""...and the dog shat on the... " a Gundagai Travel Page by iandsmith

The 'Dog on the Tuckerbox' is a legendary bronze sculpture located out the front of a restaurant and gift-shop complex eight kilometres north of the town of Gundagai (south west of Sydney) on the western side of the Hume Highway, the main route to Melbourne.
The Dog On The Tuckerbox first emerged into Australian folklore through an anonymous teamster's song of uncertain date. A version of the song appeared in the Gundagai Times in the 1880s in the form of a poem called 'Bullocky Bill' which focuses on a hardy, stoic and unlucky teamster, noted for their colourful language, who gets bogged at Five Mile Creek (a teamsters' meeting place five miles from Gundagai). The yoke of his bullock team breaks and, to make matters worse, 'the dog shat on the tucker-box/ Five miles from Gundagai'. Salesman and balladeer Jack Moses wrote a cleaned-up version in the 1920s in which the dog sits on and guards the tuckerbox. For unknown reasons he called it 'Nine Miles from Gundagai'. The lyric was very popular and inspired the commission of the sculpture for the 1932 'Back to Gundagai' celebrations. It was made by Frank Rusconi (see Rusconi's masterpiece elsewhere) and unveiled by Prime Minister Joe Lyons.
In the park outside the complex is a tribute in copper to Steele Rudd's famous Snake Gully characters - Dad, Dave, Mum and Mabel (in Rudd's stories, Snake Gully is on the Darling Downs in Queensland).
Rudd's stories centre on the trials and tribulations of a rural family with traditional traits of loyalty, battling against all odds and conservatism with small "c". A series of early Australian films were based on these tales and they became the basis of a very popular radio serial which was introduced by the song 'Along the Road to Gundagai'. Just start singing "There's a track winding back to an old fashioned shack" to an Aussie and you should get a response. Nearby are the ruins of the old Five Mile Pub.
This simple statue singularly put Gundagai on the map and now I have put it on the VT map.