The Ballad of M. T. Nutt and His Dog
"The Ballad of M. T. Nutt and His Dog" is a short comic verse by Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, first published in the *Evening News* on 17 December 1904. It runs to just three quatrains in Paterson's familiar loping ballad metre, and its humour turns on a pun buried in its hero's name: "M. T. Nutt" reads aloud as "Empty Nutt," signalling from the outset that the poem's protagonist is a fool, or at least a man about to be made to look like one. The action is slight and entirely comic. "The Honourable M. T. Nutt" is jogging through the bush when he passes a settler's hut and, on impulse, buys a dog from the settler. Pleased with his purchase, he sets off for home leading the animal behind his horse on a rope — but the dog has other ideas. Instead of trotting obediently along, it balks, pulls back against the rope, and in doing so drags the line up beneath the horse's tail. The horse, understandably affronted by this liberty, is given a voice of its own in the poem's closing stanza: it complains that it "would be soft / Such liberties to stand," then addresses the offending dog directly, telling it to "go up aloft" and sarcastically ordering the "young man" — Nutt himself — to "go on the land," a wry dig suggesting he is fit for nothing better than menial farm work after so badly bungling so simple a task as leading a dog home. The piece belongs to a vein of Paterson's writing quite different from the bush epics that made his reputation, such as "The Man from Snowy River" or "Clancy of the Overflow." Rather than romanticising outback life and horsemanship, it is a piece of throwaway newspaper light verse — the kind of comic filler Paterson regularly supplied to Sydney papers alongside his more celebrated ballads. Its pleasures are formal and verbal rather than narrative: the tight, singsong quatrains; the mock-heroic title ("Honourable") applied to a man undone by a badly behaved dog; and the small absurdist twist of giving the horse the last, most cutting word, so that the animal — not the human — ends up as the poem's voice of aggrieved common sense. The comedy depends on a simple reversal of dignity: a gentleman with a title is humiliated by a dog and a rope, and it is left to a beast of burden to deliver the poem's punchline and put him in his place. Read as a whole, the ballad is less a story than an anecdote or joke rendered in verse, in the tradition of comic bush ballads meant to raise a quick laugh in a newspaper column rather than to carry lasting emotional or narrative weight. Its interest for readers today lies chiefly in showing the lighter, more whimsical side of Paterson's output — his facility for compressing a small physical comedy (a horse, a reluctant dog, a rope in the wrong place) into a neat, quotable set of rhymes, and his readiness to poke gentle fun at a self-important "Honourable" gentleman whose bush competence proves considerably less than his title implies.
By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: Ballad, Humorous Poetry, Light Verse · 126 words
First lines
The Honourable M. T. Nutt / About the bush did jog, / Till, passing by a settler's hut, / He stopped and bought a dog.
Then started homewards full of hope, / Alas, that hopes should fail! / The dog pulled back and took the rope / Beneath the horse's tail.
The Horse remarked, "I would be soft / Such liberties to stand! " / "Oh dog," he said, "Go up aloft, / Young man, go on the land!"
The Evening News, 17 December 1904
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Genres
- Ballad — The work is structured as a traditional narrative ballad in verse form with regular rhyming quatrains telling a complete story of adventure and misadventure.
- Humorous Poetry — The narrative centers on an absurd comedic situation where the newly purchased dog's misbehavior creates an entertaining conflict, driving the plot toward ridicule.
- Light Verse — The work prioritizes entertainment and playful language over serious themes, employing accessible, witty storytelling and humorous tone throughout.
- Australian Literature — Written by Banjo Paterson, a canonical Australian poet, featuring distinctly Australian bush settings, vernacular, and colonial rural contexts.
Tags
Australian · poetry · ballad · narrative verse · bush life · outback · rural · dog · animal companion · humorous · folk poetry · storytelling
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The Ballad of M. T. Nutt and His Dog is listed on Textopian as a poem by Andrew Barton Paterson, dated 1940 CE.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Andrew Barton Paterson
- Date: 1940 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Ballad, Humorous Poetry, Light Verse, Australian Literature, Animal Fiction
- Length: 126 words
- Structure: 1 section, 4 paragraphs
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