ABOVE: The dog statue in Bonalbo. Photo: Contributed
Petting the Bonalbo Working Dog Bronze Statue last Wednesday, Thursday, or if at all, I found myself contemplating other doggy monuments in our wide, tealished land.
Basically, it boils down to our Bonalbo boy, a kelpie in Castlemaine, Red Dog in WA and the well-known Dog on the Tucker Box near Gundagai.
And, well yes I know about the big cutout of that St Bernard from Beethoven that sat outside a Video Ezy shop in Dapto for many a long dog year, but let’s face it, the thing was just Corflute and Beethoven was a Seppo dog anyway.
Back to Gundagai.
When I think of the Dog on the Tucker Box all I can think of is bowdlerism. No, not bow-wow-wowdlerism.
Bowdlerism.
You know, when you tone down, beige up and emasculate/disfeminate a piece of writing by chopping out the good bits and inserting soulless euphemisms so as not to frighten the children or scandalise the congregation.
Bowdlerism was named for Thomas Bowdler, a Pom of the 18th Century who published The Family Shakespeare, which brimmed with expungements, expurgations and euphemisms, generally leaving out the fun bits so as to make Shakespeare more suitable for children (and women).
Tom didn’t start out such a starched collar. Lord Byron remembered him as being a loose cat, but fun at a soiree.
While at Oxford he invented “The Blouson Mullet” – a shirt designed to be tucked in at the front but hang free at the back.
The Bowdler crew, which included Pitt the Elder, Lewis Carroll, a royal, Pope Leo XX and W G Grace, would don their mullet shirts and play Dance of the Flaming A%ses, which involved lighting up their shirt tails and bolting for an ornamental pond before buttock singeing occurred.
But Tom returned from a doctoring stint in India a sickly and soberised man dedicated to good works. I mention, without comment, that he married a Farquarson.
Now back to Gundagai. Someone wrote a bit of verse about a bullocky who was having a rough trot, a hell of a time and a bastard of a day. The bullocks played up, stuff got broken and then the poor bullocky discovers that the dog has shat in his tucker box. That’s right, shat. The poem makes no sense otherwise.
Now Australians have a proud tradition of changing the words to songs. “It’s a long way to the shop if ya want a sausage roll”, “Am I ever gonna see your face again? No way, José f-ck off!” and so on.
But we never tone things down. That’s just wrong.
The Town Fathers of Gundagai let themselves down, and they let Australia down when they changed ‘shat’ to ‘sat’. It’s a short and slippery slope from ‘sat’ to things like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘green coal’.
I don’t begrudge the Gundagai folk a roadside tourist attraction but you’ve got to wonder what the Chinese tourists make of it. I mean the Chinese have endured centuries of massacres, floods, earthquakes, famines, battles and torture. Then they pull up at Gundagai, pile out, take some snaps, pile back on again. One shakes his head and says, “Dog sit on box. So what?”
A lesson to us all.
Bullgoose.
and then