He started out as a teenager, filing papers and digging the odd grave. This year Hansen and Cole's Warwick Hansen marks 50 years helping the living farewell those close to them, GLEN HUMPHRIES reports.
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If you want to get a job with Hansen and Cole, you’d better practice your handwriting.
Warwick Hansen, regional manager for the funeral provider, directs people to write out their job application by hand rather than on computer.
While he says it’s because he’s “old school”, there is actually method behind the pen and ink approach.
It serves as an effective way to weed out those who might not cut it in the funeral business – those who might not listen to instructions, or who can’t spell without the help of a computer spellchecker.
And spelling can be surprisingly important in preparing a funeral.
“When I advertise a position, I always ask people to apply in their own handwriting, to Warwick Hansen care of Hansen and Cole Funerals,” Hansen explains.
“You’ll get people who will think ‘I’m not going to do that, I’m just going to type up a resume and send it in’.
“I get that and go ‘thank you, no’, they didn’t follow instructions. Or they spelt ‘Warwick’ wrong, they spelt ‘Hansen’ wrong.
“If they can’t get that attention to detail on an application for a job, how are they going to get it right in a newspaper funeral notice?”
Hansen would know a thing or two about funerals; this year he racks up a half-century in the industry.
Those 50 years started in 1967 as a teenaged “general dogsbody” at Lakeside Memorial Park, which was owned by his father.
It was a role that included filing, typing, working out wording to go on plaques and – on one occasion – digging a grave by hand.
Moving six feet of soil with nothing but a shovel is “the hardest job on the planet”, he says.
Some people would say the same about the funeral industry as a whole – due to the proximity to dead bodies. But, at its heart, it’s an industry that is more about the living than the dead.
It’s the living who funeral directors deal with, the grieving people left behind who they help with everything from organising the necessary paperwork to what sort of flowers to have on the coffin or even where the best place for a symbolic release of butterflies is (anywhere that is sheltered from the wind, as Hansen once discovered).
This is partially why Hansen prefers handwritten applications – they give a hint of the individual’s personality and if they’re suitable for this line of work.
Hansen, it seems, certainly was suitable for this line of work. As early as high school he was thinking about organising funerals.
“The lady who ran our tuckshop, her husband died and the school wanted to be represented at the funeral,” Hansen says.
“I was a prefect at the time and they said “Hansen, you’re going to represent the school’. So I went along with a couple of other prefects and teachers.
“I just noticed how cold the whole ceremony was. The staff that were involved were mechanical, just going through the motions.
“This poor widow I saw really struggling and I thought, ‘this could be done better’.”
And in 1973, he began to do just that when he and his father bought the Wollongong funeral business of Arthur Cole.
Since then, plenty of lives have been mourned and remembered in their chapel; from those who have only a few souls there to mark their passing to those who have touched so many lives that some have to stand outside in the driveway of the funeral home watching the service on a large flatscreen TV permanently mounted on the wall.
For those services Hansen is involved in, it’s putting all the pieces together that gives him the most job satisfaction and has kept him in the business.
“I enjoy the logistical side of putting everything together,” he says.
“Someone might ask what you would compare the funeral industry with. In many ways it’s like emotional logistics.
“People come to you for help – legally they can do their own funeral. When they come to us, they’re saying ‘we want you to take this burden that we have and this is what we want you to do’.”
That could even include donating your body to science which, while it may sound like an urban myth, is a genuine option once you shuffle off.
“Wollongong University has guidelines under which they will accept deceased,” Hansen says.
“We actually look after the transfer on their behalf either from the hospital or the private home to the university. They will carry out their medical research on those bodies over a period of time and then will release the bodies to then get cremated, which is when they call us back.”
Hansen and wife of 13 years Jan – who is an experienced embalmer – have also assisted in disaster management, whether it be a plane crash in Nigeria or Cameroon or the Bali bombings.
Jan would help prepare the bodies, while Hansen would look after the paperwork needed to get the bodies back home.
Hansen was involved in the 2016 return of the remains of 33 Australian soldiers who died in Vietnam but had been buried in military cemeteries in Malaysia and Singapore.
It’s a job that had a “major impact” on Hansen – who has close connections with the RSL and a deep respect for those who fought for Australia – and it still brings tears to his eyes during the retelling.
“It was a very proud time to be involved in that. Each hearse had one coffin in it and we brought them back to a central place in Sydney under police escort,” he says, pausing as tears begin to rim his eyes.
“To see the emotion on people’s faces, these were people who weren’t even born in the time of Vietnam. But to see the pride and the support that they had for these guys who died for us.
“They were soldiers, they weren’t politicians. They only had one thing to give and that was their life and so that’s what they gave.”
When asked to name the biggest change he's seen in his 50 years in the business, Hansen quickly nominates “technology”.
These days, he says, when people want music played at a service, it’s as easy as downloading the song from iTunes and playing it digitally.
But back in the 1970s, when he started out, it was a very different proposition.
“We had a cassette deck and cassette and you’d have to have fresh batteries in each time because you couldn’t rely on the batteries,” he says.
While spending five decades working on funerals of people from all walks of life, Hansen still found time to plan one more – his own.
After all, it’s hard to see a funeral director leaving the details of his own service to someone else.
“We’re going to have the service here at Kembla Grange, and I’ve even picked out the priests that are going to do it,” he says.
“There will be a prayer service here and then there will be a cremation later.”
And it’s highly likely that, on that day, there will be so many people that some will be outside watching the service on that flatscreen TV in the driveway.