If you want to find Paul Cornish just go to any of the three pubs in Derby and ask for The Undertaker. The done-up Spinifex Hotel, the good old Boab Inn, or the Sports Bar down town; almost everyone there knows him as that bloke who builds coffins, and collects and delivers the dead.
They know him all over the Kimberley too: desert mobs way out Balgo way, remote communities up past Kalumburu, and across to Bidyadanga and beyond. Everyone here knows Paul because for over 30 years he and his family have run a funeral service about this wild, outback West Australian region.
In that time, he’s dealt with snake bites, croc attacks, helicopter crashes and road train and mustering accidents, an endemic of youth suicide, people lost out in the bush for weeks, and a fair share of dead crooks who came up here to hide out too.
It’s a tough job, and the grief and pressure of it have changed Paul – for better or for worse. It’s also an extraordinary job; it’s taken him to some of the most wild and stunning places on earth, and given him unique insight into the Aboriginal ways of life and death.
But for Paul, the true beauty of this work is in rising to meet the practical challenges of dying in the outback, and restoring dignity and pride to its people.
Paul Cornish outside his home in Derby.
If Paul isn’t out bush, you might find him here, in his corrugated iron home in Derby’s industrial area. Today, he’s sitting on a camp chair in the shade beside his crab pots and the 200 Series Landcruiser he once used in his fleet of four-wheel-drive hearses.
It was a twist of fate that brought Paul here to Derby in 1985. He was two years into a trip around Australia and was travelling along the Gibb River Road. Nearing the western end of the road, he ran into car trouble.
“We bodged it up as best we could to limp into town, but we didn’t have all the right sized spanners. People would pull up to check on us, give us the spanner we need, and we’d undo the bolts then give it back to them. Pretty easy,” he says.
“From there it was eight kilometres to Derby or over 200 back to Fitzroy, so it was in to Derby for some mechanical repairs.”
A cabinet maker by trade, Paul soon found work while he spent a few months waiting for car parts to arrive. He was enchanted by the Kimberley and its outdoor lifestyle, and decided to stay.
At that time, funeral services in Derby were directed by two of the town’s police officers. They did it because there was no one else in town he could.
They came to Paul with coffins that had arrived damaged from Perth. Paul began repairing them, then building them. The police officers relied on his workmanship and saw potential in Paul, and nearing the end of their postings in Derby they approached him to take over their business.
“’I said, ‘No bloody way’. I didn’t mind building coffins, but I didn’t want to be an undertaker. I didn’t want to deal with dead people,” says Paul.
Aware of the chaos that would ensue if they left without a successor, the police officers resorted to more covert means of involving Paul.
“They sort of conned me into it. They kept calling me up, getting me to go out on jobs and help them,” he says.
“The first few [dead] people I saw were very well intact. It was just like they had fallen asleep. Then they started taking me out to more serious events.
“I remember this one, it was a very messy situation. One of the police officers said to me again, ‘you know, you really should do this job.’ And I was like, ‘why? You’ve got plenty of help’. And he goes, ‘well those two police officers are over there spewing out the door, and you’re still here helping me.’
“I could see his point there. I’d grown up in a farming family, fishing and stuff, so I realised I could obviously handle things a bit differently. I ended up taking it over after six months of them working on me.”
Because of Derby’s remoteness, Paul needed to provide a fully comprehensive service. It began with a state contract to collect the deceased. If someone died, the cops would call Paul, and he would arrive to transport them back to Derby’s mortuary.
From there an autopsy would be performed, or, in more serious cases, the body would have to flown 2,500km to Perth to await a coroner’s report, and then flown back again.
Meanwhile, Paul would begin to arrange a funeral with the family. He would take measurements of the body and then come up with a coffin design – maybe painted plain white with extra handles for more pallbearers, maybe in Eagles or Dockers colours, or maybe with horses if it was for one of the area’s legendary stockmen. Once the coffin was built and the body returned, Paul would deliver and direct that funeral.
True to the demographic of the region, the majority of these funerals were for Aboriginal people. Most people of European descent would choose to be cremated, but for Aboriginal people, burial was a traditional rite, says Paul, and it was important for them to be returned to their country in this way.
Many of these funerals are now done in the way of a Christian church service, says Paul, with elements of Aboriginal culture added in. But in the 90s, Paul worked with that last generation of Aboriginal people to have lived a traditional life, and he facilitated a number of traditional burials over the years.
“A lot has been lost, yeah,” he says.
“Back then, I was very happy to help with those traditional funerals. They were brilliant, but challenging. We’re going so remote, places where there are no tracks or airports or anything else around.
“It would often take a couple of days in a four-wheel-drive to get out to somebody’s homeland. You’d get a light aircraft to take the coffin to a station runway up there, wherever the closest station was, then pick it up and drive for hours off into the bush.
“There was a bit of modern technology in there, but we were still able to get ‘em out onto their homelands and let their family bury them in the traditional way.”
Paul was well equipped for this work because like many of Australia’s outback people he had been indigenised. From his early days he had developed strong relationships with many local families, and it was this trust and mutual respect that underpinned his work.
“I got along with people. I was right in with the locals, and I enjoyed going fishing with them and eating a bit of dugong and turtle and stuff along the way. I liked learning the stories of different spots, and more about Aboriginal culture,” he says.
“When it came to taking over the funeral business, I already had a good reputation with people. They knew me, and they were happy for me to be doing it.”
Local elders began educating Paul on the cultural protocol and traditions of the area’s many different peoples. It was vital that Paul understand and observe these for things to run smoothly.
“Some of the elders took me on board and told me what to do and what not to do when I arrived at a community with the body, and at the funeral. And I had to remember these things and jot them down, because every community and every people are different,” he says.
“As a whitefella, there’s a lot of sensitive cultural stuff that I don’t really have the right to talk about. But one that isn’t so sensitive, for instance, if I was going to a community around Derby with a coffin, I had to make sure I drive around and keep the coffin away from the family. Whereas in the desert areas, I would pull up and they would all dance around the car before I go to the cemetery.”
While many funeral homes in cities and large towns cater every aspect of the service, Paul often had to take a back seat. The families ran their own funerals; he was just there to facilitate it.
“The elders knew, they had it all worked out. I was there just as a helper. They knew what to do. They were in charge, and I had to let them be in charge.”
Paul with one of his old town hearses.
Over time, Paul expanded his business beyond Derby and into the Kimberley, taking over from retiring funeral directors in Fitzroy Crossing and Wyndham. Soon he was running funerals across the entire Kimberley.
To work in this wild and remote country, Paul needed four-wheel-drives for hearses. He built up a fleet of four LandCruisers. By pulling out the back seats he was able to stack the vehicle with coffins two wide and two high. He kept everything cool by driving with the air con up full blast and placing a few frozen water bottles in the rear footwell cavity.
Aside from stray cattle and the isolation and rough roads, the biggest challenge Paul faced every year was the wet season. Between November and March, monsoonal rains often cut off remote communities in the Kimberley, sometimes for weeks. But Paul had a job to do, and he wouldn’t let the weather stop him. He would almost always find a way around the flooded roads and swollen rivers and creeks.
“You’d make funeral dates and be all ready to go and then a big rainfall would through, and all of a sudden the roads are closed between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek,” he says.
“But we’ve always been able to do it. There’s only been a couple of wet seasons where we haven’t been able to turn up on time, but we’ve got that close that the people know where we are. There’s been flooded roads and I’ve had to sit and wait for hours for the water to subside so I can get through. I’ve gone in little Cessna aircraft and been flying above the clouds, waiting for a break to be able to land.
“Sometimes little things will hold us up, but we always get there, we always get it done.”
Paul sometimes felt he was being looked after while doing the job. There’s a kind of divine energy in the Kimberley, he says; it’s an ancient place full of story and myth and wonder, home to the oldest landscape and surviving culture in the world. Call him superstitious, but Paul felt he was able to tap into some of that magic through his work.
“I’ve been all over the Kimberley. I’ve been to remote communities, old communities, traditional lands. There are not too many places I haven’t been. It’s such a great place, a very unique, ancient land,” he says.
“When I’m up here on the lands and going out to different places, I really feel it. It just affects you. There is something very spiritual that it brings out. And over the years of the funeral business, you get to see a lot of odd things and mysterious thing. Things that you wouldn’t normally see and can’t explain. There is a lot more out there than what we can understand or know about.”
There is an ancient and indescribable magic in the Kimberley, says Paul.
While the funeral business has brought Paul his fair share of happiness and supernatural experience, its also taken its toll. The nature of the work meant he was always on call and constantly dealing with other people grief and distress.
“People don’t take holidays from dying. There are no planned times. Accidents happen at any time,” he says.
“Some weeks I was working 120 hours. You just don’t have a choice. You can’t say, ‘oh, no, sorry, just leave them there until tomorrow, I’ll be out there at eight o’clock.’ When something happens, you’ve just gotta go.”
It made it harder for Paul working in a small community too, because often the people he was burying were people he knew. He knew them and he knew their issues too. National data shows that binge drinking and alcoholism is more rampant in the northern regions of Australia like the Kimberley. Paul tried to change things, but he often felt powerless and distressed with the futility of his efforts.
“Alcohol causes a lot of death. It causes too many accidents, too many problems, too much abuse. I’ve buried too many teenaged children from alcohol abuse. It’s such a bad thing to see, and you want to do something about it,” he says.
“You see so much. You try so hard. You tell people all the time they’ve gotta change their drinking habits, and things don’t happen. It’s up to the individual to do something. But if the individuals having a good time drinking drink, they don’t wanna do anything about it, you know.”
As if all this wasn’t enough Paul was regularly attending traumatic events. While he became inured to his work like any worker, there were certain things that stayed with him.
“In an area like this you do everything. There have been croc attacks, helicopter accidents, people being hit by road trains, people lost in the bush that you don’t find for weeks. But you’re always walking with police in these situations, and you know what you gotta do. You gotta do the job. And you do get used to it,” he says.
“But the worst thing to ever deal with – and this is where a lot of other funeral directors have come unstuck in the past – is dealing with children. That’s so traumatic for everyone. You’re not supposed to pass away so young.
“It was taking more and more out of me, you know. It was getting too much to be able to do all of those things and keep doing them properly.”
Paul had his own way of coping with his emotional fatigue and the things he saw. He kept himself busy and tried not to think about things too much, pushing them away into a place inside of him he could not easily access. But these things always find their way back out.
After 28 years running funeral services across the Kimberley, Paul decided three years ago that it was time to step away. One of his sons, Jaden, had been working with Paul for nearly five years, and there were plans for him to take over the business.
But things got messy, and Jaden took the skills he learned from his old man and branched out and began his own thing.
Paul knows that if Jaden chooses to stay in this business, he will have to make many of the same mistakes he made. He knows the true cost of this work, but he also knows the importance and the pride and the dignity of it too, and it’s those things that keeps a man going, he says.
“I do think about it because he’s having to dealt with all these things that I dealt with. He’s already having to deal with friends passing away and stuff,” says Paul.
“But the true satisfaction of this is being able to make things right for people. Everyone is grateful for that. The most important part of this work is keeping the family happy, making things right, and looking after the person who passed away.
“You know that you’ve helped people, and that you’ve done a good job. If you can do that, you can feel happy in yourself with what you’ve done.”
Paul is now enjoying his retirement, exploring more of the Kimberley and spending more time in many of the remote communities he has worked in, not as an undertaker now but a fisherman.
“I’ve had a few years of unwinding now, and I’m still up here in the Kimberley because it’s such a great spot to be. And when I go off travelling and boating and stuff, I feel I still get looked after wherever I go,” he says.
“I feel it, especially in those traditional areas. I enjoy getting up there and spending time sitting and talking with locals. I’m not talking to them about funeral business. I’m talking about where is a good fishing spot, and they enjoy talking to me too.”