Death has always been a diverse and individual experience. There were several different ways of death in Australia between the start of mass immigration and the Great War, with considerable overlap and fluidity between the various elements, not least between the urban and rural. One aspect of the story explores the transmission of British and Irish culture and ideals concerning death, especially among the middle and respectable working classes in the growing Australian cities. Christian beliefs exercised a profound influence on many people facing death up to the 1880s, in relation to deathbed scenes and rituals, funeral practices, and the consolations of religious faith. The urban middle class and respectable working classes attempted to re-create the British and Irish Christian ideal of the ‘good death’, both Protestant and Catholic, which required spiritual preparation and submission to God’s will. Those who came to the Australian colonies in the great waves of immigration and the gold rushes from the 1840s to the 1880s often carried with them a rich Christian culture of death and mourning rituals. For many immigrants, the language of the Bible, the prayer book, and familiar hymns permeated the vernacular, especially in the context of death. Family letters and diaries recapture poignant deathbed scenes, the tragedies of babies’ deaths, funerals and cemetery visits, and the consolations of faith and memory.

The public history of death in urban Australia among the middle classes and the respectable working classes, as reflected in funerals and in the practices of undertakers, maintained the process of direct inheritance from Britain. The social imperative of a respectable funeral was widely shared. The increasing commercialisation, simplification, and standardisation of funerals by colonial undertakers in the towns and emerging cities provided a secure foundation for a public commemoration of death which largely achieved successful transplantation. Australian funerals were never as extravagant as those in Britain. The funeral and mourning reform associations encouraged cheaper and more modest funerals and burials from the 1870s.

But, as Geoffrey Serle has so astutely observed: ‘Culture is a highly perishable growth which, transplanted, cannot bloom as before. Once the geographical break was made in creative terms, the tradition was broken or became very tenuous.’ Serle also notices the cultural time lag, and the weakness of a derivative culture drawing little inspiration from its immediate environment. Serle is not writing directly about the culture of death, but his comments are illuminating.

Fundamental changes in religious and demographic patterns profoundly altered death practices and attitudes in Australia. The traditional Christian way of death declined more rapidly in the Australian colonies than in Britain and Ireland. This Christian culture was fragile in early colonial Australia because, initially, it lacked clergymen, church buildings, and an institutionalised structure with traditional rituals and supportive congregations. The scattered population in rural areas, the lack of clergy, and the high masculinity ratios ensured that traditions withered earlier than they might otherwise have done and were more vulnerable to the challenges of biblical criticism, scientific rationalism, and evolutionary theory from the 1870s. The transplanted Catholic culture of death survived longer than the Protestant because it relied more on a vital combination of formal traditional ritual and comforting sacraments.

If the decline in Christian faith was one major motor of change in death practices in Australia, the other was the great demographic transformation between 1880 and 1918. The traditional pattern, marked by high mortality, a short life expectancy, and a high infant death rate, was replaced by a new pattern: a continuous decline in mortality, improved death rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy.

The most obvious feature of this change was that old age replaced infancy as the most probable time of death.

The derivative European culture of death was at its most fragile and least adaptable amongst the poorest sections of the colonial Australian community. Some commentators talk of a ‘denial’ of death in the twentieth century as if an absence of rituals and a silence about death were entirely new features of modern society. But death was equally ignored in the nineteenth century in the case of the institutionalised destitute, especially if they were also old and frail and former convicts or children of convicts. The late nineteenth-century Australian ‘benevolent’ asylums were more akin to the often brutal early British workhouses of 1834 to 1870 than Australian authorities liked to admit, especially in their ill-treatment and neglect of sick and dying old people. Theories of social Darwinism and utilitarianism reinforced the stigmas against paupers, former convicts, and sick old people perceived as useless to society. Within most asylums, there was little or no concern for the rituals of dying or the dignified ending of life, and inmates were condemned to obscurity in pauper graves.

While the traditional Christian way of death transplanted from Britain and Ireland was steadily eroded in urban Australia, a more robust and distinctively Australian culture of death developed independently in the bush. The Bulletin, the bestselling weekly in Australia by the 1880s, did much to promote the idealised bushman as the distinctive Australian. Its writers argued that national character was forged through a heroic struggle with a harsh environment. Like the bush ballads it frequently published, the Bulletin highlighted the vital role played by death in this noble ideal. In a long editorial in 1894 entitled ‘Dead in the Bush’, the Bulletin depicted as an epic tragedy the hopeless but valiant struggle of the courageous bushman against the destructive forces of nature:

The human tragedy has no grimmer scenes than those daily acted in the vast theatre of the Australian bush ... Pitilessly pursued by the blind forces of destructive Nature, isolated Man staggers continually across the stage, racked by hunger, consumed with thirst, crushed in sickness, yet turning feebly to confront his Furies, and fighting to the last against the Inexorable which overwhelms him.

The death of the heroic bushman was a dominant cultural image of death in colonial Australia; it contrasted strongly with the peaceful domesticated deathbed scene, surrounded by family, so popular in nineteenth-century British art and literature but notably absent from colonial Australian art. The prototypical death of the bushman took a variety of forms, always masculinist, usually heroic, and sometimes violent. Images of colonial deaths in art and literature are dominated by deaths of explorers, bushrangers, bushmen, and gold-diggers who supposedly died valiant deaths, often from thirst and exposure while struggling against the merciless environment.

Explorers and bushrangers who became national legends were almost invariably dead explorers and bushrangers. Death played a crucial role in the creation of young male heroes, changing the perceived nature of their enterprise, making them martyrs in a national cause. The fact of their dreadful bush deaths was regarded as more significant than the quality of their achievement, as the extraordinary fame accorded the leaders of the disastrous Burke and Wills expedition testifies.

Representations of the deaths of explorers were among the most powerful contributions to the cultural narratives of noble bushmen with great qualities of courage, mateship, and self-sacrifice. Burke and Wills were enshrined in Australian folklore as national heroes, Burke’s incompetent leadership notwithstanding, partly because they perished. The deaths of Burke and Wills captured the imagination of artists such as William Strutt, S.T. Gill, and Sidney Nolan. Death was at the heart of Henry Kendall’s epic poem ‘The Fate of the Explorers’, which related how the fame of ‘the glorious martyrs’ spread far and wide: ‘For a glorious work was finished, and a noble task complete.’ Explorers were depicted as heroes who fought the pitiless forces of nature with courage and stoically endured dreadful deaths from thirst and exposure.

Dead and dying bushrangers and their victims were memorialised in bush ballads and were also prominently portrayed in the press from the 1860s to the 1880s. As heroes, the bushrangers were even more flawed than the explorers, since the bushrangers were usually disreputable armed robbers who were misrepresented as courageous Celtic rebels. Above all, the bushrangers were prepared to die and their deaths were sensationalised. After being shot dead by a station hand near Wangaratta, Victoria, in the 1860s, Daniel Morgan was propped up to be photographed with his eyes open and still holding his gun. Ben Hall, the most celebrated bushranger of all apart from Ned Kelly, was killed by police near Forbes in 1865. One of the many ballads commemorating his death lamented that many hearts would always mourn him: ‘a hero has been slain / Savagely they murdered him / While the victim slept’.

But death was also significant in nineteenth-century images of ordinary bushmen. The deaths of Burke and Wills had such an impact on the popular imagination in part because theirs was an epic version of an agonising death that was universally feared and was not uncommon in the bush. But where Burke and Wills became national heroes, most men who died of thirst, exposure, and malnutrition in the bush or on the goldfields were never recovered or identified and the majority were forgotten. The Bulletin dramatised this tragic fate in 1894: ‘In every nook of the Australian wilderness bleach the bones of Australian pioneers. The dingo and the crow, sole witnesses of their death struggles, tear the flesh from the shrunken limbs.’

Visual images and popular bush ballads had a similar focus on lonely deaths caused by exposure to an unforgiving land where men fought hopelessly against the harsh environment and superior power of nature. S.T. Gill’s paintings and sketches of the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s included ‘the unlucky digger that never returned’, depicting the skeleton of an unknown digger who probably died from starvation and fell prey to the hovering scavengers. Fear of these scavengers’ desecration of corpses partly explains the great emphasis on the need for bush burials in the earth. Where Gill’s image of the man who perished in the Victorian goldfields was stoical and resigned, Norman Lindsay’s cartoon in the Bulletin fifty years later was infinitely more malevolent, reflecting the greater harshness of the Western Australian goldfields. Lindsay’s landscape is dotted with skeletons of animal heads, while two aggressive crows perch close to the dying man waiting for his agonising death struggles to end so they can take out his eyes and pick the skeleton clean.

These images of men who died of thirst and exposure in the bush were supported by a whole genre of bush ballads, categorised as ‘Perishes’ in one edition. The Bulletin published many bush ballads, especially the famous ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, written in 1891 by Barcroft Boake, a land surveyor, drover and poet, a ballad which foreshadowed his own early suicide by hanging himself with his stockwhip:

Out on the wastes of the Never Never –
That’s where the dead men lie! …
Strangled by thirst and fierce privation –
That’s how the dead men die!

These ballads were sung by bushmen around campfires, trying with laconic humour to make light of disaster, thirst, heat, and death.

The historical record is consistent with the visual images and bush ballads in depicting such deaths as tragic, but its evidence on their cause is more complex and less complimentary. The idealisation of heroic bushmen in their ceaseless struggle with the forces of an alien environment has some basic flaws. Police files, autobiographies, and records of lonely graves reveal that greed, stupidity, bad judgment, and alcohol were also significant factors in such deaths, alongside heroism and mateship. The bush was not directly responsible, and many such deaths could have been prevented. Ernestine Hill, in The Great Australian Loneliness, stated that victims were often old hands who drank too much beer before embarking on a bush journey at the end of the dry season and miscalculated the availability of water. A man named Edward Hicks died on his way to the Western Australian goldfields in 1887, eighteen miles from Wyndham. ‘He was so drunk when he left Wyndham that he had to be led.’ He died from dehydration caused by heat and lack of water, though he was drinking ‘painkiller’ rather than alcohol on the day he died.

 Powerful images of heroic deaths in the bush sustained myths through the ideals they valorised and those they excluded. The colonial Australian masculine images of the bush death were the antithesis of the British ideal of the good Christian family death, presided over by caring females, and supported by Christian rituals and a formal church funeral. The characteristic images of bush deaths largely excluded institutionalised religion and most Christian rituals of mourning, as well as moving attention away from church, community, and family. But the cultural representation of male deaths in the bush is historically misleading with its focus on epic deaths of explorers, bushrangers, and valiant bushmen. Historical and statistical evidence contrasts markedly with the heroic mythology, demonstrating that the most significant causes of male deaths in the bush and rural areas were diseases and accidents, notably ‘fractures’ and drowning.

Fractures signified the fatal shattering of bodies and bones in road, rail, horse, or mining accidents, and their mortality rate was exceedingly high. In general, between 1869 and 1903, men died from accidents and violence in colonial Australia three times more often than women. Such deaths were often linked with alcohol abuse, which was common in a society with a high disproportion of males. Where Aboriginal men were included in cultural images, they too were often misrepresented, either as a dying race, or as the ‘fierce fantastic savages’ of Henry Kendall’s poetic imagination. The high Aboriginal death rate in prolonged frontier conflict and dispossession was trivialised or remembered selectively.

Police records indicate that old age was often linked with destitution as a major contributory factor in male deaths in the bush and rural areas. Most adult pauper deaths were those of lonely old immigrant men who had never married or had abandoned their families for the goldfields or the bush. Many were homeless tramps, while others were ageing bushmen, swagmen, or shepherds. Police records demonstrate the horror of being a homeless and penniless immigrant far from home and still regarded as a stranger. Old men were more vulnerable to disease and accidents and less adaptable in the bush, where failures were not readily tolerated. Deaths of men from old age, fractures, and disease did not feature in bush ballads because they were not susceptible to heroic treatment.

Dominant colonial narratives and visual images of death and dying also neglected women and children, in marked contrast to popular British sentimental deathbed scenes of consumptive women or young children, surrounded by the grieving family. Mortality from the complications of pregnancy and childbirth was the second most important cause of death in Victoria in 1870, at about ten per cent of total deaths in the 25–44 age group. Yet death in childbirth was overlooked, and women were usually only portrayed in supportive roles. Frederick McCubbin’s famous sentimental painting A Bush Burial is unusual in depicting a more domesticated settler family burying a loved one in the coastal forests, with a woman and child as chief mourners. The potential deaths of children primarily captured the colonial imagination when they were lost in the bush, despite the appalling death rates for infants and young children from infectious diseases and from accidents such as drowning.

Images of bush deaths and burials were popularised by artists such as Frederick McCubbbin and S.T. Gill, and by writers such as Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson.

They were widely disseminated through the popular bush ballads, and were extraordinarily powerful. Experiences of death in the Australian bush stimulated the more creative and enduring ways in which immigrants adapted to a new and initially hostile environment. The Australian tradition of simple bush burials in rural areas was necessary for early settlers living outside the reach of churches, parsons, and undertakers, and it developed a ritual of its own, largely unaffected by British traditions. The bush culture of death was usually secular and derived from the land and from immigrants’ personal experiences and responses to the unique Australian environment. Bush deaths were natural deaths dictated by geography, landscape, isolation, climate, and the lack of established cemeteries.

The diverse representations of bush funerals and burials in the second half of the nineteenth century help us to understand the characteristics of the bushman’s distinctively Australian view of death and its transmission into the wider colonial culture in the twentieth century. The tough, practical circumstances of a bushman’s death in the remote outback usually made elaborate imported burial ritual impossible as well as inappropriate. More than that, such ritual seems to have often been unsought, possibly reflecting the bushman’s hostility to the British parent culture and his scepticism or indifference to institutionalised Christianity.

One important reason for the cultural emphasis on the bush grave in nineteenth-century Australia was its role in establishing a sense of belonging to the land. The first two generations of immigrants often felt torn between two countries and two cultures. Death and burial were crucial components of this ambivalence and disorientation. Those who had left parents and family graves behind in Britain and Ireland felt especially torn and more likely to feel that home still lay overseas, offering the prospect of ultimate burial with their families. Patrick O’Farrell has underlined the passionate desire of many Irish immigrants to be buried with their family in Ireland, rather than in a strange, distant land. But, for most Irish immigrants, burial in Ireland could only be a dream and spiritual reunion in heaven the only possibility.

When migrants became reconciled to the prospect of ultimate burial in Australia, however, they had usually accepted their new land as home. This helps to explain the emphasis on bush burials and bush graves in the ballads, many written by Irish migrants. Bush burials symbolised the making of significant new bonds with the Australian land, as the next generation had parents’ graves to visit in their new homeland. The grave in the bush became an important cultural image in its own right in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Elizabeth Webby has argued that it was even more popular and pervasive in Australian literature and art than the image of the lost child. Charles Harpur recognised the significance of the grave in establishing a sense of national identity and individual belonging in such poems as ‘The Grave of Clements’ and ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’. Unlike the literary and visual representations of death in Britain, which emphasised deathbed scenes, those in Australia focused on the burial and the grave, which established the link with the land.

The powerful connection with the land was again revealed in pastoralist Robert Fellowes Lukis’s memories of the burial in the 1920s of his friend Rob Edkins, owner of the Indee Station near remote Port Hedland in Western Australia. Rob ‘loved the bush life and birds and animals’ and had asked to be buried at Merrinyia claypan, a lovely location between two hills, four miles from his station, and his favourite spot in life. The bishop tried to resist the request because Indee Station was not consecrated ground, but Lukis insisted it was Rob’s dying wish after living there for many years and he had ‘consecrated every inch of Indee’.

Henry Lawson’s two short stories of the 1890s on bush burials are illuminating about bushmen’s attitudes to death and burial, and their substitution of mateship and simple morality for highly ritualised Victorian funeral ceremony. ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ describes the communal alcoholic wake and bush funeral of a stranger in town who was drowned while driving horses across the Darling River. The local bushmen, who did not know the stranger, joined the funeral gathering at the corner pub, dancing jigs, drinking, skylarking, and fighting. The story suggests an interesting juxtaposition of respect for the dead and lack of respect for the institution of the church and its priest. The ritual seemed inappropriate, even farcical, and sentiment was absent: ‘they found no portraits, nor locks of hair, nor any love letters, nor anything of that kind in his swag – not even a reference to his mother.’

Henry Lawson’s second story, ‘The Bush Undertaker’, written in 1892, captures other significant features of bush burials. An old shepherd and his sheepdog were celebrating Christmas day alone together, robbing an Aboriginal grave, when they discovered the shrivelled body of the shepherd’s old mate Brummy, ‘dried to a mummy by the intense heat’. The shepherd’s response was laconic but respectful: ‘now I expect I’ll have t’fix yer up for the last time an’ make yer decent, for ‘twon’t do t’leave yer a-lyin’ out here like a dead sheep’. He intended to ensure that Brummy had ‘a good comfortable buryin’ even if he ‘never rightly knowed Brummy’s religion’. The shepherd recognised that it was his duty to his old mate to carry him six miles home to his hut for a ‘decent’ burial, despite the blazing heat, rather than leaving the body to predators. This was apparently a basic human response by an old bushman who sought to prevent the further desecration of his mate’s corpse. The double-standard here is astounding, given his own total violation of the indigenous grave. Lawson concluded his tale with an apt comment on the abnormal nature of burial in the Australian bush – ‘the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands’.

The artistic images are broadly consistent with the literary images of the nature of bush funerals, depicting only the social rituals that take place after death, with no deathbed scenes or religious themes, and few female participants. S.T. Gill included ‘A Bush Funeral’ in his Australian Sketchbook of 1864, showing the sad, dignified cortège accompanying the plodding bullocks pulling the coffin, while the dead man’s mate and his dog walk slowly alongside as chief mourners. Such representations of bush burials reinforce Lawson’s view of bushmen’s respect for the dead, where circumstances allowed. They also indicate that a second common characteristic of bushmen’s approach to death was a stoical acceptance of inevitable death without fuss. Bushmen were pragmatic because they believed there was no more to be done for the dead and they must look instead to their own survival. In the harsh circumstances of the outback, prolonged formal mourning and elaborate ritual were impractical luxuries. As Robert Fellowes Lukis noted of death in Port Hedland: ‘We knew death had to come to us all. And when the time came, we were quite philosophical in our outlook’, and they gave ‘a mighty good bloke … a good send off’. The tribute required by mateship to a dead mate was an exuberant masculine wake with plenty of beer and, sometimes, black comedy. The ‘bushies from far and wide rallied to the call’ of such wakes, which were recorded as barbarous customs by some middle-class Protestants.

The bushmen’s fundamental respect for the dead can easily be misunderstood by later generations and urban people because it was often accompanied by so little formal ritual or respect for institutional religion. Bushmen preferred to invent their own rules and adopt casual rituals more appropriate, as they saw it, to a harsh environment and climate, and to particular circumstances, such as the lack of clergymen. Ernestine Hill observed that, in the far north and west of Western Australia, the usual service was merely ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul’, or the singing of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’, followed by ‘all hands back to the pub’.

There is little surviving information about bushmen’s perceptions of what happened after death. While most had little time for organised religion, it seems probable that many retained a residual belief in God, and a hope for some sort of existence hereafter. The old bushman Alf Morris in Such is Life said to Tom Collins as he was dying: ‘I’m not a religious man, Collins; I don’t know what will become of me after death; but God does, and that’s sufficient for me.’ That was probably also good enough for many other bushmen, who were likely to be agnostic rather than atheist, and stoical whatever the result.

The many ballads on death published in the Bulletin between 1896 and 1906 adopted three broad approaches to the question of immortality. One group of doubters shared the view of Gordon’s sick stockrider that they had hopes but no certainty of any afterlife. A larger group believed in annihilation at death, though most, like R. Crawford of New South Wales, preferred to call it ‘sleep’. A third group of balladeers sought hope in the beauty and regeneration of nature rather than religion. John Drayman ‘mused upon the mystery of Nature’s wondrous harmony’, which he considered far more ennobling than church, priest, and prayer. The most hopeful poets were those who sought regeneration of life through the natural cycle of the seasons.

Attitudes to death and burial in the Australian bush arguably owed more to the imperatives of the bush itself and to the popular customs and beliefs of the poor labouring classes in Ireland and Britain than to the middle- and upper-class ‘Victorian way of death’. The literary and visual images of bush burials are well supported by historical evidence, and help to construct the distinctive Australian culture of death which developed in the bush largely independently of imported European traditions and rituals. By contrast, the narratives of fearless men who perished after valiant battles with the alien bush were sometimes conjured out of the imagination to satisfy a psychological need for Australian heroes. ‘Bushed’ deaths from thirst and exposure were actually feared more than they were valorised, in part because predators would devour the corpses and proper bush burials were rarely possible.

The Great War marked a turning-point in the history of death, grief, and mourning in Australia. It shattered the traditional Christian culture of death as a dominant model in Australia, and also accelerated a pre-existing decline in Christian mourning rituals. Terrible mass slaughter of young men could not be accommodated within a traditional Christian middle-class model of domesticated family deaths – a model already in decline because of religious indifference and the challenges of science and secularism. As Dr Robert Scot Skirving observed in his anguish on his soldier-son’s death in 1915: ‘that gulf of sorrow, the Great War, separated us from all our past lives and emotions’, creating a changed world afterwards. The war reinforced the stoical and private responses to death and grief learned by bushmen and isolated settlers over many decades of adjustment to the Australian environment. The extremely high rate of Australian participation and mortality in the two world wars help to explain the preoccupation with death in the interwar years and also the long silence about death in the next half century.