ABSTRACT

Funerals were significant events in Aboriginal people’s lives in Charters Towers. Large numbers of people attended funerals, and were expected to travel widely to attend those of family in other towns. During 2002 seven funerals that i knew of and attended were held in the town and people from town attended at least twice as many other funerals elsewhere around the region as well as in Brisbane. In the Aboriginal social context of Charters Towers, the death of someone initiated a chain of events and rituals, which for all their ostensive structural similarity to non-Aboriginal funerary processes, were closely linked to Aboriginal notions of sociality and relatedness. In this chapter I examine funerals as events that demonstrate the complexity, as examined in previous chapters, of social relationships in practice. I have moved away from the performance of categories in bureaucratic practice to analyse funerals as central to contemporary Murri sociality. Death and the funeral event bring people together to demonstrate the shared histories that are often embodied in the ‘old people’ (living and dead).