Tarcutta Accommodation, Hotels, Tours & Information

Tarcutta

A small farming town in softly-undulating country on the Hume Highway about half way between Sydney and Melbourne, Tarcutta is a farming community relying for its prosperity mainly on sheep and cattle and the interstate truckies who use the town as a change-over point in the trade between the two capital cities. The local park houses a poignant memorial to the truck drivers who have died on the infamously-dangerous local stretch of the Hume Highway. Dozens of names are engraved on the memorial. The local café, which has sustained generations of truckies, has also been the source of inspiration for a brace of Australia's best modern poets, Les Murray and Bruce Dawe. Murray wrote The Burning Truck while recharging on the café fare in 1961 and Dawe immortalised the eatery in a couple of lines in his poem Under Way. Tarcutta is about 40km south-west of Gundagai - the town that has the strongest claims through song , poems and anecdotal evidence to being home to the legendary dog that sat on the tuckerbox.