I think it's no coincidence to me that this funeral home is full of corridors and doors and cupboards and storage areas, and all of these transitional spaces really reflect what I understand as the constituent elements of rites of passage, which is rites of separation, of transition.

So this idea of the liminality, of betwixt and between when someone dies, you're not living the life you were.

You don't know where and how your relationship will continue with them or what that means.

And then there's rites of reincorporation.

Part seven, transitions.

There's a storage space, uh, formerly known as the Harry Potter cupboard, which we now call the TARDIS, which just holds a lot of, a lot of things for a little space, um, you know, like, uh, the shovels and the sand for burials, and it's where the cool plates live.

And then there's another door that says staff only.

And again, there's more coffins here.

This room was one of the reasons Victoria was drawn to take a lease on this building so that her team could hold on-site ceremonies aligned with their values that were flexible with time and responsive to what different people need.

Funerals are a meaning-making time.

Some faiths and cultures, the mourning rites, the funeral rites are fully intact.

But in the 21st century, for a number of people, you're making meaning from the elements that you're presented with.

A location, time, space, clothes your person might wear, orders of service, flowers, no flowers, coffin, shroud.

These become key signifiers in that meaning-making.

And in truth, it's not so much what your funeral rites look like.

And as a First Nations person who's lived with ceremony all my life, I can really relate to that and feel that.

Historically, there's been a very strict front, front of house and back of house division in a lot of the funeral homes, and the parts that are less accessible to people are the parts that fear or mistrust can grow, 'cause people lose sight of their dead.

[gentle music] The reason we're here in these premises is 'cause we have our own onsite mortuary, which in an independent context in Sydney, New South Wales, is a very rare thing.

There are plastic plants and a beautiful image of gum trees and a mountain on the back of the door.

There is a whiteboard that has the names of all the people that we're caring for and which funeral director is looking after them.

And then you open [door squeaks] the door to the cool room.

[generator hums] We also can store coffins in here, so we might coffin people the day before their funeral, and the coffin can stay in here.

You can hear the generator.

On one side there is a, the, the mortuary birth shelves, and there's room to move in here, and on days like this, it's really nice and cool.

There are a few things I remember clearly, though: the friends who held me up, the constant presence of my family, and a deeply important phone call from Victoria in her capacity as a doula.

I call myself a mortality doula because I often work with people well before they are facing their actual death.

I work with people who have experienced e-either a very significant diagnosis or a life-limiting illness or are just managing general unwellness or who are needing companioning and support as they accompany and walk with someone in their life who is living with their mortality, and they just say, "Look, I'm engaging you as a doula because I'm connected to this person, and I don't think they'd really wanna meet you, but I need the support." They might need another set of ears and eyes and listening capacities in their specialist appointments with them who speak medicalese.

But most people essentially just deeply value someone that goes, "Let's drop into this." Here you are.

You're living in your body with the face of your death.

This is what your death might look like, and it might have a particular trajectory.

And so what does that mean? How do you recalibrate your life and what's important to you and how you wanna live? That's, that's the value.

I think that part of what makes her so good at this, especially now, is that she's had her own very personal journey facing mortality.

It took years of advocacy from many people in the death sector, like Victoria, members of Cemeteries and Crematoria New South Wales, Metropolitan Memorial Parks, and colleagues and peers in other states who had paved the way.

So we did a lot of psychosocial care, so there was a number of times where poor Ben was shrouded in this shroud bearer, and we were working with the workers that you don't see who work behind the scenes who are putting coffins into the cremator.

And when the first person came to us, said, "Yes, I would love to do it," or in fact his daughter on his behalf, it was full, it was full of the concierges who work in the chapel.

It was full of all the people that work in the crematorium.

It was full of the managers.

It was full of area managers.

There was a lot of people, and there was a, a palpable sense of anxiety in the room, or anticipation more so.

I now see the craftsmanship and the care, the cooking, the flowers, the silkworms, artists, and stories that will hold the bodies of the people we love.

It was just so foreign to me.

My father died in 1994 at home, and he had an amazing death, like kids and dogs for days.

He was a doctor.

He was like, "I'm not going to hospital to die." And I had an incredible time with him, and I had sat with him for many, many, many days before he died.

I was living at home.

I loved my dad, and I loved the night nurses, and I just loved the whole process.

I knew there was something very real here.

You know, you can come in, you go into the back garden, you stay in the entrance room, you take a walk down the street and come back in 10 minutes.

But before we go any deeper in, I'll let Victoria tell you how she arrived here.

[gentle music] Within LifeRites, I am, of course, a funeral director, a end of life or mortality doula, a counselor, and just a, a member of the team.

Alongside and outside of LifeRites, I am a 60-year-old woman.

I am a mother.

I am a queer-identified human being.

I am a performance maker and troublemaker, and I am a human being who really loves being alive.

My teenage years were fraught and challenging, as they often are for many people, and I exploded into Darlinghurst in the '80s into taking drugs.

Victoria was in her early 30s at this point and starting to work around the country, receive grants, and travel internationally as an artist.

I've spent the last few years recording the sounds and stories of an independent funeral home, one of the last of its kind with an on-site mortuary and chapel.

We call her the Grand Old Dame, this building.

She's passed her prime, but she's very glamorous and still got great bones and looks fabulous.

but I think she's long received and welcomed people at really significant times of their lives.

And the hard may be just a little easier.

If we understand that there is a sense of a process and a cycle to our lives and our relationship to our bodies change and at some point we'll deeply grieve people we love, that builds up what I call our mortality muscle.

So I think mortality is one of the greatest gifts that we've