About 60 people, including academics, nurses, doctors and funeral directors, will address the conference, being held at the Otago Museum tomorrow and Friday, when they will publicise research being done in the areas of death, dying and bereavement in Australia and New Zealand.
About 140 people are expected to attend.
Conference director Cyril Schafer, of the University of Otago, said the fact the conference was being held at all was evidence of a more open attitude to death than in the past.
"[As recently as the] 1980s, discussion of death was not really something that was openly encouraged ... children particularly were not seen to have any kind of place in funerary rituals and, if someone died, often children were not allowed to go to the funeral."
There had also been a "remarkable transition" towards a more secular view of death and its meaning in recent times, Dr Schafer said.
"In the past, death was very much the realm of religion ...
"[and] what we have seen in New Zealand for a long period of time now is an increasing focus on the needs of the individual and the family."
However, despite this move towards focusing on the individual, death still "brought people together" and there were still important rituals associated with death.
Dr Schafer said the conference came at a time when mortality rates were increasing, because of an ageing population.
"There [are] more people dying, so care of the elderly and dying will become a really important issue."
The first Death Down Under conference was held in Sydney last year.
