Hosted by David Rigby & Hayley West

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About this Death Cafe

This is the second Death Cafe in Castlemaine. The Mess Room at the Governor's Cafe is a new space we hope will accommodate our Death Cafes into the future. 

We look forward to hearing your stories, thanks for sharing!

About David Rigby & Hayley West

David Rigby is a Castlemaine immigrant of six years standing. His one and only serious health scare twelve years ago persuaded him that death is at least a theoretical possibility and that it is unlikely that an exception will be made in his case (with acknowledgements to Woody Allen). As part of the process of confronting his mortality, he spent two years as a volunteer for an in-the-home palliative care service in Melbourne. He co-hosted the first Death Cafe in Castlemaine in 2015, and is looking forward to sharing again with the Mount Alexander Shire community in which he feels so much at home. 

Hayley West has recently returned to Victoria after a hiatus of 13 years. She had co-hosted Death Cafes in the Blue Mountains, Canberra and Senegal, and is a death literacy and natural burial movement advocate. Her visual arts practice relates to a lived awareness of death and memorial, focusing on the realities of grief and how remaining objects and memories are interconnected. Her latest exhibition 'Remnants of the dead and demands on the living' is in its final week at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre.