Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (also dooverlackey) any nameless object or gadget or task.

1941		Argus (Melbourne) Supp. 15 Nov. 1/1: ‘Pass me the doovah, old man,’ asked one of the officers. Without hesitation another man handed the butter to him. A few minutes later another soldier said: ‘Trouble you for the doovah, please?’ This time the word meant ‘pepper’ [...] The ‘doovah’ can be anything — pickles, a can of bully beef, a 9.2 coast defence gun, a taxi, a rifle [...] or anything else under the sun. It seems to take the place of the archaic ‘thingumibob’.
1943		J. Binning Target Area 139: Everything is a ‘doover.’ If you are looking for an oil can or a piece of soap, you wonder where you put the ‘doover’.
1945		Baker Aus. Lang. 153: Other words of particular note [in the 1939–45 war] were [...] doover, doovah, or doovah-dah used as a general utility term for a thingumebob, specifically applied to any shelter, especially a humpy, and to a hospital bottle for urination.
1946		Aus. Women’s Wkly 1 Dec. 2/2: A doover was rice in any other guise.
1968		S. Gore Holy Smoke 77: They was humpin’ along all these other doovers as well as the tucker.
1977		(con. 1941) R. Beilby Gunner 269: The tune took him back through twelve months to a cafe in Tel Aviv where [...] a large crowd from the Battalion had celebrated after a three-day ‘doover’, one of those maddening mimic training battles.
1986		R. Beckett Dinkum Aussie Dict. 21: Doover: Anything that one cannot get hold of one’s self while the tractor is blowing up. Thus, ‘For Christ’s sake hand me that doover will yez?’.
1999		G. Seal Lingo 72: There are even Lingo names for those things we cannot remember the names of- whatsit, dooverlackey (or just doover), whatchamacallit, thingumebob.

2. a hospital urine bottle; thus doover-joey, a hospital orderly (among whose jobs is the emptying of such bottles).

1945		Baker Aus. Lang. 153: Doovah or doovah-dah [...] a hospital bottle for urination, whence, doover joey, a male hospital nurse.
1948		Partridge Dict. Forces’ Sl.

3. (Aus. milit.) a dug-out.

1944		L. Glassop We Were the Rats 168: Like a bloody fool, I went over to his doover and asked him.
1959		(con. 1940s) E. Lambert Glory Thrown In (1961) 30: Christy went back to the depths of his doover.

4. the penis.

1963–74

B. Humphries Barry McKenzie [comic strip] in Complete Barry McKenzie (1988) 88: They reckon a bloke’s doover never looks up to much when you’re lookin’ down on it from above.