Image 1: The Tuckerbox Mythology, Gundagai
Time: 12:30 p.m.
Date: 23 November 2022
Place: The Dog on the Tuckerbox, Snake Gully, approximately five miles (eight kilometres) from Gundagai, New South Wales.
Image 2: Dog on the Tuckerbox, Gundagai
I never been, before, to “the dog on the tuckerbox, five miles from Gundagai”. The story is pathetic unless it is the story of the story; that is, the pioneer obsession in the early twentieth century – the conservatives slave-mindedness to the late nineteenth century rather than any vision for its own modernist future. The story is Gundagai’s need to envision itself in the creation of the pathway which was emerging as the Hume highway – the passage to new Canberra Parliament from the old Melbourne temporary site, as well the old Sydney road to Melbourne. The Prime Minister Joseph Lyons unveiled the monument (‘the moment’) on 28 November 1932, the monument to unthinking colonialism, expressed in the words of the radical nationalist historian Brian Fitzpatrick:
“Earth’s self upholds this monument
To conquerors who won her when
Wooing was dangerous, and now
Are gathered unto her again.”
Image 3: The Tuckerbox, Gundagai
‘Conquerors’! Even the old radical nationalists were as bad as the heritage conservatives. Why conquest? Like the Spanish conquistadors. This crazy nineteenth-century gaze upon conquering pioneers. It is still with us. One day, the bulk of the population will catch-up with the twenty-first century. By then it will be too late.
The Tuckerbox Pool, Gundagai
Neville Buch
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