CAQA Everlasting Funeral Services
CAQA Everlasting Funeral Services is a family-founded funeral, cemetery and crematorium business serving families across Melbourne's eastern suburbs, the Yarra Valley and the Ballarat region. The business arranges and conducts burials, cremations, memorial services and repatriations, cares for the deceased in its own mortuary, and operates Everlasting Memorial Park, a lawn and monumental cemetery with a two-cremator crematorium, memorial gardens and a columbarium. Everlasting works with families of every faith and none, with hospitals, aged care homes, the coroner and interstate funeral directors, and with celebrants, clergy, florists, monumental masons and newspapers to deliver each service as the family wants it.
The business is organised into six departments: funeral arranging and client services, mortuary and embalming, cemetery operations and grounds, crematorium and memorialisation, transfers, fleet and ceremony support, and compliance, records and administration. The Ringwood funeral home holds the arranging suites, a chapel seating 180 and the head office. The Bayswater centre houses the mortuary, cool rooms, embalming theatre and transfer vehicles. The Memorial Park team works seven days on a rotating roster, and the transfer team covers a 24-hour first-call service on a three-shift pattern. Funerals are conducted six days a week, with the Ballarat chapel used for regional services.
Everlasting operates under the Victorian cemeteries and crematoria legislation, birth, death and marriage registration law, coronial law, the Australian Consumer Law and Victorian occupational health and safety law. Every deceased person is identified at each transfer of care using a two-person check and a wrist and coffin identification tag. The mortuary follows infection and contamination control procedures with vaccination, sharps and chemical controls. The crematorium runs under an environmental licence with emission monitoring, and every cremation and interment is recorded in the permanent registers. A documented quality system with controlled policies, procedures, forms and registers is audited internally every quarter and reviewed by the leadership team each month.