The Court exercised its inherent jurisdiction to order release of a deceased's body for cremation to the deceased's daughter over the objection of the deceased's wife, who sought to defer cremation pending a coronial investigation that the State Coroner had already declined to undertake. The Court applied the evaluative framework from Brown v Weidig and State of NSW v Gill, holding that the deceased's expressed wishes for cremation, the support of other family members, the absence of any evidentiary basis for the wife's allegations regarding the cause of death, and the impracticability of indefinite storage of the body all favoured granting the plaintiff carriage of the cremation. The Court also appointed the plaintiff as limited-purpose interim administrator under s 73 of the Probate and Administration Act 1898 (NSW) solely to obtain a death certificate and cremation permit, without resolving the separate dispute over the validity of a purported testamentary document found on the deceased's iPhone.
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