate or reliable yet.  But either way it is interesting and informative.  So read on, it was fun to make the survey and hopefully the data will be fun to read!

Scattering Ashes

    The scattering of ash is rather relaxed in Australia.  While there are certain rules and guidelines (which i will cover) they are not too strickt.  In this post I will look at how ash can legally be scattered (or 'diposed' of) in Australia, how people view ash and some interesting ways that ash has been scattered.

Attending a Funeral: The Seating

    The seating is something which does throw some mourners.  It is not a common or serious issue, but it is something which obviously makes people unnecessarily uncomfortable.  In this post I look at where mourners should sit, as well as how they should sit.  As in how to make the whole event easier and better for everyone.

An Inside Look: Pinegrove

    Pinegrove Memorial Park is a cemetery and crematorium that is also a very important centre for InvoCare.  It is a relatively new place and as such it is notably different from other cemeteries.  For example the roads tend to be wider and the curb is slopped and low rather than high or square.

    Pinegrove is owned and operated by InvoCare.

Mourning Tourists: A comparison between the mourner and the tourist

    This is my second 'formal' essay about the funeral industry, and it is rather different to the first one.  While the first essay was about the nakedness of dead bodies and how we interact with the world around us this is about modernity and the funeral industry.  About how the modern funeral industry works and operates and what a modern funeral is.  In this essay I explore the idea of "the mourner" and what it is by comparing the mourner with the tourist.  As the essay is quite long I have provided a summary (or abstract) below along with a link to the full essay.

Working Funerals - Lowering the coffin

    This post is a how to guid on lowering the coffin at the cemetery.  It looks simple and easy but so many people do it wrong and risk injuring their back or damaging the coffin.  While written from the point of view of an undertaker this guide can also be handy for mourners.

An Inside Look: Woronora Cemetery & Crematorium

    Woronora is a cemetery and crematorium, the cemetery opened in 1895 and the crematorium opened in 1934.  It is a nice place with good staff.  While sometimes confusing to navigate it is actually fairly simple and one of the easiest cemeteries to find and navigate.

    It is run and owned by a trust.