A
Public Memory Project
by
Chris Lee

About

History

Places

Writers
Alice Guèrin Crist
Dorothy Cottrell
Margaret Curran
Bruce Dawe
George Essex Evans
Jean Kent
David Rowbotham
Steele Rudd
A. G. Stephens
Margaret Trist
Jillian Watkinson

Writers

'… Golden lights touched the pale-iced cream-piled splendour of the cakes, and the little green jade tea-cups gave an odd clear note to the dim brown-gold gloom. But strangest of all were the little old ladies themselves. The light brushed heavy coiled white hair, sparse grey locks, tight-screwed, little decorous black frills, little tightly held black hand-bags, little bowed shoulders, and old shoulders rigidly straight. It lit withered lips and sharpley gleaming black eyes and more gentle glances of faded blue; and they chirruped together like so many strange small birds, preparing for migratory flight; which after all they were; for all the long pageant of life was behind them, with its fruit blossom of youth, its storms, its agony, its splendor of noon, and they were left just a little while to chirrup in the gold sunset.' ‘The Singing Gold’ Dorothy Cottrell

Arthur Hoey Davis Steele Rudd (1868-1935)   Arthur Hoey Davis owes his substantial popular reputation to comic representations of the trials and tribulations of the small selector on the Darling Downs. Davis, who wrote under the pseudonym of Steele Rudd, was the son of a blacksmith who selected land at Emu Creek just south of Toowoomba in 1870.

He left school at the age of twelve in 1880 and spent the next five years working on properties in the area. In 1885 his mother used political connections to secure her son a public service place in Brisbane and the young man moved to the big city. Davis began to write his comic stories in the 1890s and they began appearing in the Sydney Bulletin from 1895.

With the assistance of A.G. Stephens, Davis' selection stories were collected in On Our Selection (1899). The 'Dad and Dave' stories as they came to be known eventually filled numerous editions and were packaged and repackaged for different markets. Other volumes included Our New Selection (1903), Sandy's Selection (1904) and Back on Our Selection (1906). Rudd published more than twenty works of fiction and six plays including ten books dealing with the gradual if often tragic success of the Rudd family. Dad and Dave also featured in a number of popular plays, three silent movies, four 'talkies' and a long running radio series that became a national institution.

Success as a writer and growing connections with the Sydney literati saw him move to Sydney but financial pressures stemming from a series of ultimately unsuccessful Steele Rudd magazines later saw him return to a small property on the Darling Downs. He died in Brisbane on 11 October 1935.

Further Reading

Bruce Bennett, 'Alternative Traditions: 1880-1930,' Australian Short Fiction: A History. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002. 69-100.

Eric Irvin, Australian Melodrama : Eighty Years of Popular Theatre, Sydney, New South Wales : Hale & Iremonger, 1981.

Richard Fotheringham, In Search of Steele Rudd, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995

.Jim Hoy, 'John Ise and Steele Rudd: The Literary Response to Homesteading in America and Selecting in Australia,' Antipodes 11.2 (Dec. 1997): 91-94.

Ken Stewart, 'Person, Persona and Product: Henry Kendall and 'Steele Rudd'. Australian Literary Studies 17.3 (1996): 289-292.

Please use the link list on the left to access various featured writers Biographies and Portraits.

Submissions and suggestions for writers not yet included can be sent to leec@usq.edu.au