In a quiet corner of Rookwood Cemetery in western Sydney, a grassed walkway runs between rows of old headstones. The grass is kept trimmed, but there is nothing to indicate what lies beneath. In October 2015, Roger Davies and four others were buried there in a communal plot by the New South Wales government. The four strangers were deemed unable to afford their own funeral, a designation that gave the state responsibility for their remains.
Davies was a rough sleeper whose body was found in 2015, three years after his death. A postmortem found fractures to nine ribs around the time of his death, but police decided there was no evidence of suspicious circumstances and concluded he had overdosed. No drug paraphernalia was reportedly found with him.
Police knew Davies was from Adelaide and had the names and dates of birth of his brother and sister, but documents suggest they first contacted South Australian authorities for a family contact number on 20 November 2017. By then, Davies had already been buried. His sister, Chantel Dubsky, learned of his death only after the burial.
"There was no closure, there's never going to be any closure," Dubsky told the Guardian. "And up until now with you, there's no one who's cared."
Dubsky said she would have had her brother cremated and returned to Adelaide to be laid to rest with his mother and grandparents. "It's unspeakable. He shouldn't be there in the first place," she said.
The government did not mark his grave, despite a 2013 promise to do so. A three-month Guardian investigation found at least 18 clients of Sydney homelessness services have been placed in unmarked communal graves since 2016. Leaders in the homelessness sector say they were not informed of these burials.