Photographs copyright: DAVID McMAHON
If you're driving through the Riverina region along the Hume Highway that links Melbourne to Canberra and Sydney, one of the must-see sites is The Dog on the Tuckerbox at Snake Gully, five miles or eight kilometres from the town of Gundagai. It is a monument to the early pioneers and is based on a poem that celebrated a loyal dog who guarded his master's tuckerbox (``tucker'' being the word for food) while a team of bullocks got bogged at a creek crossing.
Mind you, there is a bit of debate about whether the original bush poem about the dog guarding the tuckerbox originally said the dog ``sat'' on the tuckerbox or whether the dog, er, actually fouled the tuckerbox (think a four-letter word with an ``H'' after the ``S''.
In the late 19th century (some time in the 1880s, apparently) `The Gundagai Times' printed a poem by a person who wrote under the name Bowyang Yorke:
``As I was coming down Conroy's Gap,
I heard a maiden cry;
'There goes Bill the Bullocky,
He's bound for Gundagai .......
His team got bogged at the nine mile creek,
Bill lashed and swore and cried;
'If Nobby don't get me out of this,
I'll tattoo his bloody hide.'
But Nobby strained and broke the yoke,
And poked out the leader's eye;
Then the dog sat on the Tucker Box
Nine miles from Gundagai.''
There is no definitive answer to whether it was ``sat'' or the four-letter variant I've mentioned. Likewise, there is debate over whether it was ``nine miles'' or ``five miles'' but if you look at the photograph below you'll see that the official endorsement is for ``five miles''.
