Episode Details

Did you know that around sixty percent of burial disputes that end up in Australian courts involve an Aboriginal person, and that appointing an executor can be the one thing that prevents it?

In this episode, I'm speaking with Professor Prue Vines, a leading Australian legal academic at the Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney, where she has taught since 1990. Prue is co-author, with Rosalind Croucher, of the country's leading succession law textbook, Succession: Families, Property and Death, and sole author of Law and Justice in Australia. She is also the author of the Aboriginal Wills Handbook, and her research sits right at the intersection of law and death, with a particular and long standing focus on developing culturally appropriate wills for Indigenous Australians and on the burial rights disputes that so often follow when that planning hasn't happened.

Prue and I talk about why succession law can feel so harsh when emotion meets property, and why a will should really be thought of as part of planning for the people you leave behind, not just a piece of paper about money. She walks me through what a will actually does, including the part most people never think about: appointing an executor who has the legal right to decide what happens to your body. We get into the risks of DIY wills, how to choose an executor you can truly trust, and what the probate and intestacy process actually looks like when someone dies with or without a will.

A large part of our conversation is dedicated to Prue's decades of work with Aboriginal communities across Australia, developing wills that actually reflect how kinship, family and obligation work in those communities rather than imposing a Western template. She explains how appointing an executor became the single most important reason many Aboriginal elders chose to make a will in the first place, because it settles who has the right to decide what happens to a person's body. We go deep on burial rights: why disputes over where someone is laid to rest disproportionately involve Aboriginal Australians, what dispossession has done to people's ability to be buried on country, the different ways communities have adapted, from smoking ceremonies to carrying home a handful of earth, and the real court cases Prue has seen where a missing will meant a family was torn apart over a burial decision that should never have needed a judge.

Prue closes by making the case for enduring power of attorney and guardianship alongside a will, and pushes back on the idea that will disputes are becoming more common than they really are.

Remember; you may not be ready to die, but at least you can be prepared.

Take care,

Catherine

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