Great Australian Bush Funeral Stories

Introduction

I grew up in the south-west of New South Wales, in a small place called Beckom. There was just sixty-four of us living in the township itself and there were fifteen of us kids who attended Beckom Public School. If the school had a library, I can’t recall it and, of course, the town wasn’t large enough to support one. In our house we only had three books: a collection of Henry Lawson’s called While the Billy Boils, with a few of his other stories added in; then we had Banjo Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, and an aging family Bible.

Although the Bible didn’t get much of a bashing, other than my mother’s habit of bashing it against her bunions in the odd belief that the Lord’s weight behind the Lord’s word could move anything from mountains to bunions, Lawson’s stories and Paterson’s poetry certainly did. While Paterson’s poetry evoked a more romantic side of the bush, it was the earthiness of Lawson’s short stories that I most identified with. He could make me laugh or cry, simply by the way he crafted his stories. I still recall rolling around with laughter while reading ‘The Loaded Dog’:

‘Run, Andy! run!’ they shouted back at him. ‘Run!!! Look behind you, you fool!’ Andy turned slowly and looked, and there, close behind him, was the retriever with the cartridge in his mouth — wedged into his broadest and silliest grin. And that wasn’t all. The dog had come round the fire to Andy, and the loose end of the fuse had trailed and waggled over the burning sticks into the blaze . . . and now it was hissing and spitting properly.

Andy’s legs started with a jolt; his legs started before his brain did, and he made after Dave and Jim. And the dog followed . . . They could never explain, any more than the dog, why they followed each other, but so they ran, Dave keeping in Jim’s track in all its turnings, Andy after Dave, and the dog circling round Andy — the live fuse swishing in all directions and hissing and spluttering and stinking . . .

Another time I remember returning home from a school mate’s father’s funeral and locking myself away and shedding a tear or two while I read ‘The Bush Undertaker’:

On reaching the hut the old man dumped the corpse against the wall, wrong end up, and stood scratching his head while he endeavoured to collect his muddled thoughts . . . And the sun sank again on the grand Australian bush — the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands.

In my teenage years, I attended Yanco Agricultural High School, an all-boys boarding school in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area of New South Wales, where I was lucky to have had two English teachers who were Lawson fanatics. So much so that, whenever we’d be bussed in to Leeton for sports days or whatever, they’d always ask the bus driver to take a detour past the old fibro place where Henry had lived for a short while, back in the mid-1910s.

So I guess it’s no wonder that my own writing has been so strongly influenced by Henry Lawson. What’s more, after my writing life began, it was Henry’s trail that I often seemed to find myself following. When I was writing Great Australian Shearing Stories, I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading ‘The Shearing of the Cook’s Dog’. With Great Australian Droving Stories, I was reminded of the terribly haunting ‘The Drovers Wife’. For Great Australian Outback Towns and Pubs there was ‘A Bush Publican’s Lament’. For both Great Australian Outback School Stories and Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories, I couldn’t go past ‘An Echo from the Old Bark School’.

In 2014, I was invited to be writer-in-residence in Bourke, in north-western New South Wales, for their Festival of a Thousand Stories. This was the town where Henry had spent some time back in the early 1890s. As Henry wrote of his experience, ‘If you know Bourke, you know Australia.’ And it’s true.

Two particular events happened in Bourke that drew me even closer to Henry. The first was when a small group of us spent a couple of days travelling across the north-west in the footsteps of Henry Lawson and poets such as Will Ogilvie and Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant. For the first leg of that trip, we drove the near-on two hundred kilometres from Bourke up to the Queensland border town of Hungerford, along the ‘track’ that Henry and a mate had taken three weeks to walk during the severely drought-affected early 1890s. Though it’d been well over a hundred years since Henry had been here, I could still relate to his story ‘Hungerford’:

One of the hungriest cleared roads in New South Wales runs to within a couple of miles of Hungerford, and stops there; then you strike through the scrub to the town. There is no distant prospect of Hungerford — you don’t see the town till you are quite close to it, and then two or three white-washed galvanised-iron roofs start out of the mulga.

The second important event was when local historian Paul Roe conducted a tour of the Bourke Cemetery. As part of that tour, Paul mentioned that the cemetery had been the scene of two of Australia’s most famous funerals. The most recent was that of Professor Fred Hollows, the acclaimed eye surgeon, who’s acknowledged worldwide for his work in restoring sight to people who were unnecessarily going blind. Like myself, over his time, Fred formed a strong connection with those living throughout the remote north-western areas of New South Wales.

Paul told us that the second famous funeral to be recorded in Bourke took place back in 1892 when Henry Lawson wrote the story ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. In the story, Henry tags along behind a funeral procession of an unnamed stockman who’d drowned in a local billabong:

The hearse was drawn up and the tail-boards were opened . . . four men lifted the coffin out and laid it over the grave. The priest, a pale, quiet young fellow, stood under the shade of a sapling which grew at the head of the grave. He took off his hat, dropped it carelessly on the ground, and proceeded to business . . . The grave looked very narrow under the coffin, and I drew a breath of relief when the box slid easily down. I saw a coffin get stuck once, at Rookwood, and it had to be yanked out with difficulty, and laid on the sods at the feet of the heart-broken relations, who howled dismally while the grave-diggers widened the hole. But they don’t cut contracts so fine in the West . . . Our grave-digger . . . scraped up some light and dusty soil and threw it down to deaden the fall of the clay lumps on the coffin. He also tried to steer the first few shovelfuls gently down against the end of the grave with the back of the shovel turned outwards, but the hard dry Darling River clods rebounded and knocked all the same.

You can’t get much more Australian than that.

But while Henry Lawson has often been touted as being ‘Australia’s greatest short-story writer’, his personal life was far from great. He failed his matriculation exams, possible due to, among other things, a mix of his shyness and deafness. He had a failed relationship with the noted writer of prose and poetry Mary Gilmore, who later became Dame Mary Jean Gilmore. He had a failed marriage with Bertha Bredt, whom he left with their two children: a son, Jim, and a daughter, Bertha. Throughout his life, he suffered from ongoing mental-health issues and was possibly bipolar and, due to alcoholism and poor publishing agreements, he battled economically throughout his life. He was also jailed on occasions for drunkenness and non-payment of child support.

In his mid-thirties, Henry began a long friendship with Mrs Isabel Byers. During this time, Mrs Byers tried to get Henry back on his feet by negotiating better deals with publishers. She reunited him with his children. She rallied his friends and supporters to help him financially. She also nursed him through his severe mental and alcoholic states. But to little avail. In his later years, Henry became withdrawn, depressed and broke. At his lowest point, he’d wander the streets, begging for money.

Henry died in Mrs Byers’ home in 1922, at the age of fifty-five. For someone who was virtually destitute at the time of his death, he became the first person in New South Wales to be granted a state funeral on the grounds of him having been a ‘distinguished citizen’ — an honour usually reserved for governors, chief justices and the like. Thousands turned out on the day of his funeral, including the then Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, and the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang.

As a scribe of bush and outback stories, I couldn’t have wished for a better writing mentor. So don’t be alarmed if, as you read through Great Australian Outback Funeral Stories, you feel the ghostly presence of Henry Lawson.

Tall Man — an ode to Henry Lawson

He was a tall man, about six feet tall

With a lanky limp and a nasal drawl

The shadow on his shoulder’d make a blind man crawl

But that’s the way it was.

He grew up poor, grew up lean

His mum was known as a union queen

He loved to write. He dared to dream

That’s the way it was.

Chorus

And the dogs ran round chasing one another

And the men ran round shouting out for cover

When the shed blew up you should’ve seen them scuttle

That’s the way it was

Yes, that’s the way it was. Oh that’s the way it was.

With Henry, that’s the way it was.

You’d find him in a bar somewhere

Drinking beer with a midnight stare

Looking out to Lord knows where

But that’s the way it was.

Henry, get out of here.

You’ve got to go out west to clear your head

The way you’re going you’ll soon be dead

That’s the way it was.

Chorus

And the dogs ran round chasing one another

And the men ran round shouting out for cover

When the shed blew up you should’ve seen them scuttle

That’s the way it was

Yes, that’s the way it was. Oh that’s the way it was.

With Henry, that’s the way it was.

So he took a train away outback

To the town of Bourke, at the end of the track

If you don’t go now you won’t come back