It is not unusual for farmers to expand into a side business on their land. Normally it involves cultivating a new crop, or investing in a certain breed. RICK BAYNE talks to a farmer who is providing a much more economical alternative to the norm in an industry that will never die.
Tony Dupleix has a big farm with a traditional big farm operation — sheep.
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But he also manages a small plot of land dedicated to an enterprise not likely to be found on any other farm in Australia — upright burials.
Raising sheep and burying people seem far removed, but Tony enjoys balancing both and there is a connection: sheep are enlisted twice a year to graze over the cemetery site.
Being a prime lamb farmer is Tony’s day job, but he gets as much satisfaction out of his nightshift work running Kurweeton Cemetery, located on flat farming land between Camperdown and Darlington in south-west Victoria.
“I’m a prime lamb farmer by day, undertaker by arrangement,” he says.
“I need to be a sheep farmer because that’s my day-to-day income, but this job is fascinating because it’s totally different and I have amazing conversations with people.”
It all started with a conversation in 1984 between friends who were disillusioned with the traditional funeral process.
“It led to a discussion about what you would have to do to shake up the industry and provide an alternative,” Tony said.
“We thought maybe there was a cheaper and simpler form of burial.”
Today, the 4ha block is the final resting place for 106 people with hundreds more on the pre-paid list. In total, the site could host 36,000 people, a lot more than a traditional cemetery of that dimension.
It became apparent in the 1990s that they needed to buy land, but it wasn’t until 2009 that they could start.
“We’re very patient people,” Tony quips.
Obtaining local and state government approvals became a bureaucratic nightmare and some people in his home town still avoid Tony and consider his enterprise abhorrent.
But many people love the idea of being buried in a more natural way.
Tony and his initial team of 20-unit holder subscribers and five board members wanted to find a simpler way for people to be buried.
Upright Burials and Kurweeton Cemetery was the answer, creating what Tony believes to be the only commercial business of its type in the world.
“The first thing was to throw away the box and all the other paraphernalia that comes with a traditional burial,” he said.
“We stripped it back to being like an old-style undertaker.”
They looked at options for enclosing the deceased while adhering to requirements to keep the body in a leak and odour-proof container. Plastic and Polypipe tubes were rejected, but shrouds worked.
“It’s like the old mummification you see in movies or burial at sea where people are tightly encased in a shroud, ensuring the body remains reasonably rigid so they won’t slump and the soil can be backfilled around them more respectfully,” Tony said.
People are entombed in a biodegradable bag made out of cornstarch which is covered by an outer layer made from hessian.
Using a local contractor, they drill a grave using a rotary auger rather than excavate. There has to be a minimum 600mm of soil above the body, so all graves are three metres deep, removing the need to measure people.
A device was designed to carry the deceased from a van to their grave and it then tilts to lower the body.
A cemetery has to be on Crown land and administered by a separate trust, and like with government departments, Tony faced headwinds when he approached local cemeteries.
“We’re just a burial company that wants to use a cemetery,” he said.
All local cemetery trusts rejected the concept, so they bought land from an interested farmer, gave it to the state and requested that it be gazetted as a cemetery.
The gazetting process took another six years but finally, in 2009, it became available for use, with the Darlington Cemetery Trust appointed to run it as an annex to its existing cemetery.
The land, covered by native grasses and some residual grazing grasses, was previously used for sheep and cropping and is today surrounded by those enterprises.
Growing crops or any activity that disturbs the soil is not allowed, but the land can be grazed, and sheep are called upon twice a year to keep the grass down.
Tony would have been happy to have the plots on his home farm, 10km away at Leslie Manor, but the soil didn’t suit and he was concerned that his farm wouldn’t forever be in his family.
He does, however, have a refrigeration storage system at his home.
Being a livestock farmer, Tony knew how to deal with death.
“They say you can’t have livestock unless you have dead stock, so you do get a little bit aware of death and mortality,” he said.
“We don’t like to see our animals die, but it does happen, so I wasn’t perturbed about wading into this industry as a side interest.”
The first burial in 2010 was a Vietnam War veteran from Skipton named Alan Hayward.
“He’d been phoning me for years and said this was exactly what he wanted,” Tony said.
“When I rang him and told him we were open for business, he was so relieved and it appealed to him that he would be the first.
“About a month later we were able to bury him.”
Tony has spoken to nearly all of the 106 people interred on the site, along with hundreds who have pre-paid.
“It’s those conversations that kept me motivated,” he said.
“People are saying we’re doing exactly what they are looking for. They want something different and simple.
“It’s a lot cheaper than a traditional funeral, but that’s not what attracts people. They like it because of the environmental benefits and that it’s utilising so few resources. They want their last step on the planet to be a soft one.”
For every burial, a tree is planted as part of a community revegetation program at Mount Elephant, which can be seen from the site.
“We believe the whole process is environmentally neutral,” Tony adds.
For the first 12 years, the burial rate remained consistent, but numbers have increased in the past three years after Upright Burials received national publicity.
“We have some family plots here now and we’re getting a lot more enquiries that are turning into pre-payments,” Tony said.
Tony is relieved that all funerals so far have been pre-planned, with none as a result of an unexpected casualty.
There’s a small monument near the gate with plaques recording the names of the deceased, along with a locator for their graves. Graves are set 1.2 metres apart.
Tony expects more people will opt for the simpler funeral process in the future, although even 15 years after starting he still has detractors.
“There are still people in Camperdown who will cross the street rather than pass me on the footpath,” he said.
“They think it’s abhorrent, though they might do the same for a conventional funeral director.”
Tony’s partner in the business is his wife Lois, who also oversees a family South Devon cattle farm at Lake Purrumbete along with a café on the lake’s shores.
Despite the detractors, Tony is thankful for the support over the decades, and some of it has come full-circle.
Three of the initial board members are now buried on the site, along with the original farm owner.
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