Five Aussie roadside monuments to stop by on your next drive
The verges of Australia’s highways are seemingly littered with brass plaques and stone towers commemorating one historical deed or another.Usually, it’s the path an early explorer took, or possibly where a famous bushranger met a grisly end. Other monuments are a little more quirky and unique, so if you have time, stop and check out these five.
Dog on the Tuckerbox, near Gundagai, NSW
You’ll find a bronze effigy of a scrawny dog sitting on a tucker box along the Hume Highway, about eight kilometres north of Gundagai. It’s a celebrated legend based on a 19th century poem called ‘Bill the Bullocky’, relating to bullock teams that built the road. The memorial was unveiled in 1932 by none other than Prime Minister John Curtain. Interestingly, in the original poem the dog isn’t a hero guarding its owner’s food stores by sitting on the tucker box, but rather the villain sitting (or worse) in it instead.
Three Lost Children, Daylesford, Victoria
In 1967 a monument was erected in the Daylesford cemetery marking 100 years since three little boys wandered into the bush near this central Victorian town and disappeared. William and Thomas Graham along with Alfred Burman, aged between four and six, got lost in July 1867 and despite a massive search managed to walk most of the way to nearby Musk, where their bodies were found months later. It’s a sad story but is remembered by this walk and visiting the cemetery here on the Trentham Road.
Huskies Memorial, Kingston, Tasmania
Dogs seem to get almost as much recognition as humans on Australian monuments and this memorial to the Husky teams that helped explore the Antarctic is no exception. It can be found outside the Australian Antarctic Division headquarters and commemorates the 40 years service from 1954 by these sled-pulling dogs at Australia’s Mawson Base before an international treaty in 1992 banned introduced species (other than humans) on the southern continent.
Black Stump, Cowell, South Australia
The town of Cowell is a long way from anywhere – it’s on the far side of the Spencer Gulf, about a 500km drive west of Adelaide – so you’d be right in thinking it’s well beyond the Black Stump (whatever that is!). Strangely though, just such an object was placed in the middle of town next to the Commercial Hotel in 1972 as a prank, labelling it the ‘best pub this side of the black stump’. The original was somehow stolen, and a new one sits there commemorating land clearing in the area.
BellaGNOMEia, Nullarbor Plain, Western Australia
It can take days to cross the vast expanses of the Nullarbor but there’s plenty to see, including kangaroos, camels, dingos, Bunda Cliffs. Less obvious is this roadside memorial that wasn’t exactly inaugurated … it seems to have just happened. Garden gnomes began appearing in a roadside stop next to the highway outside Belladonia, and was named BellaGNOMEia. Then a hand-painted sign and even more gnomes appeared. Barely less weird is the monument at Belladonia Roadhouse dedicated to the large chunks of Skylab, the space station that fell to earth nearby in 1979.
Feature Image: Flickr by bready_fv
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