Bill Marsh - Great Australian Bush Funeral Stories

Contents

BILL SWAMPY MARSH is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. He spent most of his youth in rural south-western New South Wales. Bill was forced to give up any idea he had of a career as a cricketer when a stint at agricultural college was curtailed because of illness, and so began his hobby of writing. After backpacking through three continents and working in the wine industry, his writing hobby blossomed into a career.

His first collection of short stories, Beckom Pop. 64, was published in 1988, his second, Old Yanconian Daze, in 1995 and his third, Looking for Dad, in 1998. During 1999 Bill released Australia, a CD of his songs and stories. That was followed in 2002 by A Drovers Wife and Glory, Glory: A Tribute to the Royal Flying Doctor Service in 2008 and Open Roads: The Songs and Stories of Bill Swampy Marsh in 2017. He has written soundtrack songs and music for the television documentaries The Last Mail from Birdsville: The Story of Tom Kruse; Source to Sea: The Story of the Murray Riverboats and the German travel documentaries Traumzeit auf dem Stuart Highway, Clinic Flights (Tilpa & Marble Bar), Traumzeit in den Kimberleys and Einsatz von Port Hedland nach Marble Bar.

Bill runs writing workshops throughout Australia and is a teacher of short-story writing within the Adelaide Institute of TAFEs Professional Writing Unit. He has won and judged many nationwide short-story and song-writing competitions and short film awards.

Great Australian Bush Funeral Stories is part of Bills very successful series of Great Australian stories including: Great Australian Outback Nurses Stories (2017), Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories (2016), Great Australian Outback Police Stories (2015), Amazing Grace: Stories of faith and friendship from outback Australia (2014), The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories and Great Australian Outback School Stories (2013), Great Australian CWA Stories (2011), New Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories and The ABC Book of Great Aussie Stories for Young People (2010), Great Australian Stories: Outback Towns and Pubs (2009), More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001) and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999). Bills biography Goldie: Adventures in a vanishing Australia was published in 2008 and his semi-autobiographical collection Swampy: Tall tales and true from boyhood and beyond was published in 2012.

More information about the author can be found at www.billswampymarsh.com

Facebook: Bill Swampy Marsh

The ABC Wave device is a trademark of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.

First published in Australia in 2018

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Bill Marsh 2018

The right of Bill Marsh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN: 978 0 7333 3858 8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978 1 4607 0885 9 (ebook)

Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio

Front cover image: Josephine Smith digging a grave at the Drouin Cemetery, Victoria, 1944, by Jim Fitzpatrick [PIC/7755/38 LOC Drawer A113] courtesy National Library of Australia

Illustrations by Lew Keilar

For Ollie, whos full of life.

The stories contained in this book are written from interviews recorded by Bill Swampy Marsh. The contributors are:

Larry & Therese Adams

Neill Bartlett

Kath & Noel Beauchamp

Chris Carter

Evan & Chris Connick

Vanessa Forsyth

David Freeman

Bernadette Greensill

Christine & David Harris

Wayne Kennedy

George A Lee

Tony Bulrusher Marsh

Pauline McAllister

Peter Morton

David ONeill

Garry & Pol Purcell

Paul Roe

Darren Seivwright

Chris Smith

Gordon Sue

Lyn Unsworth

Margaret Worth

Garry & Helen Zanardi

Helen Barnard

Tom Bateman

Fran Callan

Jane Clemson

Fran Davies

Jane Fox

Rob & Roz Gillam

David Nutz Hansford

Peter Holland

Michael Lanagan

Jeanette & Garry Mann

Bob Mathieson

Bev Mezzen

Paula OConnor

Frank Partington

Kath Robb

John Sargent

Wayne Shearman

Justin Steadman

John Thomas

Trevor Walker

Val Wright

... and many, many more

I grew up in the south-west of New South Wales, in a small place called Beckom. There was just sixty-four of us living in the township itself and there were fifteen of us kids who attended Beckom Public School. If the school had a library, I cant recall it and, of course, the town wasnt large enough to support one. In our house we only had three books: a collection of Henry Lawsons called While the Billy Boils, with a few of his other stories added in; then we had Banjo Patersons The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, and an aging family Bible.

Although the Bible didnt get much of a bashing, other than my mothers habit of bashing it against her bunions in the odd belief that the Lords weight behind the Lords word could move anything from mountains to bunions, Lawsons stories and Patersons poetry certainly did. While Patersons poetry evoked a more romantic side of the bush, it was the earthiness of Lawsons short stories that I most identified with. He could make me laugh or cry, simply by the way he crafted his stories. I still recall rolling around with laughter while reading The Loaded Dog:

Run, Andy! run! they shouted back at him. Run!!! Look behind you, you fool! Andy turned slowly and looked, and there, close behind him, was the retriever with the cartridge in his mouth wedged into his broadest and silliest grin.And that wasnt all. The dog had come round the fire to Andy, and the loose end of the fuse had trailed andwaggled over the burning sticks into the blaze... and now it was hissing and spitting properly.

Andys legs started with a jolt; his legs started before his brain did, and he made after Dave and Jim. And the dog followed... They could never explain, any more than the dog, why they followed each other, but so they ran, Dave keeping in Jims track in all its turnings, Andy after Dave, and the dog circling round Andy the live fuse swishing in all directions and hissing and spluttering and stinking...