Renowned Emmy Award-winning Australian artist/filmmaker Lynette Wallworth (Tender, AFF 2013) died and was revived when she was 11. This has given her a fascination with death, the last great frontier in human life. We all know our lives will end, and yet - in the Western world at least - we act as if death is a mirage, disappearing the closer we move towards it. Melbourne palliative care specialists, Drs Marg Ross and Justin Dwyer provide Wallworth with a perfect opportunity to explore ways that we might approach death with a sense of calmness, and yes, even joy, by treating terminally ill patients with psychedelic drugs, so that their relationship to death is fundamentally altered.

Psilocybin is not new; it comes from ancient traditions. When the doctors journey to the Amazon to experience traditional medicines, they are confronted by the realisation that the world’s oldest cultures have something important to reveal, not just about medicine, but about death itself.