A Change Of Menu - Analysis

Bravado in a small-bore world

Paterson’s central joke is also his central claim: in the bush, confidence and imported expectations are flimsy gear, and the land has a way of forcing you back onto the diet you tried to escape. The poem opens on a newcomer—the new chum—who has loaded his three-nought-three, a gun described as small-bore even as his hopes were big. He’s sick of old ewe and dreams of a more exciting menu: shoot a pig. That hunger is practical (better meat) but also social: it’s the hunger to prove you belong, to act like a bushman instead of a tenderfoot.

The tone here is lightly mocking but not cruel. Paterson lets us hear the new chum’s self-assurance—he trusts his nose more than ear—and sets it up like a tall story about to puncture itself.

The pig as ancient, local power

The poem’s turn comes when the pig appears, and the description swells into near-myth. From lignum dark—a specific, muddy, Australian hiding place where the wild duck nests and the bilbie digs—rises the father of all the pigs. Paterson makes him more than an animal; he’s a force with old authority. He comes up with a whoof and a snort and even a kind of bark, as if he’s part dog, part demon, part bush itself. The line that a tiger would have walked wide is deliberately absurd (tigers don’t belong here), and that’s the point: the pig is rendered so formidable that even an exotic apex predator would politely step aside.

This is where the poem’s tension sharpens: the new chum brings technology and appetite; the bush answers with something older, tougher, and locally adapted—an animal that literally stropped his tusks, turning the hunter’s tools (strops) into his own.

When the gun becomes a joke

The new chum fires, and the poem’s mockery snaps into place. The rifle gave tongue like a popgun in an opera bouffe: not a heroic report, but a theatrical, ineffective noise. Then Paterson lands the tall-tale exaggeration that still carries real bush logic: a boar old when the world was young is near as possible bullet-proof. Even the parenthetical aside—The more you shoot him—feels like a grin turned into folklore: unless you hit between the eyes, you’re only making the story longer and your position worse.

What’s funny also has teeth. The poem insists that mastery isn’t about having a gun; it’s about knowing what you’re actually facing. Here, the new chum’s desire for pork runs into the pig’s refusal to become food.

A new menu: fear, waiting, and humiliation

Once the new chum sees it’s up to him—meaning the pig won’t fall—his choices invert. He understands that if he pauses to reload or aim, he may become extinct, so he escapes into the tree, a gidgee limb, clinging like a native bear. The comparison is comically precise: he wanted to eat native creatures, and now he’s forced to imitate one to survive.

On the ground, the pig becomes a picture of patient, almost philosophical menace: silent and gaunt and grim, for whom night and day were the same and home was any old place. That calm turns predatory when he imagines using the man’s boots as strops. The earlier tusk-stropping image returns, but darker: the hunter’s body is reduced to equipment. Paterson turns the food chain into a joke that keeps threatening to stop being a joke.

Who’s really on display?

The bush audience arrives—crows, an eaglehawk, a cockatoo—as if the land itself is gathering to watch the newcomer’s lesson. Their patronage is slyly chosen: it makes the birds feel like upper-class spectators, and the new chum like the entertainment. The boundary rider’s line—there is something dead—twists the scene again. Something is dead, but not necessarily a body; it’s the new chum’s confidence, his fantasy of being the competent hunter who upgrades his supper.

Back to ewe, with a new kind of bitterness

The ending completes the menu-change irony. At Christmas fare—a time that should signal comfort and reward—the new chum eats a dried-up chop from a tough old ewe, exactly what he tried to escape. His closing verdict is a comic capitulation: ewe is better than native bear, nearly as tender as kangaroo, and he can even masticate an emu’s egg. But pork, the prize that started the whole adventure, becomes the one thing he now hates: pork... is the thing I hate. The contradiction is the poem’s final bite: he hates it not because it tastes bad, but because the bush has taught him what it costs.