Aromatic Magazine Is A Dead-set Winner

Newcastle Herald

Monday September 20, 2004

Cheryl McGregor

THE newsagent at our local shopping centre is more than a newsagent. He's an educator.

Left to ourselves, we customers would no doubt stick to the meat-and-two-veg menu of magazines: the ones with "Women's", "Men's", "Home" and "Garden" in their titles.

But he's constantly trying to tempt our reading palates. Witches, culture, plastic surgery, he's spread them all before us.

Unfortunately, ours is a suburb where "plastic surgery" means cutting up your credit card when you're desperately overdrawn and "culture" is seen as being rather like kangaroo meat: we know it's good for us, we'll try it some day, just not right now, OK?

Lately, however, he's had an unexpected success: a magazine about death.

Also about dying, crematoriums, hearses, funerals, graveyards, grave-diggers, urns, coffins, undertakers, tombstones, epitaphs, cemeteries, churchyards and the gossip of the $1 billion-a-year funeral industry.

It's called A Scent of Flowers and is published, edited and often written and illustrated by Sydney hairdresser, bikie and student of self-help medicine, Chris Drake.

It's not aimed at any specific audience, Chris says. The first issue seemed to appeal to people over 50.

By the second, though, he was reporting on a cheery pair of young Goths, Lillie and Matt Horam, who married (both in black) in a churchyard cemetery.

And the next issue will feature an account of a Weird Sydney tour, with Chris accompanied in a hearse by a "very lively" bunch of teenage girls for whom the highlight was the place where Michael Hutchence died "and the bondage brothel, of course".

He's also thinking of having a regular motoring page. From a horse-drawn hearse in Issue One he moved on to a 1937 Cadillac La Salle hearse in Issue Two, and Issue Three will show off a 1969 Humber "a really popular car in Australia in the 1960s".

But the heart of the magazine will continue to be information, an area which Chris sees almost as a public service.

He feels his aim of providing useful, detailed accounts of all aspects of the industry is the reason his brainchild is selling particularly well in Newcastle and the western suburbs of Sydney.

"It's costing people $4000 to $7000 for a funeral and there's nowhere for them to access information and nowhere for the industry to get it out to them," he said.

"People don't want their families to be stuck with huge bills, and it's not at all morbid to plan to avoid all that."

So Chris will run more articles like his picture spread on the making of a coffin.

"I went with a group of people and they were fascinated to find out that it was made with the same stuff used to make their kitchen cupboards."

"Fascinating", "interesting", "intriguing", they're all words that crop up frequently when Chris talks about his magazine, along with what must be his pet phrase, "Did you know . . . ?"

Did you know, for example, that: you can get coffins painted with Thomas the Tank Engine or a set of flying pigs; five Australians have been "frozen" in cryonic suspension; funerals are becoming brighter because Occupational Health and Safety requirements demand safety colours for workers . . . ?

"I hate, I really hate, to be ignorant about anything," Chris says.

A Scent of Flowers came into being because he'd just sent a letter off to the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths when he wandered into a newsagency.

He noticed idly that there were magazines about births and magazines about marriages but there wasn't a single one about deaths.

So he followed up the idea. Even though there were 260 magazine titles available in Australia, not one touched on the "forbidden" subject. Chris decided he would.

From that he's developed the publication to the point where overseas companies are making overtures (though he seems equally pleased that a NSW pub regularly orders copies).

But he can't slow down yet. There's too much to do, like organising an article on the prime ministers of Australia: how they died, what religion were they, where are they buried "except Harold Holt, naturally".

Then there's breakfast funerals, Muslim funerals, a day in the life of a gravedigger, roadside memorials, the Elephants' Graveyard, "state of the art" cemeteries in Victoria and Joseph of Arimathea, patron saint of gravediggers.

And, of course, the fun of planning his own funeral. At this stage, Chris is thinking of using his Harley as a hearse as far as the water, followed by a boat-borne funeral procession on Sydney Harbour.

"I'll never run out of subjects," he enthuses. "I mean, what happens after?"

© 2004 Newcastle Herald

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