Toganmain earned a lasting place in Australian literary history through "Flash Jack from Gundagai" - a traditional shearers' song, not one of Paterson's own compositions, but one he preserved as editor in his 1905 collection Old Bush Songs, subtitled "Composed and Sung in the Bushranging, Digging, and Overlanding Days."
Local tradition holds that Paterson himself worked at the station. In the song, the swaggering itinerant shearer Flash Jack boasts of the tallies he's cut at a string of real Riverina and outback sheds - reciting that he'd "shore at Toganmain" alongside Burrabogie, Willandra, Coleraine, Tilberoo, Barcoo, Cowan Downs, Trida and Moulamein, always drifting back to "the One Tree Plain." Being named in the same breath as these celebrated sheds set Toganmain's name into shearers' own culture, carried from camp to camp on the strength of a song.
Flash Jack from Gundagai, Banjo Paterson, 1905
I've shore at Burrabogie and I've shore at Toganmain
I've shore at Big Willandra and out on the Coleraine
But before the shearing was over I longed to get back again
Shearing for old Tom Patterson on the One Tree Plain
Chorus:
All among the wool, boys, all among the wool.
Keep your blades full, boys, keep your blades full.
I can do a respectable tally meself whenever I like to try.
They know me round the backblocks as Flash Jack from Gundagai.
I've shore at Big Willandra and I've shore at Tilberoo,
And once I drew my blades, boys, upon the famed Barcoo.
But at Cowan Downs and Trida as far as the Moulamein
I was always glad to get back again on the One Tree Plain.
And I've pinked them with the Wolseleys and I've brushed with B-bows too,
And I've shaved them in the grease, me boys, with the grass seeds showing through.
But I never slummed a pen, my lads, whatever it might contain,
When shearing for Old Tom Patterson on the One Tree Plain.
And I've been whaling up the Lachlan and I've dossed on Cooper's Creek,
And once I rung Cudjingie shed and blued it in a week.
But when Gabriel blows his trumpet, lads, I'll catch the morning train,
And push for Old Tom Patterson's on the One Tree Plain.
