G'day again Giok,

I looked back through my files to the article I mentioned above. There were two revelations for me: 1: I misremembered the location - the bloke was from Gundagai, but now (then) living in retirement in Sydney.

2: He actually named the bullocky that he reckoned wrote The Dog Shat in the Tuckerbox ... a long time before your 70s Oz singer ... Here is the text of my 1984 article, quoting from the 1967 item:

The Son of Lazy Harry

(Editor's Note: This is an article found in the Club's files as part of SINGABOUT vol. 6, number 3. This issue of Singabout was in preparation when Editorial difficulties led to the cessation of publishing. This is too good a story about one of our folk songs' legendary characters to leave mouldering in the files, especially when a certain well-known Melbourne band, in their songbook, have such a specious story about Lazy Harry that we are asked to believe that two shearers, anxious to deliver their pay cheques from Roto to the fleshpots of Sydney, having passed straight through Wagga Wagga should somehow find themselves in the Snowy Mountains whilst trying to reach Gundagai … and that's before they had boozed their pay in Lazy Harry's shanty!

Ah well … to put the record straight:

Discovered at the Five Dock Hotel, and interviewed by John Meredith, John Robertson and Eric Bolton, eighty-years old Albert Morley (1968 ) was being quizzed about the early days of Gundagai. Had he ever heard, we asked, of a song called Lazy Harry's?

"Lazy Harry?" he replied, "He was my father."

Whether his father really was the hero of the song, or whether he simply adopted the nickname; either is possible. Albert's father was Henry Morley of Mingay's Flat, where he lived on a "miner's right" lease at the nine mile. Lazy Harry's father owned a hotel known as the Noah's Ark, because it had withstood the great flood of 1852. It was on the banks of Morley Creek, not far from where it joins the Murrumbidgee River at Gundagai, and the remains of the cellar can be seen to the present day.

Lazy Harry did not have a pub, according to Albert Morley, but the song suggests that perhaps he sold grog on the sly to travellers on the road … perhaps obtained from his father's cellars! He was a talented musician, and was famous in the district for his musical performances on the cross-cut saw. Later in life he removed to the Jackalass goldfield at South Gundagai. The young man who worked as topman on the shaft with Lazy Harry, Mick Carberys, is now ninety-six, lives at Chatswood and attends the same occupational therapy class as the son of his old-time boss!

Albert Morley told us that the famous verse known as Bill The Bullocky or The Dog Shat in the Tuckerbox, was composed by a bullocky named Bill Limbeck.

Source: Singabout, October 1984, ppS1 & S4

Regards,

Bob Bolton