Life Rites Funerals

Name: Life Rites Funerals
Address: 118 Durham Street, Hurstville, NSW, 2220, AU
Telephone: +61421200250

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Hurstville, NSW
Life Rites Funerals

Life Rites is a team of holistic funeral directors, doulas, celebrants, and counsellors. Victoria Spence and team are holistic funeral directors.

We offer doula-led end of life support, after death care, funeral and ceremonial services. We give you the big picture as well as supporting you with all the details. Ours is a capacity-building practice that gives you the literacy and skills you need to meet your experiences of living and dying. We can be contacted at any point from the onset of serious illness or diagnosis, as well as for sudden, traumatic, or expected death. At Life Rites, we are with you all the way.

03/08/2026

We are looking to open our funeral home again to offer a face to face workshop for Doula’s and end-of-life professionals looking to expand their practical skills and knowledge. The two day workshop is proposed to take place on September 5 & 6 at our Funeral Home in Hurstville, South of Sydney, Bidjigal.

We require a minimum number of participants to proceed. If this seems like the workshop for you, follow this link for more information and to register your Expressions of Interest: https://www.liferites.com.au/rsvp/knowledge-and-skills-workshop-2026

31/07/2026

This community turned up with a ute to take the LifeArt cardboard coffin home for a week, to make something together for their person.

Their community wove in and out of the house, making art and adding to the coffin, piece by piece. It gave them time and presence, for storytelling and mourning.

Mourning and creating together, in community.

Every painting on this coffin tells a piece of this person's life. We love it when communities take agency over the materials of funerals, when they make it truly theirs.

29/07/2026

A massive thank you to all who supported our campaign to help fund “Here we are, the Living”. With your help, we met our first target before the end of June, which means we will be able to build an online hub for the project to host the podcast, photos, and death literacy resources.

This is a significant element to ensuring the podcast can have meaningful impact with listeners around the country, to encourage safe, healthy and empowering conversations and to demystify end-of-life care.

We can’t wait to share the finished podcast with you all and will be in touch with a launch party date before year’s end.

Thank you all so much 🧡💛

22/07/2026

We want to acknowledge and honour every body that attended Grief Moves at our funeral home.

It takes courage to walk through the door of a new space and attune to a new environment, bringing your grief, your stories, your bodies, and your willingness to support the metabolism of grief through movement and connection.

Thank you for your authenticity and generosity of your feedback. We will integrate and refine our offering for summer and look forward to sharing the space again with you.

Enormous thanks to DJ Gemma Pluto Beat, your thoughtfulness was palpable and felt through the music.

Thank you for contributing your words and stories to the collective altar. Some of our participants asked what became of the words they wrote. They were held privately and safely. Today, they were transformed by fire in the burning bin at Life Rites, which exists for this specific purpose: to release and support the ongoing transformation of our loss and sorrow and the forms we express this in. See the last slide for a video of this fire.

❤️‍🔥

15/07/2026

Join us for our annual Dying to Know Open Day at Life Rites – a free community event exploring death, dying and holistic funeral care in a warm, welcoming environment.

Meet the Life Rites team, learn about end-of-life choices and our doula-led practice through a range of talks and conversations, take an optional behind-the-scenes tour of our holistic mortuary, or simply drop in for a cup of tea and a chat.

Date: Sat 8th Aug 2026 1pm–4pm
Location: Life Rites Funeral Home, Hurstville | Bidjigal
Free RSVP and more info: https://events.humanitix.com/dying-to-know-open-day-2026

13/07/2026

B spent much of her life surrounded by flowers. As a florist, she understood their beauty, their seasonality and the way they can express what words sometimes cannot.

When the time came to farewell her, there was nowhere more fitting than home.

The property she loved, and the gardens she had tended for so many years, became the place where family and friends gathered to remember her. In familiar surroundings they shared stories, reflected and sat alongside one another in their grief.

The flowers that filled the ceremony spoke of B’s life, her work and her creativity. A final gift from her son.

Led by Ben, the ceremony wove together the story of B’s life and death, accompanied by the extraordinary voice of tenor Gaetano Bonfante carrying across the hills.

Thank you to B’s family for trusting us to help bring her home, one final time.

Shared with permission from family.

Benjamin James, End of Life Support

06/07/2026

Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, Gadigal, Bidjigal and Yuin elder, is a treasured friend and leader at Life Rites. She has sat with our families through grief, ceremony and healing and taught us more about care and country than we can properly put into words. She is the daughter of Dr Charles “Chicka” Dixon — fierce, much-loved MUA activist — and carries that same love and legacy into everything she does: as a mother, grandmother, mentor, ceremonial healer, artist, elder and friend to so many.

This NAIDOC week, and every day, we give our deepest thanks, Aunty Rhonda for all you carry and give — in this work with us, and in your communities and family. We love you.

❤️‍🔥

Slide 3 is from “Aunty Rhonda’s Walk”, a film by Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, DP/Sound/Edit by Paul Costello — we highly recommend watching the full film here: https://youtu.be/3YtI605bGD4

Slides 1 & 6 (photos): Liz Ham
Slides 2 & 5 (videos): Michael Cruz
Slide 3 (video): Aunty Rhonda’s Walk
Slide 4: source unknown — DM or comment if you know where this is from (such a good photo of Aunty Rhonda)

29/06/2026

Grief Moves 🧡💫18 July ~ https://events.humanitix.com/grief-moves

A special shout out to all the other Grief movement movement events and practitioners around Australia and internationally

For events in the Northern Rivers/Bundjalung: follow Before & After Life and Paperbark Deathcare - they most recently ran an excellent series in 2025 called “How Grief Moves”, including “Grief Dances - Move with loss” events

And there’s an upcoming Grief Rave in Naarm/Melbourne 25 July - follow Baci Hillyer for more info!

If you know of any other grief rave or movement movement events, please give them a shout out and tag them below 👇

We are by no means the originators of this concept, this is ancestral practice - we follow in the legacy and lineage of community, ceremonial and ritual practice and organising - and we are honoured to be sharing this event with our communities in our beloved funeral home on Bidjigal land 🌀

For questions about accessibility, please DM us or see the Humanitix link in our bio. We will have a quiet space! 🌻

26/06/2026

Many of you had questions after our post on Alex Greenwich's bill, so here's a bit more on what human composting actually is, along with some good resources. There's already a lot of solid info out there, and we are by no means the experts in this field, but committed to responding to your comments as best we can.

🌱 The formal name is Natural Organic Reduction, also known as Terramation or Human Composting. The body is placed in a vessel with natural plant materials like wood chips, straw and alfalfa. Beneficial microbes that already live on our bodies and in the environment do the rest. Over around 30 days to 45 days, everything breaks down into about a cubic metre of nutrient-rich soil, which can be returned to the family, used on conservation land, or planted with trees.

The process mirrors what happens naturally on a forest floor, just in a controlled environment. It's already a real, regulated option in 11 US states, as well as in Germany, where it's called Reerdigung: www.reerdigung.de

💰 In the US, the cost generally sits somewhere between cremation and burial.

📰 Media coverage:

The SMH has an informative interactive piece on the bill, noting: "Greenwich's bill will be open for consultation and he wants to hear all opinions. Under regulations proposed to be enforced by NSW Health, a person can't be composted if the method is against their wishes, bodies must be composted separately, and bodies with serious infectious diseases will not be eligible."
www.smh.com.au/interactive/2026/human-composting (Paywall)

ABC Australia also has a good article on the current context: abc.net.au/news/2026-06-25/sydney-mp-alex-greenwich-human-composting-bill-explained/106828252

To answer common questions we've been receiving, Recompose's resources are excellent →

💚 Examples of how families/clients have chosen to use the soil: www.recompose.life/green-funeral/client-stories

🕵️‍♀️ How it Works: www.recompose.life/human-composting/how-it-works

🌼 Example of a Model: www.recompose.life/our-model

🦷 What happens to bones and teeth during human composting: www.recompose.life/faqs/what-happens-to-bones-and-teeth-during-human-composting/

🌳 How Human Composting compares to Green/Natural burial: https://recompose.life/faqs/how-does-human-composting-compare-to-green-burial/

Any questions, drop them below and we'll do our best to answer🌱 But we encourage you to follow NSW advocates like Tui Davidson, Jude Warren, Teresa Russell, NDAN - Natural Death Advocacy Network, who have been doing the hard work on this!

If you know of others advocating for human composting in NSW, mention them below ⬇️ We want to acknowledge everyone that has been part of making this moment possible 💫

We welcome Natural Organic Reduction as a choice for some, and especially endorse the process as a genuinely eco-friendly option 🌿

📸: Image from Recompose

Address

118 Durham Street
Hurstville, NSW
2220

Telephone

+61421200250

Website

http://www.liferites.com.au/

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