Life Journeys: Death and Sorry Business
Download the Life Journeys: Death and Sorry Business report.
In late 2018, Old Ways, New was engaged by the Digital NSW Accelerator, within the NSW Department of Finance, Services and Innovation, to provide Indigenous perspectives to their Life Journeys project.
Our research began by exploring the following questions:
What are the current and traditional cultural practices regarding death and Sorry Business here in NSW for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples?
How do current and traditional cultural practices differ between geographic communities?
How might we support traditional cultural practices for death and Sorry Business?
Following our Country Centred Design methodology we began by understanding the cultural context for death and Sorry Business by talking with Elders and community members in urban and remote settings. The was followed by desktop research and further conversations with community members.
Based on this research, Old Ways, New developed a report delivered to the Journey Advisory Board in January 2019, which included an integrated methodology mapping, key themes from our research, opportunity statements and other supporting materials.
The Opportunity Statements selected to validate, confirm and ideate on were:
How might we provide affordable and culturally appropriate funeral services?
How might we enable affordable transport for Aboriginal people to return home, and back to Country, for Sorry Business?
How might we ensure deceased Aboriginal people are transported to their Country for burial, at no cost to their families?
We then validated (with community) and confirmed (with agencies and service providers) the opportunity statements. We spoke to community members, elders, traditional custodians, funeral directors, Coroners Court, NSW Police, Transport for NSW, and the Center for Aboriginal Health.
This yielded new information, validated and confirmed the selected statements, and demonstrated that transport for Aboriginal peoples to return home and affordable and cultural appropriate funerals services where the primary concerns for those we engaged.
We then developed a set of recommendations and strategies to address these validated and confirmed statements. These recommendations are included within the Life Journeys: Death and Sorry Business report and were delivered to the Life Journeys team in mid-2019 to take forward. We hope to continue being part of this important work in it's next and subsequent phases.
