Filling the Gaps: What objects tell us about cemeteries and grief
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| Kelly Burstow |
Kelly will speak on an observational project at Mount Gravatt Cemetery, where she quietly mapped the objects people bring to graves: the bought and the handmade, the temporary and the carefully maintained. From Christmas decorations to chairs, tools, toys, and improvised markers, these objects traced patterns of repeated visits, family routines, and the practical work of tending the dead. Mapping the movements of objects together – what people brought and took away, and what they brought and left – showed that visitors continually compensated for gaps in cemetery design and management.
People brought shade, seating, maintenance tools, colour, and seasonality where the landscape and its embedded rules did not. This work also demonstrated that objects extend everyday practices into the cemetery, and that, for the people who use them, cemeteries are far less segregated from daily life than public imagination might suggest.
Putting these observations into conversation with ideas from material culture studies and place theory, Kelly argues that objects are not just offerings or “extras”, but evidence of what mourners needed cemeteries to be: negotiated, relational places where the living could keep working on their relationships with the dead. It is worth asking what cemetery practice and design might look like if we treated the modest investments of mourners not as extras, but as evidence of what is missing in our cemeteries and how we might begin to fill those gaps.
About Kelly
For Kelly, the study of death, grief, and the role of cemeteries is deeply personal. After losing her mother in her twenties, she experienced firsthand how cemeteries can evolve into vital social spaces, becoming a regular meeting place for her and her three sisters. This personal journey led her to complete a Bachelor of Arts (Honours), earning the University Medal for her project Between Abandonment and Multifunctional Greenspace: Historic Urban Cemeteries as Entangled Liminal Places.
Kelly’s research, which centres on everyday experiences at South Brisbane Cemetery, has been presented locally and internationally, inspiring broader conversations about how communities engage with spaces of remembrance. Kelly is the creator of the Cemetery as Place website, and a committee member of the Queensland Cemetery Heritage and Arts Association.
