Henry Lawson's short story "The Union Buries Its Dead" opens with a scene on the Darling River in New South Wales, Australia. A group of bushmen—single men living in the Australian bush, most likely working as cattle herders or sheep shearers—are out on boats on a Sunday in what seems to be a leisure activity. The narrator is one of the group. They come upon a lone young man driving horses along the bank of the river, and exchange brief and light-hearted words. One of the members of the narrator's group jokingly warns the man that the billabong water is deep enough to drown him. The man moves on and the narrator puts the exchange out of his mind.
The main action of the story occurs the next day, when a funeral passes through the town. The deceased is a young man, identified only by the union card that the police found in his belongings. The men, bound by their shared union affiliation, plan to attend the funeral despite a difference in religion—the dead man is a Catholic—but their plans are disrupted by heavy drinking, and the funeral party ends up numbering only fifteen. The procession through the hot and dusty town involves several characters: an interruption from a horseman, back from a long trip and unaware of the funeral, and a drunk shearer barely able to take off his hat as the hearse passes, for example. One man in the procession recites romantic poetry and cracks morbid jokes, wondering whether the deceased's union card will be accepted in heaven. It is this man who alerts the narrator to the important realization that the man in the coffin is the same man they saw on the Darling river billabong just yesterday. Perhaps they would have prolonged yesterday's conversation if they had known the man would go on to die in that same river.
Finally, the main event begins, as the priest sprinkles holy water on the coffin. The narrator disapprovingly comments on the absurd actions of a well-to-do pub owner, who makes a show of his sincerity by holding the priest's hat over his head to shield him from the sun, despite standing in the shade. The grave-digger lowers the coffin into the earth, and shovels hard clods of dirt into the grave that make a loud sound as they hit the bottom. The narrator assures us that although the event has the potential for sentimentality, there is none present. The narrator learns the deceased man's name from the writing on the coffin: James John Tyson.
The story ends with the narrator revealing that James John Tyson was not in actuality the man's name. In a final dark twist, he notes that he did learn the man's real name, but it is already forgotten.
