According to Sydney J Baker in his book The Australian Language, “as a generic title for food of any description, tucker has been in Australian use since 1852.” It seems to have arrived with the gold rushes of the 1850s, and a common term on the goldfields was that of “making tucker” – that is, finding enough gold to pay for your food.
The word is derived from the English word tuck, which was used as schoolboy slang for food bought from a pastry cook and led to the term tuck shop. According to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, “tuck” came from the expression “to tuck in” and was first used as a noun to mean food in 1835. This may have arisen from a chain of shops and coffee houses run by a family by the name of Tuck from the late 18th century until 1850. There is a goldfields link. Thomas J Tuck was a London baker and migrated to Victoria with his brother, William, in 1852, opening a confectionery and pastry store at Sandhurst (now Bendigo).
From tucker came a number of other words. The tucker-box – a receptacle for transporting food – has gone into legend thanks to poems celebrating a dog who sat on a tucker-box (or in a more scatalogical version, shat in the tucker-box), five or possibly nine miles from Gundagai. The original poem, by a bush poet who called himself Bowyang Yorke, was, according to the Institute of Australian Culture, written in 1859. It tells of an unfortunate bullock driver headed for the New South Wales town:
As I was coming down Conroy’s Gap
I heard a maiden cry,
“There goes Bill the Bullocky,
He’s bound for Gundagai.
A better poor old ——
Never cracked an honest crust;
A tougher poor old ——
Never drug a whip through dust.”His team got bogged at the Five-Mile Creek,
Bill lashed and swore and cried:
“If Nobby don’t get me out of this I’ll tattoo his —— hide.”
But Nobby strained, and broke the yoke,
And poked out the leader’s eye,
Then the dog sat on the tucker box,
Five miles from Gundagai.
An updated version (without the missing swear words) was written by the wine and whisky salesman, Jack Moses, in 1923. Titled The Dog and the Tucker Box, it placed the hound’s misdeed nine miles from Gundagai. The citizens of Gundagai seized upon the popularity of these ditties as a way to promote their town and erected a statue of said dog, fixing on a location five miles north along the Hume Highway. It would have to be one of the most fondled dogs in Australia.
“Tucker” remains a well-understood, if lesser-used, word in modern Australia. In popular parlance, it most often occurs as “bush tucker”, referring to indigenous foods originally part of the diet of First Nations people.