THE UNION BURIES ITS DEAD
by Henry Lawson, 1893

Henry Lawson's status both as a part of and as a creator of Australia's national mythology is attested by his appearance on the $10 banknote. Traditional accounts of Australian literary achievement promote Lawson as the writer who did the most to stabilize and to celebrate the characteristic virtues of his compatriots: a tough resilience in the face of the unrelenting bush; a "natural," and therefore nondogmatic, socialism that found expression both in union organization and in the private camaraderie of "mateship"; and a hardheaded distrust of abstractions, cities, and social pretension.

Most of these values seem to be embodied in the scenario of "The Union Buries Its Dead," which was written early in 1893, first published in the Sydney magazine Truth on 16 April 1893, and collected in While the Billy Boils in 1896. A young laborer drowns while trying to swim some horses across the Darling River in outback New South Wales. Because the dead man was a member of the General Labourers' Union (GLU), his funeral is well attended by the inhabitants of the small bush township through which he had passed on the previous day. Even though he was "almost a stranger in town" and a Roman Catholic, while "the majority … were otherwise," his GLU ticket ensures a public display of respect from his fellow workers.

But this seeming validation of mateship also appears to be subtly undermined in a number of ways. Most obviously, Lawson—or rather the narrator—takes an entire paragraph to distance himself from the sentimental clichés with which the ethnic of the bush is conventionally celebrated:

I have left out the wattle—because it wasn't there. I have also neglected to mention the heart-broker old mate, with his grizzled head bowed and great drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was absent—he was probably "outback."

It is not, however, only the separate topoi of this idealizing iconography that are missing in Lawson's narrative but also the aesthetic and moral coherence they might confer on the tableau of bereavement. Indeed, "The Union Buries Its Dead" precisely foregrounds the fragmentation into which the fiction of solidarity quickly collapses, a fragmentation signaled as early as the first sentence of the second paragraph—"Next day a funeral gathered at a corner pub and asked each other in to have a drink while waiting for the hearse." The collectivity implicit in "funeral" immediately dissolves into the separate identities of which the cortege is composed. The deceased young man has been "almost a stranger in town," the mourners in the trap were "strangers to us who were on foot, and we to them," and the horseman who briefly joins the procession before dodging off to join a friend in a hotel bar is "a stranger to the entire show."

In such a milieu of nonrecognition, where social cohesion has given place to general estrangement, the decorous, ritualistic gestures of mourning become perfunctory and are emptied of meaning. A pair of drunken shearers "covered their right ears with their hats, out of respect for the departed," and even the officiating priest "took off his hat, dropped it carelessly on the ground, and proceeded to business." Despite early claims that "unionism is stronger than creed," schismatic intolerance resurfaces as the burial rites proceed: "One or two heathens winced slightly when the holy water was sprinkled on the coffin," and an anonymous "someone" identifies the priest as "the Devil." The squalid ceremony finally degenerates altogether into farce when a "big, bull-necked publican" officiously picks up the priest's conical straw hat and dangles it two inches above his head to protect him from the burning sun—implicitly a grotesque parody of a saint's halo or a martyr's crown. After this the narrator's laconic remark as "the hard dry Darling clods" (metonymically representative of the hard, dry land that has occasioned this hard, dry story) knock and rebound on the coffin's lid seems a wholly appropriate summation of what has gone before: "It didn't matter much—nothing does."

This line, or one very like it, occurs in one of Lawson's earlier and best stories, "The Bush Undertaker" (1892), and its aptness to the present text seems confirmed by the final paragraphs, in which the drowned man's identity is first revealed ("So his name's James Tyson"), then withdrawn ("J.T. wasn't his real name—only 'the name he went by"'), then revealed again ("We did hear, later on, what his real name was"), and finally canceled once more ("We have already forgotten the name"). Naming, the ultimate guarantee of the subject's uniqueness, has become a source of duplicity and confusion, its individuating function rendered problematic and at last illusory. The narrator, however, expresses no regret for his lapse of memory, and, indeed, throughout the story his tone has been disengaged, easily distracted by minutiae (he notices, for example, the way in which the drops of holy water leave "little round black spots" on the cloth draping the coffin), digressing into anecdote ("I saw a coffin get stuck, once, at Rookwood"), and unconcerned with welding his disparate perceptions into a neat structure.

And yet there is perhaps a hint of defensiveness in the narrator's resolute effort to distance himself from the events in which he has participated, a guarded disinclination to explore the full range of potential responses that his experience might generate. The dogged literalism with which he recounts the drowned man's last rites and the facile cynicism with which he concludes that nothing matters seem at least partly adopted to keep at arm's length the alternative of despair. A nightmare of universal estrangement and, as the dead man's anonymity implies, nonentity thus gets deflected into a wry comedy of bush manners. The speaker's determined antisentimentalism is calculated not only to establish the realistic superiority of his own narrative to falsifying stereotypes but also to preempt any search for significance in an incident that is constructed merely as a campfire yarn. And the casually discursive mode of presentation, presupposing as it does a known community of like-minded auditors, itself serves to palliate the horror that has been glimpsed. The "union" that the funeral of the dead worker has been unable to catalyze is implicitly achieved in the relationship between the narrator and his assumed readers. Alienated content coexists and is contained by companionable form, and this is crucial to the tale's meaning. For Lawson's story, despite its appearance of radical skepticism, can thus finally commit itself to the Australian legend of masculine solidarity—not as a comfortingly absolute value but rather as a strategy for survival on the brink of the abyss.

—Robert Dingley