The one guarantee in life is that everyone will need a coffin. Susie Croll and Kim Eastman run a coffin making business at Scottsdale, near Launceston in Tasmania, making cheap, environmentally friendly ecocoffins and coffins which can be custom built to almost any design. The business is based on the notion that funerals should celebrate life, and that a creative coffin can make a statement about the person and allow them to be as stylish and creative in death as they were in life. The idea came when the pair were walking through the bush and came to a cemetery where a coffin had just been laid. It was a plain brown box which revealed nothing about the person. This inspired them to create a coffin which expressed the occupant’s life.
The product
Many interesting requests have resulted such as a fire truck coffin for a fireman, a mossy log for a log truck driver and a sarcophagus of Isis, protector of the dead. Susie has a leopard skin coffin for herself, which will be used as a coffee table until required for its original purpose. But the eco-coffin is their favourite.
The eco-coffin is ecologically sound, made from recycled cardboard and plantation timber and provides a good cost alternative to traditional coffins. It comes flat-packed and can be mailed throughout Australia. The cardboard can be decorated to suit the individual and has assisted as therapy in the grieving process. Aboriginal elders who painted a coffin discussed the life as they decorated it and when used in the service it brought back memories which helped them all. Jim Pike also met a grandmother who had a party for her grandchildren to decorate her coffin.
Further information
Australian Eco-Coffins
1425 Forester Road
Scottsdale, TAS, 7261
Kim Eastman phone: (03) 6352 3929 or Susie Croll phone: (03) 6356 1195. Website: www.tascraft.com.au/FI/
The Celtic Eco-Coffin retails at $199 and custom made coffins retail from $3500-$4000.
