Great Australian Outback Yarns, page 23
The thing was, when the powers that be looked into the Scottish feller’s background, he didn’t seem to have any family in Australia. What’s more, he was skint, as broke as a badger. So with little to no means to his name the local authorities decided that he’d be given what’s called a pauper’s funeral. As I said, this all happened at a time when Humpty Doo was just starting to expand and so there was a lot of infrastructure work going on; you know, stuff like the kerbing and guttering of the new streets, sewerage and stormwater systems being laid. Even the cemetery was getting a new office, a small chapel for services, along with toilets and so forth for the convenience of the mourners.
Now, when it came to organising the funeral for this pauper, the local priest thought that, at the very least, the poor feller should be given a send-off themed as close to his homeland as possible. To that end he got in touch with a mate of his, Brian, who was the lead bagpiper in Darwin’s Scottish Highland Pipe Band. After explaining the situation, the priest asked Brian if he’d like to pop down to Humpty Doo on the day of the funeral and farewell the feller by playing a couple of Scottish tunes.
‘Yep,’ said Brian, ‘it’s the least I can do for the poor bugger.’
So all was organised. The service was to be held at the gravesite and there’d only be Brian and the priest, plus Wally’s mates from the pub who’d found the feller. Oh, and seeing how it was smack-bang in the middle of the wet season, a couple of gravediggers would be there, at the ready, to fill in the hole before the next deluge hit and, as well as having died from a heart attack or some such, the poor Scottish feller would also be drowned.
As it happened, the day of the funeral was a howler. It’s raining cats and dogs and, to make matters worse, Brian’s car refuses to start. It was something to do with the electrics and so he had to call the AANT — Automobile Association of the Northern Territory. By the time they got him up and going, he’s running over an hour late. Anyway, Brian tosses the bagpipes in his car and he high-tails it down to Humpty Doo. By the time he gets there, it’s stopped raining. He rushes around to the Humpty Doo Cemetery but there’s no one there. The funeral’s over. The priest’s packed up and gone home and Wally’s mates have returned to the pub to continue their commiserations.
Of course, Brian’s feeling pretty wretched about the pauper having been buried without a decent Scottish send-off. ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘what can I do?’
Then he sees a couple of gravediggers filling in the hole over the far side, near the new chapel and administration block. ‘That’s it,’ he says and he grabs his bagpipes and he heads off to the gravesite. So eager is he to make up for lost time that, even before he reaches the site, he’s pumped up his bagpipe and he’s into full swing with Rabbie Burns’ ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’. Midway across the cemetery he realises that ‘My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose’ mightn’t be the most suitable of funeral tunes, so he then changes tact and breaks into another Rabbie Burns favourite, ‘Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon’. By the time he gets to the grave, the two gravediggers have stopped filling in the hole and they’re standing there to greet him with their shovels respectfully held by their sides.
Without a breath, Brian then burst into another Scottish favourite, ‘Amazing Grace’. The thing was, halfway through the first verse, Brian started to think about his own life’s situation. It’d been a difficult couple of months. Due to his excess drinking and a few of his other bad habits, his wife had left him and she’d taken off down south with their two teenage daughters. So then, in his own way, Brian started think about the similarities between himself and the Scottish pauper. He could imagine the situation where, if he got sick, there’d be no one there to care for him. Worse still, if he died at home, he could well go like the pauper — as dead as a doornail, sitting upright in his armchair, with a can of beer in his hand and his glassy eyes staring blankly at a fervently flickering television set.
And the more Brian thought about the situation, the more emotional he became, and, the more emotional he became, the more emotional did his playing become. By the third verse, Brian had got it in his head that this could well be his own funeral: a pauper’s funeral with a lone piper like himself playing ‘Amazing Grace’ and with just two other blokes — gravediggers — in attendance. And that’s when the tears began to flow. Then as he reached the final refrain of ‘Amazing Grace’, he looked across and there were the two gravediggers also shedding a tear or three.
When he’d finished playing, a solemn silence fell as Brian and the gravediggers stared down into that three-quarter-filled hole.
‘I must apologise,’ Brian said to the two men, ‘this’s the first time I’ve played at a pauper’s funeral, and I’m a bit emotional.’
‘Well,’ said one of the diggers, sniffling back the tears, ‘it’s the first time we’ve ever had a piper play at one of our septic tank installations.’
About the Author
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 due to 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 Drover’s 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 has won and judged many nationwide short-story and songwriting competitions and short-film awards as well as running writing workshops throughout Australia. He has performed his songs and stories from outback places such as Mount Dare (pop. 10), down the Birdsville Track, as part of the Great Australian Cattle Drive; on the Ghan as part of Great Southern Rail’s ANZAC Tribute Journey; and at the Transport Hall of Fame gala dinner in Alice Springs as a support act to Slim Dusty.
Great Australian Outback Yarns draws from Bill’s very successful series of ‘Great Australian’ stories, which includes: Great Australian Volunteer Firies Stories (2021), Great Australian Outback Trucking Stories (2019), Great Australian Bush Funeral Stories and Great Australian Bush Priests Stories (2018), 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). Bill’s 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
Copyright
The ABC ‘Wave’ device is a trademark of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.
HarperCollinsPublishers
Australia • Brazil • Canada • France • Germany • Holland • Hungary
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First published in Australia in 2021
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney NSW 2000
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
This is a combined volume of stories drawn from fourteen of Bill Marsh’s previous books: Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Stories: Outback Towns and Pubs (2009), New Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2010), Great Australian CWA Stories (2011), Great Australian Outback School Stories (2013), Great Australian Outback Police Stories (2015), Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories (2016), Great Australian Outback Nurses Stories (2017), Great Australian Bush Funeral Stories (2018), Great Australian Bush Priests Stories (2018), Great Australian Trucking Stories (2019).
Copyright © Bill Marsh 1999, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021
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.
ISBN 978 0 7333 4215 8 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4607 1439 3 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover image: Stuart Arms Hotel bar, 1921, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, by Jack Laver, courtesy State Library of South Australia [PRG 1365/1/445]
Bill Marsh, Great Australian Outback Yarns
