2025 End of Year Wrap
As 2025 draws to a close, amongst unimaginable loss and complexity, we are holding all of our country and its people in our thoughts and with great care. This year has been huge for many of the Life Rites team members as well as our small, independent business and company. We have experienced personal losses, big changes, some successes, and a year of meeting all our families and clients with all we have. As death and loss permeate so many areas of our lives, we take this opportunity to recap some of what we have done this year to build connection, equity, and agency for all.
Go gently, people.
Navigating the holidays - Loss, Shock and Grief
Our thoughts and hearts are with the recent devastating shooting at Bondi Junction on Sunday, December 14th, 2025. This final month and the upcoming holidays are often very difficult and potentially isolating times for people living with shock, loss, suicidality, and grief. As part of acknowledging this, and the very real need at this time, we have compiled some information and resources that come from our professional kit bag as well as our personal and lived experience as humans and community members. Please see the blog here and reach out to us at Life Rites or any of the supports we mention. We are here and want you also to be here with us as the shock and disbelief move through us.
End of Life Practitioner Workshops
This year we ran three workshops for newly trained doulas to bridge some of their knowledge and experience gaps when it comes to setting up a practice and attending to home dying and after-death care, self-care, and many other topics. As with all training, the learnings went both ways, and we so valued the opportunity to share our years of experience and to refine what and how we conveyed the material and the hands-on learning. Stay tuned for the announcement of our weekend trainings in 2026.
Local Business Awards Finalists & Victoria as
Business Person of the Year
After 6 years of working from our beloved funeral home in Hurstville, as part of Georges River Council, we put our hat in the ring for our local business awards. Our team was a finalist for Specialised Business, and Victoria, our founder, was in the running for Business Person of the Year. So sure was she that the team would win, that when her name was announced as the winner in her category, she was so genuinely shocked that she was uncharacteristically entirely lost for words. You can see her heartfelt but entirely unprepared acceptance speech here. We are so grateful for the recognition of the work we do and hope to become fixtures of this richly diverse LGA and community.
Shrouded Cremation in Metropolitan Memorial Park Trial rolled out and ongoing as an option for families
Perhaps our most significant point of pride and excitement this year came about with the introduction of shrouded cremation, through one of the major crematorium and cemetery operations, Metropolitan Memorial Parks. Life Rites worked with the MMP teams; Cemetery and Crematoria NSW; ACC Higgins, who modified the shroud bearer design; as well as Natural Grace Funeral Directors, who had already established shrouded cremation in Victoria, and who generously shared their knowledge. Together we offered this as a legitimate and genuine choice for families in the Sydney Metropolitan Area and hopefully, in 2026, throughout NSW.
The families that have chosen this were all so deeply moved and heartened by the beautifully shrouded form of their person and the capacity to be close to them during the service. We too have noticed how humanising and intimate the form of a beautifully shrouded person is, adorned with flowers. This represents a huge part of our mission, to re-incorporate death as a part of life, and shrouded cremation is one way that families feel closer and more connected to the body of their beloved person. See our blog here for more information. Our range of beautiful organic handmade shrouds has continued to be purchased and sent across the country.
Services across the Sydney metro and NSW -
Mountains, Wagga, Bowral, Beaches etc.
Many people know of our premises in Hurstville and still assume that they must live close to work with us, or that the ceremony for their person can only take place at our premises. While our premises are always available, we have worked across Sydney and the Greater Metropolitan Area and throughout NSW. We have looked after families and held services in the Northern Beaches, Upper North Shore, Wollongong, Illawarra, Central Coast, Southern Highlands, the Blue Mountains, Wagga Wagga, and Dubbo, as well as families having their person return from overseas and interstate to have funeral rites in Sydney. Our care and quality are available to you wherever you live in this city and state or around the world.
The Bearded Tit Funeral
It's not often that we are called upon to hold a service for a much-loved community bar and institution. Victoria collaborated with Joy Joy, one of the founders of the Bearded Tit, and local artist Harriet Gillies and a choir of community members to bring language and expression to just what the Tit had offered to so many community members and locals. You can read more about it, and see a video of the ceremony.
We offered the ceremony as a gift, and CeremonyCast reduced their fees significantly to come and stream it on a Saturday so all could attend. You can see their service here.
Community Programs in 2025
Over the past year, our community work has continued to grow and deepen. We were proud to contribute to a series of ACON workshops, and to be invited to speak at the UNSW Faculty of Medicine, with Kim, Ben, and Vicki sharing insights from the frontline of holistic end-of-life care, grief, and community-centred practice with first- and second-year medicine students in collaboration with Dying to Know.
In May, Life Rites devised Planting Your Mortality, a garden-based workshop created for the Derek Jarman Retrospective at UNSW Galleries. Inspired by Jarman's legacy of creativity, queerness, illness, and mortality, the workshop offered a gentle, embodied way to reflect on life, death, and what truly matters.
Later in the year, we partnered with the BEACON Project and Waverley Council to rework and present Planting Your Mortality for the wider community. This version of the workshop created an accessible and welcoming space for people to speak about what is important to them, or to those they love, at the end of life. It was deeply moving to witness the conversations, reflections, and connections that emerged.
Life Rites also partnered with ACON to devise and deliver a series of online suicide bereavement workshops for LGBTQ+ community members across NSW. These workshops were thoughtful, necessary, and profoundly meaningful to develop and facilitate. We are grateful to everyone who trusted us with their stories. Please stay tuned for the 2026 series.
Our work with ACON continues into 2026, with two upcoming in-person workshops:
Queer PowerPoint at Life Rites
Queer PowerPoint at Life Rites is upcoming as part of Sydney Festival. We are so excited to have collaborated with Queer PowerPoint and Sydney Festival to offer an intimate evening of storytelling with the super clunky and deeply daggy technology of PowerPoint to offer a lateral and intimate way into all the ways we can lean into mortality. We would love for you to join us with a spectacular lineup of artists, presenters, and speakers. See tickets and shows here.
Kinchela Boys Aboriginal Home (KBAH)
Reclaiming Community and Home Death Care Training
This project, long in development and funding support, came to fruition in 2025. Life Rites had the privilege of supporting KBAH to get a transfer van, cool plates, and cooling blankets to support after-death home care. As part of the work, we hosted the team from Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation as part of their Reclaiming Community and Home Death Care project to share our knowledge in home-based death care.
KBAH is doing vital work in this project, supporting their communities to reclaim cultural practices around end of life, death, and dying. As committed participants, we shared our approaches to holistic funeral care and home-based death care over two 2-day training sessions. It was rich, and we learned so much from each other, sharing our knowledge and experiences. We will continue to build upon and consolidate this work so that the KBAH transfer journey bus can care for all people and carry out its core purpose of transferring Uncles and KBAH community members back to Country when it is their time to be laid to rest, with mob and by mob. Please contact us to find out more about the transfer service offered by KBAH in 2026.
Vic and Ben at Brunswick Heads gathering of independent funeral directors and healthcare workers
Victoria and Ben travelled to Brunswick Heads for a gathering of independent funeral directors and deathcare workers from across the country.
In a landscape often defined by the corporate funeral industry, independence means something quite different. It's a commitment to care that is personal, grounded, transparent, and human. It's the freedom to walk alongside families in ways that feel authentic and deeply aligned with their values, and with our own.
But while we each work independently, the weekend gathering was a reminder that we are part of a collective movement, a group of people who are quietly changing the culture of deathcare through integrity, community, and compassion.
To be in a room together, people from Queensland, Hobart, Victoria, New South Wales, Canberra, and Kangaroo Island, was to feel what connection can do. Conversations that affirmed why we do this work, and how we can continue to support each other as we shape what the future of independent deathcare might become.
Dying To Know Open Day at Life Rites
As part of Dying to Know Day, we welcomed the community into Life Rites for an Open Day, opening our doors with the intention of transparency, education, and connection. It is always a highlight of our year, giving us the opportunity to meet so many people who are curious, thoughtful, and wanting to be informed about their own end-of-life choices. It was important to us that visitors could see our premises firsthand, understand how we care for the dead, and learn about the values that shape our model of care. People were invited to ask honest questions, walk through our spaces, and gain a clearer sense of how we work.
By making our work visible, we aim to reduce fear and uncertainty, support informed choice, and build confidence around death, dying, and after-death care.
This work is only possible because of the community we share, the families who trust us, the collaborators who walk beside us, and the people who show up to learn, listen, and care. Thank you for being part of it. We're looking forward to what 2026 will bring, and we hope to see you along the way.
Love,
The Life Rites Funerals team