Australia celebrates cultural difference easily enough in public life. The harder test is whether hospitals, coroners and cemeteries can accommodate it when families are grieving.
Australia likes to picture multiculturalism in colour: food stalls, music, clothing and festivals. These celebrations allow communities to share traditions and the wider society to encounter difference with curiosity rather than fear. But they are among the easier expressions of diversity for institutions to embrace.
The harder test may begin in a hospital mortuary. A family has lost someone. Its cultural or religious obligations require burial without delay, while the institution operates according to release procedures, working hours and legal responsibilities. As the family waits, grief becomes entangled with forms, funeral costs, cemetery rules and uncertainty about who can decide.
Hospitals must protect public health and meet legal obligations. Families must honour the dead in ways that give meaning to loss. Yet the institutional and cultural clocks may move differently.
A society’s commitment to cultural difference is tested not only by how it welcomes people into public life, but by how it allows them to leave it.
Long before I encountered this problem in Australian institutions, rural Ghana had taught me that the treatment of the dead also tests relationships among the living.
My research into sustainable burial practices in Botoku began from a simple recognition: burial expresses relationships among the living and the dead, families and ancestors, communities and land. Reform must take these meanings seriously while addressing funeral costs and pressure on land.
Respecting culture also means supporting informed change. Australia should make lower-impact options, including natural or ‘green’ burials, more accessible. These commonly use biodegradable coffins or shrouds and avoid embalming. Their suitability depends on local conditions, cultural wishes and arrangements for remembrance.
Governments should work with communities to provide balanced, multilingual information about environmental benefits, costs, availability and limitations, including restrictions on grave markers. Such conversations should happen before bereavement, when families have time to reflect. Communities should help shape the options, with room to question, adapt or decline them.
The shared challenge in Botoku and Australia is to make environmental responsibility compatible with dignity, memory and belonging.
A recent P&I piece on Gandhi argued that genuine multiculturalism requires more than passive tolerance. It asks Australians to accept cultural and religious difference as part of the nation’s shared life. The harder question is what acceptance means when institutions must adjust their practices.
Can a hospital release a body promptly when faith requires burial without delay? Can grieving families receive understandable information in their own language? Are Indigenous responsibilities to Country considered before arrangements become fixed? Can cemetery planning accommodate people for whom cremation is unacceptable? Are culturally appropriate choices affordable, rather than formally available but financially beyond reach?
There are no uniform cultural answers. People within the same community may interpret traditions differently. The deceased’s wishes, family expectations and religious obligations may conflict. A secular person may still want burial among ancestors; relatives may disagree about cremation.
Institutions should neither assign people fixed identities nor presume what their culture requires. Their responsibility is to create flexible processes through which wishes can be expressed, disagreements addressed and lawful accommodations negotiated. Multiculturalism becomes meaningful when difference is not merely welcomed in principle but taken seriously in practice.
A practical test of whether death-care systems respect cultural difference begins with four questions.
First, time. Can institutions respond to different mourning and burial timetables? A delay that appears administratively minor may carry profound religious and emotional consequences. Hospitals, mortuaries and coronial services need clear procedures for urgent release, including after hours and on weekends, while explaining when legal or investigative requirements make delay unavoidable.
Second, ritual. Can families safely participate in washing, viewing, prayer and other practices surrounding the body? Can requests for gender-sensitive handling be considered? Cultural capability does not mean memorising fixed rules about particular communities. It means knowing how to ask, listen, explain constraints and seek workable arrangements.
Third, place. Do cemetery and land-use plans reflect demographic change, Indigenous connections to Country and differing beliefs about burial, cremation and permanence? Governments should publish accessible information about long-term cemetery capacity and involve affected communities before scarcity becomes crisis. Early planning offers more choices than conflict managed after suitable land has disappeared.
Fourth, cost. Are prices, burial rights and available choices understandable and transparent? Freedom to choose means little when the only culturally acceptable option is unaffordable. Families deciding under grief and time pressure are especially vulnerable. Multilingual information, independent guidance and transparent prices should cover conventional and greener options, making informed choice possible before bereavement.
States should assess hospitals, mortuaries, coronial services and cemetery systems against these four dimensions. Planning should involve faith organisations, migrant communities, Traditional Owners, funeral workers and people without religious affiliations. The aim is not a separate system for every group, but a shared system flexible enough to recognise legitimate difference.
Accommodation will have limits. Public health, safety, environmental protection, finite land and equal access all matter. Cultural claims cannot automatically override these responsibilities.
But apparently neutral rules may contain inherited assumptions about family authority, timing and the treatment of remains. Victoria’s law-reform inquiry found that funeral law developed from nineteenth-century English assumptions, including an expectation of Christian burial, that fit uneasily with contemporary Australia. It proposed greater legal recognition of people’s funeral and burial wishes.
The proper standard is neither automatic permission nor reflexive refusal. Institutions should explain restrictions, consider their effects on grieving families and examine less burdensome alternatives.
Festivals, music and food tell people that their culture contributes to Australia. How hospitals, coroners and cemeteries respond at moments of loss tells them whether it truly belongs here.
Multiculturalism is easiest when difference entertains us. Its harder test comes when difference asks institutions to change. Australia will know that cultural acceptance has matured when a grieving family does not have to choose between obeying the system and honouring the person it has lost.
Komla Tsey
Komla Tsey is a Ghanaian–Australian writer, retired Professor of Education for Social Sustainability, and part-time Professorial Research Fellow at the Jawun Research Institute, Central Queensland University. His writing explores education, democratic culture, identity, Indigenous empowerment, colonial legacies and the moral certainties that shape public life. His forthcoming memoir, Botoku Child, traces a journey from a small village in Ghana to universities and communities across the world, examining how inherited beliefs, curiosity and lived experience shape both personal lives and democratic societies.