The Union

Buries its Dead

 Themes - What is the Australian Identity
Created
Typifies characters Landscape
Men Mateship
Women Loneliness
“Toughness”

Many of the themes are repeated throughout different stories, such as

the bush and bush living, and loneliness/resilience. Lawson treats the
themes as a way of establishing what it means to be Australian and to
construct a version of the Australian identity. Lawson has used
language to create a distinct identity for Australia at a time just
before Federation, when we were moving from under the shadow of
Britain and shying away from British culture. 2
 Inveterate gamblers, drink
as much beer as their wages
will permit, are devoted to
bawdy jokes, and use
probably the foulest
language in the world

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1.
The Union Buries its
Dead
The story tells of the encounter of a group of men with
a young drover whose inexperience makes him fall
victim to a billabong’s treacherous waters in the
borderland of the Australian frontier in the late 19th
century. Without identity and without a relative or a
friend to claim his body, he is buried by the General
Labourers’ Union because the deceased carries the
same Union’s ticket in his pocket.

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 Context
"The Union Buries Its Dead" is a short story by Henry Lawson in which a young
man drowns while fording his horses in the river. The story describes the funeral
procession in the Outback for the young man who, though a stranger in town, is
nevertheless given a funeral because he was a fellow union labourer. Lawson
uses the story to satirise the overly romanticised "bush life" and the Union's
commitment to respecting its members.
Angus and Robertson published the story in the collection While the Billy Boils
in 1896.

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Summarising
Complete the sentence starters
- The elements of the story which capture its meaning are …
- Lawson wants us to consider …
- The three main ideas I can identify in the story are …
- I think the story is about the genesis of “Australian
Identity”…

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This story was published in 1893 and is
described as Historian Manning Clarke like this:
“He (Lawson) was telling Australians that the
bush barbarians had their own way of showing
they know just as well as the author of the book
of Ecclesiastes what life was all about” (cited in
“Studies in Australian Classic Fiction”)
This means that the men in the bush had their
own rituals and while they might not be very
religious they understood life in a really true
way.
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 Unionism
This story revolves around unionism. The union at the time had
the idea of creating an alliance of working people but there was still a
division among the classes which Lawson expressed in this story.
Henry Lawson was considered by Will H Ogilvie as a “confirmed
Socialist…setting high value on the brotherhood of man and seeing
nothing but virtue in the attitude of Trade Unionism”
Lawson believed in Unionism and the values and beliefs around this
are in his stories. Some of these values and beliefs became part of our
national collective identity. They became part of our culture. Whether
they are part of your personal identity is up to you.
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Structure

Short Story or sketch Narration Techniques

❏ Use of narrator as ❏ First Person ❏ Vernacular
colloquialisms
the eyes and the ears
❏ Use of Allusion
of the reader. Character/s ❏ Sentence length
❏ Short sentences ❏ Unnamed narrator ❏ Language Devices-
❏ The dead man Humour
Setting ❏ Procession of - Descriptive language
❏ The Australian Bush mourners - irony

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Analysis Questions
1. List the ideas about Australian culture and Identity in
UBID.
a. State if they confirm, ignore, challenge, reveal, and
disrupt.
2. Describe, with evidence, the men.
a. How is Lawson portraying the typical Australian male.
3. Find an example of when Lawson personifies the heat.
What is the effect of this?
4. List three example of Lawson’s ‘humour’.
5. Why does Lawson use the pronouns? Provide examples.
6. Explain the similarities and differences between the DW
and UBID. 11
Lawsons Narrator
Lawson’s narrators usually speak in a
distinctively local idiom and fit the national
stereotype: they are men, and working-class;
they are laconic; they are aware of injustices of
the word; and they are usually unpretentiously
intelligent.

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Themes
● A Bushman's Approach to Hardship-S several
times throughout the text, the narrator repeats the sentiment that it
"doesn't matter." His approach, therefore, seems to include a dismissal
of any difficult emotion.

● Isolation of Bush Life- The residents of the town, for

example, are portrayed as raging alcoholics, using substances to cope
with the harshness of bush life. The main plot event, the death of the
bushman, is also a reminder in itself of the isolation of that lifestyle. The
man dies alone in the bush, unknown even to his family members, and
the town cannot even remember his name.

● Respect for the Dead- The story shows a lack of respect

for the dead and the ritual of the funeral. Lawson was an atheist.

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● Class Divisions- revulsion brought up by the presence of
class divisions demonstrates the emphasis Lawson, and other
writers of his time, placed on a new egalitarian Australian national
consciousness.

● Religious Devotion -the heavy presence of religious

imagery throughout the text underscores the importance of the
church to bush life and historically, in Australia.

● Community vs. Strangers- throughout the text,

characters are repeatedly referred to as "strangers." The
boundary between community and strangers is not always well-
defined and in fact depends on the relative associations
between characters.

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 The procession numbered fifteen,
fourteen souls following the broken
shell of a soul. Perhaps not one of the
fourteen possessed a soul any more
than the corpse did—but that doesn’t
matter.
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How has Lawson broken down romantic notions of the bush in his

short story ‘The Union Buries its Dead’? Provide quotes to

support your thesis.

Begin with:

What has Lawson done within the structure of the short story - ‘The

Union Buries its Dead’?

How has he achieved it?

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How has Henry Lawson affirmed or challenged
cultural stereotypes?
Begin by asking yourself what stereotypes have been depicted by
Lawson within his short stories.
Have they been positively conveyed and if so, where?
Have they been negatively conveyed and if so, where?

(If you are finding it hard to write a substantial piece, write some dot
points so that you can start to recognise where you are seeing a range
of ideas and processes being utilised by Lawson.)
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