Corpse Fauna

I am helping to lower the body into the ground.

The earth is clod heavy, it glows, deep, red russet and rich.

This is volcano soil- fertile and full of possibility. Apparently, in this place, around 23-40 million years ago, there was a slow streak of volcanic eruptions known as the “Older Volcanics” . These occurred in the Oligocene era, a name derived from the Greek oligo- meaning “small, little, few” which was given to this period because, during this time, there were very few ‘modern’ animals emerging to take their part on the earths stage. But while there may not have been many animals emerging there was

fire and lava

and pumice scarred stone

and this inferno

left behind life,

in this rich russet soil.

The body being lowered, is being held together by cloth,

woven together in a herring bow pattern and it is getting ready

to dissolve.

This body has been on a long,

long

journey.

Firstly the dying,

and then the morgue,

and then the coroners,

and then back to the morgue

and then a drive in the back of a van

and now,

finally,

here.

The dissolving that will take place doesn’t happen all by itself.

( Nothing ever happens, by itself, not really )

The linen that is wrapping around the body in clean, folded lines,

is organic. It needs to be, so the Corpse Fauna can come.

But before they come, with their tiny teeth and seeping chemical

tongues, the shroud will hold the body tight.

This body, because it is in a shroud, will decompose

much faster than the bodies of those who are held in boxes.

A dead body is an ecosystem all of its own,

different fauna come,

different fauna go.

A veritable railway station of arrivals and departures.

Here come the Corpse Fauna!

Ready to devour, suck, sip, breed, nest and depart

and all their hidden work helps with the job of decomposition

above and below the ground.

First come the bacteria, flies, beetles, mites, parasitic wasps who feed

on the actual corpse. Then arrive the parasitoid wasps, predatory beetles and

predatory flies,

who feed on the other animals,

that feed on the corpse.

The ‘Fauna of Corpses’ is a system which dates back to 1952.

Groups of species of insects are classified together based upon the order that they arrive to feed on the body and forensic investigators use this order to reconstruct the timing and circumstances of a death.

A body can take anywhere from 10 to 15 years to decompose into a skeleton in a coffin,

but in a shroud - like the woman whose body I am lowering into the

earth, it can be much,

much faster.

The burial is over.

The body now lies, deep in volcano soil that once held fire and is covered in earth and the broken off branches

of

golden wattle.

The mourners drive off and I go to visit my ancestors. I am aware of the privilege of this act. To have a grave, a resting place, in a cemetery filled with the bones of my bloodline, this is what

safety

looks like.

A safety that has, no doubt, come at the expense of the safety of the Wurundjeri people who first lived and loved and lost on this land - long before the Scots fleeing the Clearances and the Irish fleeing the famine and the Germans avoiding persecution came and colonised their Country.

I lye on my stomach on the hot dry earth, its smells of formic acid and vinegar from the many ants, busy with their work and I am watching them go in and out of a crevice in a grave. It is the grave of my grandmother and my grandfather, who lie side by side in Westburn.

My mothers ashes have been dug into the side of her mothers grave, up near her heart ( on the insistence of my Aunty, the youngest sister who gets to bury all the dead ) and I keep thinking about the invisible ‘work’ of Corpse Fauna. When I was little we would sing a song about ‘worms going in and worms going out, of going in thin and coming out stout’ but so many people get cremated now or are entombed in heavy wood and metal that the Corpse Feeders often struggle to do their work. But now, with these new (and ancient) shroud burials, the Corpse Fauna are back.

As a Minister I am doing more and more ‘wild grave’ burials

and this has woken me up to the

ecological cost

of traditional burial

where the natural work of the Corpse Fauna is barred at the casket gate.

What would it mean, I wonder, for more of us to give our bodies over to this tiny but multitudinous workforce?

A black and white feathered Currawong carols out overhead and the mountains above me hum

with their blue,

gumtree song.

I will leave the tiny living to deal with the dead and I bow my head before them, as I rise up from the earth, to travel home.