Granite angels with crumbling faces and broken wings. Headstones cracked by shifting earth. Chiselled names faded by the elements. Rusted iron fences leaning drunkenly against the wind, swathed in weeds trying to escape the dead beneath them.

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Wander through your local cemetery and evidence abounds of a time not long ago when Australians took their all-consuming real estate obsession with them to the grave.

But death's land grab - that long-running era when we laid our deceased to rest in plots of soil marked as their final address - is over. About three-quarters of Australians are now being cremated in a quiet revolution that almost nobody is talking about.

The rapid shift towards cremation - 30 years ago the figure was only one in three - is one of the most significant shifts in modern Australian culture. Yet like many things in our lives it has crept up on us almost unnoticed, largely due to two issues that once seemed grotesquely out of place when discussing death - convenience and cost.

Ashes are portable. You can scatter the remains of loved ones at their favourite beach, bury them beneath an admired tree or divide them among family members where, in all likelihood, they will rest forgotten on a mantelpiece or in a cupboard.

A more brutally practical reason, however, is that life has become expensive enough for the living and harder to justify for the dead. Reserving precious real estate for those who have passed away, particularly in our crowded cities and suburbs, costs thousands of dollars before factoring in the expense of headstones, ceremonies and maintenance.

Cremation comes at a fraction of the price. When mortgages, school fees and everyday living costs leave many families struggling, the economics of death begin to matter.

There is also an obvious cultural reason for the shift. We're a far less religious nation than we used to be. Church attendance has declined along with the expectation that burying someone in sacred soil improves their chance of resurrection. The modern funeral, with its videos, photographic slideshows and songs celebrating the life of the departed, is now less about theology and more about remembrance.

My wife and I are in the throes of updating our wills. She has opted to donate her body to science, perhaps in the belief that future technology will be able to determine why her brain prevented her from reading maps or having a solid sense of direction. I want to be cremated, a wish that, after such a poor joke, may be granted sooner than I think.

But if the business of death is becoming more flexible, something profoundly subtle is being........

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