Gone to a wetter place: the Queenslanders disrupting the death industry with water cremations

Wendy and Mark Tasker in Capella, Queensland, where they are preparing to open an alkaline hydrolysis facility — also known as water cremation — inside an old timber church. Photograph: Sylvia Liber/The Guardian

The town of Capella in central Queensland is home to fewer than 1,000 living souls and has no grocery store.

But by Christmas it may be home to a machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that liquidises human remains into an urnful of white powdered bones.