Gundagai has become one of those iconic places, if you’re driving from Victoria to NSW or to Queensland (or the other way round) you’ll almost certainly stop at Gundagai. I actually stopped there twice, going to and from Sydney for the Book Expo 2015. Most people don’t go into the township instead stopping at the Dog on the Tuckerbox several kilometres away, there you can find petrol, places to eat and the Dog. It’s a lovely area and includes a couple of rather broken down houses and some old farm machinery.

My apologies if this photo makes you ill but I was trying out some different angles, not sure they worked.

The Dog on the Tuckerbox is an old poem about Bill the Bullocky who upset his dog who then shat in his tuckerbox. At some point this word either lost the ‘h’ due to a typo or was deliberately sanitised and instead the dog became the ultimate in loyalty, sitting on the tuckerbox until the return of his master.

So those of us who put the ‘h’ back in out of sheer perversity have actually been doing the right thing. Although many people do know the real story nowadays. And when I say ‘real’, I mean the story as we have it from the poem as there’s a chance it may not have actually happened.

Here is the photo of the statue, nicely surrounded by a moat where people throw coins (for some reason). The box looks to be moderately difficult to get into and while I know there are some dogs capable of some quite clever feats I suspect this dog would not have been able to break and enter the tuckerbox, and if he did then he would have eaten the food rather than leaving a less than savoury deposit. My thoughts are more along the lines of the bullockies being rather bored and inventive of an evening sitting around the campfire wrote some songs which eventually ended up written down. It is only a supposition, unless someone has a time machine and is able to go back to the 1850s or further and follow them around we’ll never really know.