Burial back to basics

In 1999, Mark Blackham and Sola Freeman prepared to say goodbye to their newborn daughter. She was named Ceitein, after the spring.

They wanted her to forever rest in peaceful, native bushland. But the choice was not theirs.

Ceitein had a ‘‘traditional’’ funeral and Blackham vowed he would help others to take control of death.

He opened Aotearoa up to natural burials, a concept only explored in the United Kingdom at the time. It wasn’t easy. ‘‘Everyone, apart from Wellington, said ‘no’.’’

After years of research, money and push-backs the Natural Cemetery inside Makara, on Wellington’s west coast, became a reality on June 3, 2008.

The Wellington City Council and Natural Burials partnership marked the first significant change in funeral practice for New Zealand in 150 years.

In as little as a decade, trees marking people’s natural burial plots have rooted themselves in North and South Island soils, springing up after the capital’s living memorial.

Away from the bustling streets there’s a track inside Makara that leads to a farm gate. A gravel track stretches 200 metres beyond to a point by a gully.

The limbs of tall, native trees wave in the breeze as people walk toward them. They are what’s left of the people who were laid beneath them.

Now, 168 people nourish the small, dense forest. Their wooden markers dot the tree-lines which will one day perish like the cycle of life.

Everything about the cemetery is as ‘‘natural’’ as possible.

To the left of the forest a half hectare of pasture has been set aside where the Natural Cemetery will eventually grow to become the biggest site in the southern hemisphere.

Gradually, the whole Wellington Natural Cemetery will become native bush, a park and ‘‘living memorial’’ that families ‘‘want to visit’’, Blackham says. ‘‘It’s a revolution in funeral practice, a breaking down of rules.’’

The concept had spread because people wanted something different, something simpler that related to them.

It may be ‘‘new’’ in modern terms but a natural burial is really about going back to a true tradition, Blackham says.

The choice has given people

Mark Blackham and Sola Freeman at Makara Cemetery this week. They were given the go-ahead in 2003 to organise natural burials on sites planted with native trees instead of tombstones.

A mock biodegradable wooden ‘‘headstone’’ at Waikumete Cemetery’s natural burials area in West Auckland

The natural burial area under construction at Waikumete Cemetery, in West Auckland, in 2017.