The Bush Undertaker
An old man is preparing dinner for himself and his constant companion, his dog Five Bob. After dinner he grabs a shovel and pick and heads out to a cemetery where he digs up the skeletal remains of a "blackfellow"; he puts them in a bag and heads home again, but on the way discovers the body of a man that has been dried out by the fierce Australian sun. When he looks more closely at the man he realizes that he is an old friend; his name was Brummy and he was a drinker. The old man manages to figure out a way to carry the man home, where he plans on giving him a funeral that is respectful and somber, but he is hampered by the fact that he doesn't know whether or not Bunny was religious or spiritual in any way, and if he was, what his beliefs were. Undaunted, the old man digs Bunny's grave in the Australian bush, and buries him.
Drovers were men who moved livestock long distances by walking them across barren lands which took many months. The drover's wife lives in the Australian outback, in a small hut, with her four children. There is nobody for miles around; they live an isolated exisence. The woman has to be self-sufficient and she takes care of her kids single handedly, because there is nobody there for her to ask for help. One day, a snake slithers underneath the house and disappears. The woman puts the children to bed and then waits with her dog for the snake to re-emerge. They wait all night, until when it is almost dawn, and the snake re-appears, at which point the woman and the dog kill it, thereby protecting their family from the threats posed by the wild Australian outback.
The narrator is boating with friends on the Darling River, Australia's third-longest river. They encounter a young man riding a horse, driving some horses along the riverbank. He asks if it is possible for him to cross the river with the horses, and the clown of the group jokes that it is deep enough to drown the young man, who continues along the bank instead.
The following day the narrator finds out about a funeral that is taking place at the pub on the corner. The person who has died turns out to be the horseman whom they had met the previous day. They don't know him, or anything about him, other than the fact he was a member of a union. They organize his funeral because his union membership makes him family.
However, the union members in the pub are rather fond of a drink; by the time the funeral procession leaves most of them are too drunk to follow behind it. The narrator and his friends do manage to follow, but the funeral itself is a strange affair; there is no emotion, because nobody knew the deceased man, and so they have no real emotion to display. They also fail to truly connect with the sadness of the loss of a young life; although the narrator was told the name of the man, he cannot remember it long enough to recount it in the story.
A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father
A poor carpenter returns to his farm on New Year's Eve and discovers that his children have been thoroughly neglected by his lazy and neurotic wife. His eldest son has been feeling sick, but feels better and wants to help his father cook and clean; however, he doesn't really know how.
The man's wife, Emma, calls out from her bedroom that she is bad in the head again, and complains that her husband does nothing to help out in the house. She blames him for everything. On New Year's Day the man gets up early and heads into the farming town where he works, repeating the cycle of the year before He does not celebrate the beginning of the new year, because he knows it is not a fresh start or a new opportunity, but a continuation of the last.
A Double Buggy at Lahey's Creek
Joe has been trying to get a hold of a double buggy, but has not managed to get one yet. Mary on the other hand, is obsessed with trying to grow potatoes. She has great success in this, and to show how proud he is of her, Joe redoubles his efforts to find a double buggy. He eventually finds one, and the surprise gift strengthens what has previously been a marriage with more downs than ups in it.
