Australian way of death has changed

IT WAS was not even Page 1. On 24 September 1961, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on an inside page in just 250 words the ghastly murder-suicide of Mrs Mary Robinson and her four children. She stood atop the 35-metre cliff at Woolshed Falls near Beechworth in Victoria, swept two children in each arm and the five of them fell to their deaths – Mary 32, Lynette 10, Trevor 7, Graeme 4, and Dianna 3.

Lynette was in the year behind me at Beechworth State School. I did not know her, but her cousin, Gwen, was in my class.

My father, then Anglican Rector of Beechworth, conducted the funeral. The most difficult act in his professional life, he said later. And in the Blitz he had the job of conducting the services for the burial of body parts.

In 1961 we were told by Mr Rasmussen, our Grade 5 teacher, not to say anything to Gwen when she returned to school a week later.

Yes, at the funeral, there were a couple of reporters from the Age, the Sun and Herald, but it was certainly not a bunfight. Moreover, the whole town did not turn out for the funeral – only those connected.

It was nothing like the out-pouring we have seen in Sydney and Cairns in the past fortnight. The media behaviour, too, was completely different. But in 1961 television had not reached Beechworth and regional Australia.

Ironically enough, on the same page as the report of the Robinson tragedy, there was an article saying that the Commonwelath Government would announce the following week a timetable for the bringing of television to regional Australia.

Television did not come to Beechworth until 1966 – ten years after it came to Melbourne.

Just as the media’s behaviour was different then, so, too, was the public reaction. There was no sea of flowers at Beechworth State School like there was in Martin Place or in Murray Street in the Cairns suburb of Manoora.

In the ensuing 53 years, we can ask, was it media leading – portraying ever more emotional coverage to events, or was the public leading – demanding ever more emotional and detailed media coverage of such events?

It seems the latter is more likely. The first reports of the death of Azaria Chamberlain, for example, were mostly only a few paragraphs, and mostly not on page one. The media frenzy only happened as events unfolded and the public demand rose to insatiability.

These days, the media knows the public demand for instantaneous emotional response is inevitable and so its starting point is the big emotional splash.

I don’t think we should see that as an aberration. Rather, the stoic “do not mention the dead” response of the 1960s is the aberration.

In the 19th century, public mourning and out-pouring of grief was gargantuan. And then it shrank.

Hilda Maclean, a PhD candidate at the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland, points out in The Conversation that 40,000 people came as spectators to the funeral of Bourke and Wills in Melbourne in 1893.

In the 20th century, she points out, that as death and dying was moved from the home to public institutions, mourning moved from the public to the private arena.

At the end of the 20th century things changed. The death of Princess Diana was a turning point, in Australia as well as Britain.

The cultural response to death has changed. It tells us at least this: the idea that there is some immutable Australian character grounded in some fundamental Australian cultural fundamentals is fanciful. These things change.

In the 1960s the response to the Robinson tragedy was one of stoicism and silence. Perhaps the experience in the two world war of multiple youth deaths iad caused that. Then a public outpouring of grief for each death had been impossible. They would not have been able to keep up.

It took a couple of generations to change the response to death back to a more overt one.

A younger generation, who did not go through large-scale war themselves or did not have parents who related that experience to them, began the renewal of public outpouring of grief. The public outpouring, especially by younger people, at the death of Princess Diana contrasted with the initial stiff-upper-lip reaction of the Queen and Prince Philip as if public mourning was a sign of weakness.

Television and social media have been the vehicles of the out-pouring – not the cause of it.

The modern overt expression of grief, support and sympathy has been derided as “over the top” by some, but compared to the approach of the 1960s, it seems healthy.

In the 1960s those dealing with death were left alone. It was a matter for religion to deal with. Death was shut away. No-one dared openly mention the word “cancer”, for example.

The ordered silence at Beechworth State School in 1961 was a well-intentioned cruelty.

The reaction in Martin Place and in Cairns was much more healthy – a sign of societal strength, not of weakness.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 26 December 2014.