Ray Martin is dead.
It was news to me, too. Standing next to me at the Roslyn Packer theatre in Walsh Bay, he is doing an excellent impression of being alive.
We’re attending Martin’s wake. His 1995 Logie for most popular TV personality and old press passes from New York, Beirut, Kuala Lumpur and South Korea are laid out on a table. Gretel Killeen, who worked on Midday with Martin from 1989 to 1991, has been tapped to give the eulogy.
“I’ve been given two and a half minutes,” she says. “To be honest, I’ve found it hard to keep Ray interesting for that long. Lower your standards, everyone. There is nothing scandalous in Ray’s life, besides that legal altercation in the 90s and Postman Pat wanting his wig back.”
I have a bombshell to drop on you: Martin isn’t actually dead. His “wake”, which was held last November, is actually a scene from his upcoming documentary miniseries, Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye, which premieres on SBS on 14 August: a three-part examination of how Australians say goodbye to their loved ones. The idea of Martin throwing himself a living wake came naturally, he says.
“I’m 78, so statistically, I’m four years short of when the average man in Australia dies,” he says.
He’s been thinking a lot about how he wants to go. Blown-up photos along the walls show highlights from his life: marrying his wife, Dianne, in 1968; a shot of the original 60 Minutes lineup in 1978. The one that gets him talking the most, though, is a photo of Jed, his daughter’s border collie. Martin has unofficially adopted him while her house is being renovated.
“He’s the sweetest dog in the history of the world. He goes everywhere with me at the moment,” Martin says. “He sleeps on my bed. I can’t get up and go to the loo without him following me like a shadow.”
Jed himself is here, huddled nervously by Martin’s coffin. It’s a fairly cheap one – “we just chose one with feet” – but the plywood exterior means people can write messages on it with one of the textas sitting on the lid.
“None of my family are here today, apart from the dog,” Martin says, deadpan. “They didn’t want to come. My family tends to be a bit like most Australians, you know. Death – they don’t want to talk about it.”
In the show Martin attends a Samoan-Australian funeral in western Sydney, a funeral director’s convention in Las Vegas, and explores the emerging practice of body composting and even vertical burial at Australia’s only “upright cemetery”, in Victoria.
One of the highlights follows the burial of Firdausi, a tour guide and father who died at the age of 54. In accordance with Islamic funeral rites, Firdausi’s family gathers in NSW’s Lakemba mosque to wash his body with warm water three times. For people from other cultures, for whom the idea of even looking at a dead body can be deeply uncomfortable, seeing people handle the limbs of a dead loved one is confronting and eye-opening.
“I’ve learned a million things while we’ve been making this show, but I haven’t changed my preferences,” Martin says. “I’d like to be composted, I think. I don’t want to be buried, but cremation is a difficult alternative. It’s bloody hot. When we went to a crematorium and filmed an empty coffin going into the oven, it exploded before the doors shut.”
Dr Hannah Gould, a cultural anthropologist and the show’s resident “Professor of Death”, hopes that it will reveal “some of the structural issues and injustices around death and dying in Australia” that most people may not be aware of.
“That old cliche that ‘death is the great leveller’ [is] bullshit,” Gould says. “One of the biggest privileges a lot of people have is not having to think about death. There are communities in Australia, like Indigenous communities, where the average mortality is much younger and people go to funerals all the time. Going to a funeral might be as common or more common than going to a wedding or a birthday.”
During shooting, Gould invited Martin to her Australian-first course at the University of Melbourne that teaches medical students and junior doctors how to be better at one of the hardest parts of their jobs: telling people that they are dying, or that their loved one has died.
“It’s a doctor’s responsibility to make sure they’ve communicated to a patient or a loved one what’s going on,” she says. “But a lot of doctors use euphemisms that end up causing a lot of confusion and distress. They’re uncomfortable saying ‘I’m sorry, your wife has died’ to someone – they’ll say things like ‘there’s nothing more we can do’ or ‘we’ve moved on to palliation now’.”
As more and more people die in hospitals and professional care settings, the role of an end-of-life carer, once largely filled by priests and religious figures, is now being filled by doctors and nurses. That can raise uncomfortable feelings for medical professionals, for whom death can be stigmatised as a kind of professional failure on their part.
But for their part, the young doctors in Gould’s class seem unfazed. “It’s a real privilege that we can be there for people in their final moments, and their families as well,” one says in the show. “That’s part of the job.”
Watching medical students grapple with this responsibility was one of the experiences Martin had while shooting The Last Goodbye that prompted him to think not just about death and dying, but what does or doesn’t come next.
“As a lapsed Catholic, I suspect it’s just ashes to ashes. But every major religion believes in something after death,” Martin says. “I’ve met priests and people who are much more intelligent than I am, or people like bankers and real estate agents with no romance in their souls. I’ve met people who have seen ghosts. I can’t say to them that they’re bullshitting, or that they’re not credible.”
At Martin’s “wake”, his guests are invited to meet, swap tips of the funeral trade and “mourn” their host by leaving messages on his cheap, eco-friendly coffin.
The whole affair is meant to be lighthearted, but some emotion creeps in. An “obsessive photographer”, Martin has narrowed down his life to just 10 images mounted on easels around the room, that he considers the most meaningful. The original 60 Minutes lineup from 1978; his daughter and baby grandson; and a photo from his wedding to Dianne, his wife of more than 55 years.
Even after attending his own funeral, he doesn’t have a preferred way to end up – cremated, maybe, but definitely not buried, horizontally or vertically (as “an expensive popsicle”, as he puts it.) But if he gets the choice, he wants to die out west, and in the bush.
“This is where I should be,” he says. “When it comes to dying, you should go home.”
Ray Martin: The Last Goodbye starts on SBS on 14 August
