This is a lengthy article but I believe it is of interest...
The Dog on the Tuckerbox
When my brothers and I were young, our parents took us to Gundagai for a tourist trip. It was then that I first came across the famed dog on the tuckerbox. I still remember wondering why a dog sitting on a food box waiting for his master to return was considered so special. The dog had to wait somewhere and the fact of the waiting was a natural response to its master having gone away. In my youthful innocence I mentally filed it under “Things that Don’t Make Sense but that I Can’t Explain”.
Some years later I came across a poem that made the whole thing understandable: the dog hadn’t sat on the tuckerbox 9 miles from Gundagai, it had shat in the tuckerbox 9 miles from Gundagai.
I was reminded of this recently when I saw a reference to the dog on the tuckerbox monument.
