Great Australian Bush Funeral Stories by Bill Marsh

Author:Bill Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2018-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Well, I’m a funeral director myself, and have been for the last decade or so. I guess I first got interested in the business when I was a very young kid and I got to know Dad’s best mate, Bob. Bob was an old bush undertaker, as funeral directors were known as back then, and he turned out to be quite an influence in my life. So much so that he became a sort of honorary uncle. ‘Uncle Bob’ I used to call him.

Just about every Sunday, Dad and I used to go down to Uncle Bob’s place for a bloke-socialise out in his garage. And it sort of fascinated me. There we’d be chatting away in among all the spare coffins and funereal palaver. And more importantly, I was always given prime position to sit — ‘the throne’ they used to call it — which was up on the bonnet of Uncle Bob’s Ford Twin Spinner hearse. You couldn’t get much better than that, could you?

Another memory I have is when we were all going out bush for a picnic one time in Uncle Bob’s Holden station wagon cum body-removal vehicle. Dad and Uncle Bob were sitting in the front and Mum and I were having a great time, mucking around in the back, chatting away and singing songs and so forth. And I remember at one point, Uncle Bob looking over his shoulder and remarking, ‘Well, you’re certainly a lot more talkative than most of the buggers I get to carry back there.’

Anyhow, Uncle Bob died when I was eleven or thereabouts. And from then on, as I got older, it was just a case of being in the right place at the right time really. I didn’t do any funeral-type instruction courses or anything. I just hooked up with another old bush undertaker and I learned the tricks of the trade as I went along. But of course, the question I get asked most often is, ‘What’s the difference between a casket and a coffin?’

Well, while both a casket and a coffin are used for the same thing — to either bury someone in or cremate someone in — they are two different shapes. A casket for instance is the most used these days, mainly for convenience. That’s why it’s rectangular in shape, with four sides, a top and a bottom, while a coffin is constructed more to the shape of a body. That’s why a coffin is six-sided, with the top end being slightly larger to accommodate the shoulders and the head of the deceased, while the bottom end need not be so wide because that’s where the feet of the deceased go.

So, now that we’ve cleared that one up, the basic procedure is that, after someone dies, the family or whoever get in touch with us, the funeral directors, and we go and collect the deceased person. That’s not done in the hearse. The hearse is only used for the funeral. Similar to Uncle Bob, what we have is a ‘removal vehicle’ which is either our station wagon or a van.

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