“The Union Buries Its Dead” is a story written by Henry Lawson, an Australian writer and poet. It takes place in Bourke, a small town in rural New South Wales, and narrates the burial of a union laborer, who drowned in a river. Lawson wrote “The Union Buries Its Dead” in 1893, but it was first published as part of the collection While the Billy Boils (1896). It is one of his most anthologized short stories, and cemented his status as an author who shaped Australia’s national mythology.
Lawson primarily wrote realist fiction, and this story is no different. In fact, Lawson later commented that the story is a true account of a funeral he actually observed in Bourke. The story takes place in the heyday of the Australian union movement. It mentions the GSU, the General Labourers' Union, formed just two years before Lawson wrote the story to organize the woolshed workers. Alongside the ASU, the Australian Shearers' Union, who organized New South Wales shearers, it was a radical union. These unions, however, were racked by divisions even among the working class itself, and the story reflects those conflicts.
As a literary text, the story shares many attributes with other "bush yarns," or short stories about life in the Australian outback. Although much of the action itself takes place in a town, rather than the outback itself, the characters Lawson writes are bush archetypes: the drover, the shearer, the pompous pub owner, the drunk, etc. The story, and indeed its genre, depicts a distinctly Australian ethos—masculine and white with an aversion to arrogance, a keen awareness of class distinctions, and a biting sense of humor. It falls within one category of Australian nationalist literature from the 19th century: a dry depiction of the harshness of the Australian bush, similar in its sparse language and tone to the writing of Ernest Hemingway.
