[Editor: This is a poem from Beyond the City Gates: Australian Story & Verse (1923) by Jack Moses.]
Nine Miles from Gundagai.
The Dog and the Tucker Box.
I’ve done my share of shearing sheep,
Of droving, and all that,
And bogged a bullock team as well
On a Murrumbidgee flat.
I’ve seen the bullock stretch and strain,
And blink his bleary eye,
And the dog sit on the tucker box
Nine miles from Gundagai.
I’ve been jilted, jarred, and crossed in love,
And sand-bagged in the dark,
Till if a mountain fell on me
I’d treat it as a lark.
It’s when you’ve got your bullocks bogged,
That’s the time you flog and cry,
And the dog sits on the tucker box,
Nine miles from Gundagai.
We’ve all got our little troubles
In life’s hard, thorny way;
Some strike them in a motor car,
And others in a dray.
But when your dog and bullocks strike,
It ain’t no apple pie,
And the dog sits on the tucker box,
Nine miles from Gundagai.
But that’s all past and dead and gone,
And I’ve sold the team for meat,
And perhaps some day where I was bogged
There’ll be an asphalt street.
The dog — ah! well he got a bait,
And thought he’d like to die,
So I buried him — in the tucker box,
Nine miles from Gundagai.
Source:
Jack Moses, Beyond the City Gates: Australian Story & Verse, Sydney: Austral Publishing Co., 1923, pp. 26-27 (the related picture is on p. 26)
Also published in various newspapers, including:
The Gundagai Times and Tumut, Adelong and Murrumbidgee District Advertiser (Gundagai, NSW), 25 November 1919, p. 2 (entitled “The Dog Sat on the Tucker Box”)
The Gundagai Times and Tumut, Adelong and Murrumbidgee District Advertiser (Gundagai, NSW), 15 October 1920, p. 2
The Burrowa News (Burrowa, NSW), 31 December 1920, p. 3 (entitled “The Dog and the Tucker Box”)
Editor’s notes:
bait = poison bait, such as that laid out for dingoes or foxes
tucker = food
That’s not the poem I learnt in school as a kid of the 1960s.
It depends which Gundagai poem you are thinking of.
For example, there is:
Bill the Bullocky, https://www.australianculture.org/the-dog-on-the-tucker-box-1935/
Good morning mate, https://www.australianculture.org/ec72-by-unknown-bush-bard/
On the Road to Gundagai, https://www.australianculture.org/on-the-road-to-gundagai-1905/
Flash Jack from Gundagai, https://www.australianculture.org/flash-jack-from-gundagai-1905/
Also, there is an article which discusses the various “The Dog on the Tucker Box” poems, https://www.australianculture.org/the-dog-on-the-tucker-box-gundagai/
There’s also the song ‘a track winding back to an old fashioned shack along the road to Gundagai’, that I was told was a WW1 soldier dreaming of home.
I have a signed copy of “Nine Miles from Gundagai”, dated1939.
I was wondering if you could tell me more about it.