Nine Miles From Gundagai

"Nine Miles From Gundagai" is a poem by Australian poet Jack Moses.
It was first published in the poet's collection of poetry and stories Beyond the City Gates : Australian Story and Verse in 1923, and later in a number of other Australian poetry anthologies.

Outline

The poet relates the story of his dog who sat on the tucker box nine miles outside the New South Wales town of Gundagai to guard its contents.

Further publications

After its initial publication in the Beyond the City Gates : Australian Story and Verse collection in 1923, the poem was reprinted as follows:The North Queensland Register 14 January 1924Australian Bush Songs and Ballads edited by Will Lawson, Frank Johnson, 1944An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by George Mackaness, Angus & Robertson, 1952Favourite Australian Poems edited by Ian Mudie, Rigby, 1963Silence Into Song : An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Clifford O'Brien, Rigby, 1968The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse edited by Beatrice Davis, Nelson, 1984Little Book of Dogs compiled by Maree Bentley and Jo Karmel, National Library of Australia, 2008100 Australian Poems You Need to Know edited by Jamie Grant, Hardie Grant, 2008The ABC Book of Australian Poetry: A Treasury of Poems for Young Children edited by Libby Hathorn, ABC Books, 2010

Note

The original tale of the "dog on the tuckerbox" dates to a doggerel poem, "Bullocky Bill", published anonymously by "Bowyang Yorke" in 1857. In that poem the distance to Gundagai is given as "five Miles" but Moses reportedly changed the distance to "nine miles" as he believed it had "more music in it."