Hundreds of cultures, hundreds of ways of saying goodbye and every one of them has something to teach the rest of us.
More than seven million Australians – over a quarter of us – were born overseas, nearly half of us have a parent who was, and more than 5.5 million people speak a language other than English at home, according to the 2021 Census.
Which means that on any given night, in hospitals, aged care homes, palliative care units and family homes across the country, people are saying goodbye to a dying loved one in hundreds of different ways and almost none of them look like the quiet, curtained-off death we tend to imagine.
Beneath each faith and tradition lie questions that are surprisingly practical. Who sits with the person who is dying? Should end-of-life care happen at home or in hospital? Who cooks? Who decides? Every community that has settled here arrived with its own answers, worked out over generations and the answers are worth eavesdropping on, whatever your own background.
Who’s in the Room
In many cultures, a dying person is simply never left alone. Cultural care guides developed by the Migrant Information Centre in Melbourne’s east with Eastern Palliative Care, profiling Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Sri Lankan and Vietnamese communities, describe something closer to a relay than a visit: extended family rotating through the caregiving, the cooking, the sitting. For these families, “who is in the room” is just as important as any medical decision.
Where It Happens
In some Vietnamese and South Asian traditions, dying away from home is believed to unsettle the spirit, so families will move heaven and earth to bring someone back from hospital. In some Chinese traditions, the belief runs the other way, and home is avoided. These aren’t quirks to be managed around a discharge plan; they shape real decisions about where end-of-life care happens. And for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the question of place reaches deepest of all: being on Country to die can matter as much as being close to family.
Elders, Stories and Shared Meals
In many communities, elders and not paperwork, lead the decisions and rituals around death. Storytelling and shared meals recur everywhere. Gathering to eat, to recount memories, to mark significant days. The customs don’t stop at the death itself, either. They carry on through mourning periods, remembrance meals and anniversaries, which is another way of saying the goodbye is never really a single moment.
What the Research Says
None of this is lost on Australian researchers. A 2025 review in the Journal of Clinical Nursing found that communication, the health literacy of patients and their families, access to services and the cultural competence of healthcare workers remain the recurring gaps for culturally and linguistically diverse communities at the end of life. A 2026 South Australian study went further, showing that community-led, co-designed programs – workshops, radio and podcast segments, and translated printed resources – built with Filipino, German, Italian and Vietnamese communities can genuinely build “death literacy”. Translated end-of-life care information already exists on government sites like Victoria’s Better Health Channel, in Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Vietnamese and other languages; the trouble is that too few people know it’s there.
Many Ways to a Good Death
There is no single right way to die well. Every community in Australia has already worked that out for itself. And within every community, each person and family finds their own way; culture is a starting point, not a script. Sharing these customs isn’t about ranking them. It’s about widening our sense of what comfort, presence and goodbye can look like. Because whatever a family’s background, the common thread holds: nobody should die feeling alone, unheard or unseen.