The Loaded Dog

Australian poet and writer Henry Lawson’s 1901 collection of short stories, Joe Wilson and His Mates, includes a comedic farce called “The Loaded Dog.” Like most of Lawson’s writing, the story is a slice of life episode from the bush – the Australian outback – profiling the activities of the hardy colonists who made their very hard living on this rugged frontier. In this story, three gold miners invent a novel way to catch a lot of fish at once, and then find that their invention backfires on them in a spectacular way when their dog gets a hold of it.

The protagonists of this story, Dave Regan, Andy Page, and Jim Bently, appear in many of Lawson’s stories. The differences in these men’s personalities are part of what makes Lawson’s tales of their adventures funny. Dave is slightly mischievous and easy-going – he is the youngest of the trio and the one who tends to get them into various shenanigans. Jim is the cranky, self-serious member of the group. And Andy tends to be the straight man caught in the middle of Dave and Jim’s back and forth.

One day in the middle of winter, Dave, Andy, and Jim are working on sinking shafts – a particularly dangerous form of mining that involves creating a near-vertical tunnel to the bottom of the mine by using explosive cartridges. Because they are near Stony Creek, and because Andy and Dave are devoted fishermen, Dave comes up with a way that they could catch many fish at once: if they blow up the riverbed with one of their mining cartridges, they could kill a lot of fish, some to eat and some trade to the butcher for meat. Jim thinks this idea is “damned silliness” and wants nothing to do with it. But Andy is always game for whatever Dave comes up with, even if he sometimes ends up taking the blame when Dave’s theories don’t pan out.



Back at their camp, Andy starts to work on setting up a cartridge to put in the river. This involves creating a cartridge three times the normal width and then wrapping it in canvas and brown paper to increase the size of the explosion. But in the middle of his preparations, the men’s dog Tommy, a retriever puppy, becomes interested in what they are doing. Tommy’s main joy in life is retrieving things – a dead cat the men tried to throw away, any garbage they leave behind, and even the men themselves when they go swimming.

Tommy grabs one of the explosives in his mouth and plays with it, accidentally igniting its fuse by running near the campfire. Seeing the lit explosive, the three men try to flee – but Tommy treats their panicked attempts to get away as a game of chase. Dave and Jim are faster than Andy, but no matter how much they shout at each other not to follow each other – at least if they split up they won’t all blow up – they’re all still running together.

Thinking fast, Dave grabs the cartridge out of Tommy’s mouth and flings it far away – but Tommy is all the more delighted that the game of chase has now turned into a game of fetch, so he runs after the explosive and brings it back to Jim. To get away, Jim climbs as high as he can up a skinny tree, but the top of the tree bends down and breaks, so Jim ends up back on the ground. As he jumps into one of the sunken mine shafts, and as Andy hides behind a big log, Tommy takes off after Dave.



Dave runs into a nearby pub, where several other Bushmen are standing around drinking. He struggles to explain that Tommy has a live cartridge in his mouth and shuts the front door of the pub – only to find that Tommy has come into the shack from the other side. The men scatter, and Tommy starts chasing around after all of them in his normal friendly way.

In the yard, Tommy runs into a vicious, feral yellow dog that’s been a neighborhood problem for a while now. The yellow dog bites Tommy, who drops the explosives, running away in fear. A bunch of other undomesticated dogs surrounds the yellow dog to see what it’s got. Just as the yellow dog goes in to try to bite the cartridge, it explodes so hard that the shack rattles. The yellow dog is killed, and some of the other dogs are also hurt.

For the next half hour, the Bushmen and their wives laugh uproariously. Eventually, Dave apologizes for the commotion, while Tommy goes back to camp “smiling his broadest, longest, and reddest smile of amiability, and apparently satisfied for one afternoon with the fun he’d had.” For a long time afterward, any time one of the Bushmen encounters Dave, they ask him how fishing is going.



The violence that read as hilarious when Lawson was writing can seem anything but funny to a modern reader. But it may be helpful to think of this story as a lens through which to get a sense of the incredibly dangerous, and often surprisingly and randomly fatal world these Bushmen miners are in. At the drop of a hat, something can go wrong in the worst possible way – if you don’t catch enough fish, you go hungry. If you mishandle explosives, casualties will follow. Underlining this reading of the story is the fact that none of the men whose lives Dave’s invention put in danger blame him or hold a grudge – they’ve all accepted that their existence hangs in a precarious balance, so it’s easier to laugh.