by Steele Rudd
Steele Rudd, whose real name was Arthur Hoey Davis, was born in 1868 in Queensland, the eighth child of a family of thirteen. Between the ages of twelve, when he left school only partly educated, and eighteen, when he first took a city job in Brisbane, he worked as a bushman and stockman. He later founded and edited a magazine before returning to farming. His first selection of stories appeared in the Bulletin in 1895, and On Our Selection was published by the Bulletin four years later. He died in 1935.
ON OUR
SELECTION
STEELE RUDD
Introduced by Philip Butterss
ETT IMPRINT, SYDNEY
Published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay NSW, Australia 2015
First published by the Bulletin in 1899
Imprint Classics edition published in 1992 by CollinsAngus&Robertson Publishers Pty Limited
New edition published by ETT Imprint in 1996
Copyright © in this edition ETT Imprint 1992, 2015
© in introduction Philip Butterss 1992
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher, to whom all enquiries should be addressed.
ISBN: 9781925416190 (ebook)
Cover design by Julie Allbutt, Whizzbang Art, Canberra
INTRODUCTION
On Our Selection was first published in 1899. It then comprised twenty-six extensively illustrated chapters tracing the gradual rise in the fortunes of a poor selecting family through a series of humorous incidents. In 1909 the copyright changed hands and the final ten chapters were chopped off, transforming a book with a clear structure into a fairly arbitrary collection of comic episodes. From 1909 until this edition, On Our Selection has only been available in its severely shortened form, despite a number of calls for a reissue of the full version.
Arthur Hoey Davis, the creator of the Rudd family, was born in 1868 at Drayton in the Darling Downs district of southern Queensland. He was the eighth of thirteen children. His parents Thomas and Mary Davis, of Welsh and Irish extraction respectively, moved their growing family onto a selection at Emu Creek in 1875, and it was this experience of small farming that Arthur Davis was to draw on in most of his work until his death in 1935. Yet, like many of his contemporaries who published their stories and ballads of bush life in the Bulletin during the 1880s and 1890s, Davis wrote in an urban context. In 1885, at the age of sixteen, he left the selection for Brisbane and a career as a public servant. He rose to the cabinet-appointed position of Under-Sheriff in the Justice Department in 1902, before being retrenched at the beginning of 1904 as part of a widespread public service cutback. For the rest of his life Davis was to be dogged by poor financial decisions, and copyright agreements which did not secure him adequate profits from his work.
In about 1890 Davis adopted the pen-name ‘Steele Rudder’ for the humorous pieces on rowing which he was publishing in the Brisbane Chronicle. ‘Steele’ was derived from Sir Richard Steele, the English essayist; ‘Rudder’ was of course chosen because of its relevance to his subject matter. By April 1895 this had been contracted to ‘Steele Rudd’, and ‘Starting the Selection’, the first of the stories which were to become On Our Selection, appeared in the Bulletin. With encouragement from the paper’s editorial staff, six more pieces by Davis were published before the end of that year, and another four in the following year. J.F. Archibald wrote to Davis in 1897 asking him to consider collecting together the swelling number of stories for a book to be published by the Bulletin Newspaper Company.
The episodes worked well as individual sketches, but in preparing them for book publication, Davis transformed them into what A.D. Hope has described as ‘a novel, if only a rudimentary one’, with ‘a definite plan and a dramatic structure even if it is very loosely put together’. Most of the text remains the same, but linking passages have been added, inconsistencies smoothed out, and Dad’s name has changed from ‘Murtagh Colin Joseph Duncan M’Gregor Ross’ to ‘Murtagh Joseph Rudd’. The effect of this last change is to make a stronger connection between the narrator, who is clearly one of the family, and ‘Steele Rudd’ who signed the stories. Four of the sketches in the book version—‘Cranky Jack’, ‘Dad and the Donovans’, ‘Kate’s Wedding’, and ‘When Joe Was In Charge’—were formed by combining separately published episodes. Two of the pieces published in the Bulletin under the pseudonym ‘Steele Rudd’ were omitted from the book, one of them because it was not about the family of selectors.
Most importantly, the order in which the episodes appeared was altered substantially to create a logical progression from the backbreaking labour of ‘Starting the Selection’ through to the final chapter. In the early sections we see the struggle to clear the land, to plant crops, and to bring in the first harvest of corn cobs which then have to be shelled by hand. A crisis in ‘When the Wolf was at the Door’ is solved by Dan’s return, and the narrative proceeds through a number of comic episodes during which the land is gradually cleared and more crops are planted. By the twelfth chapter, ‘Kate’s Wedding’, the family is established enough to entertain guests and to celebrate. More comic incidents follow until the major setback in ‘Dad’s Fortune’, when the bailiff confiscates all the Rudds’ cows and horses. Dad refuses to give in, and the selection is gradually restocked through more comic episodes dealing with various aspects of life on the land. The book finishes with a gathering of the family at Christmas time, and a celebration that the selection is now well established. The grass is almost as tall as the corn, melons and pumpkins abound, the horses are fat, and the cows, their udders like camp-ovens, ‘had so much milk that one could track them everywhere they went—they leaked so’. Kate and Sandy return with their new baby, and Dave returns from shearing. The walls are papered, the place is decorated with green boughs, and there is much hugging and kissing and fussing over the baby. Dad may not quite kill the fatted calf for the feast, but he does kill the old cow.
This was the shape of the first edition of On Our Selection which was published in November 1899 in time for the Christmas market, a strategy that capitalized on its concluding chapter. A.G. Stephens, the Bulletin’s literary critic, reviewed the book favourably on the 16 December, just in time to remind Christmas shoppers that it would make a good present. The extensively illustrated publication retailed at the fairly expensive price of six shillings, but it was an immediate success. By 1903 twenty thousand copies had been printed and the book had been followed by a sequel, Our New Selection. Davis was earning close to four pounds a week in royalties. With the demise of its book-publishing arm, the Bulletin sold the copyright for the two books to A.C. Rowlandson of the New South Wales Bookstall Publishing Company in 1909. Rowlandson immediately removed the last ten chapters from On Our Selection and the last seven chapters from Our New Selection, and reissued them in cheap editions costing one shilling each. Rowlandson then simply combined the offcuts to form a new ‘Steele Rudd’ title, Stocking Our Selection, which was also published in 1909.
Financial considerations almost certainly played a part in the author’s acceptance of these alterations. It seems likely that because of the copyright contracts which Davis had signed with the Bulletin, he was not entitled to any initial payment from the New South Wales Bookstall Company’s reissue of On Our Selection and Our New Selection, although he probably continued to receive royalties. He was, however, paid a hundred pounds for the publication of the new title, Stocking Our Selection, and this came at a time when he was heavily mortgaged.
On Our Selection is partly a tale of upward mobility achieved through hard work, and a celebration
of the perseverance and courage shown by a family in the face of great odds. In the opening episode, the narrator remembers his mother crying for hours with loneliness and despair, yet it is her strength which later prevents Dad from surrender. Together the Rudds battle drought, fire, and heat to eke a living out of their poor soil. A number of the episodes describe the family’s encounters with the outside world, drawing attention to their poverty, their lack of sophistication, and often showing their embarrassment about these matters. When there is only stewed kangaroo-rat to feed a passing traveller in chapter three, the girls do not want to put it on the table, but their guest politely pretends that he thinks it is poultry. At Kate’s wedding, the family fortunes have risen enough for them to entertain a crowd of guests, but Dad must still pretend that the kangaroo leg hanging on the verandah is not for the family’s consumption, but for the dog. By chapter twenty-three they are pleased to be able to offer a travelling journalist steak for dinner. The episode which most clearly sets out their lack of social status is ‘A Lady at Shingle Hut’, when the school-mistress comes to stay, but by the end of the book Norah Rudd has herself become a schoolteacher who looks ‘quite the lady’.
In spite of the success of the Rudd family, a success which Davis was to develop further in later volumes, On Our Selection is by no means a simple celebration of the work ethic. Only a fine line separates stoic determination from stupidity, and the Rudds exhibit the latter quality in great abundance. There is explicit criticism of the futility of working the selection, and this comes most strongly from Dan. After he has experienced life as a shearer, he returns to Shingle Hut and implores Dad ‘over and over again, to go shearing, or rolling up, or branding—anything rather than work and starve on the selection’. Frequently the hardest work comes to naught and the greatest success is achieved not through effort, but through luck or outside agency. The harvest of two hundred bags of wheat which proves to be the final turning point in the Rudds’ fortunes, enabling the family to accumulate outbuildings, add new rooms to the hut, and increase the stock, comes almost as if by luck. Suddenly, at the end of an episode about a ridiculous attempt to make money from koala skins, there is this announcement:
And that season, when everyone else’s wheat was red with rust—when Anderson and Maloney cut theirs for hay—when Johnson put a firestick in his—ours was good to see. It ripened; and the rain kept off, and we reaped 200 bags. Salvation!
Davis also refuses to offer a simple representation of the futility of selection life. Dan’s return from shearing with a pocket full of money, at a time when the family’s fortunes are at their lowest, is a good example of the role of outside agency in helping the selection to survive, and his pleas that his father turn to some other occupation seem justified. But a later episode, ‘When Dan Came Home’, becomes a sustained criticism of his laziness, forcing a reinterpretation of Dad’s determination. Similarly, the story which appears to be the clearest condemnation of the futility of working the selection, ‘The Night We Watched for Wallabies’, turns out to be nothing of the sort. Dad seems to be making the boys stand outside on a freezing night, after a day spent harrowing, to prevent the wallabies from getting at a crop which they have already destroyed. This episode conforms more than most to the model in which short stories end with a punchline, and it transpires that the wallabies are an excuse to get the youngsters out of the hut while another child is born.
Implicit in the Rudds’ story is a critique of the inequality of land distribution which was at the root of such poverty and hardship. This criticism is most marked in the early stories of On Our Selection, although it runs intermittently through the book as a whole. Later episodes, both in this and other books, tend to dwell less on the harshness of life on a selection and more on its comic side. The buffoonery is even more marked in some of the stage, film and radio adaptations of Davis’s work. In 1904 Davis published an article in Life, titled ‘How I Wrote On Our Selection', which suggested that there had been a political motive in writing the book:
Reared on a selection, I knew well what a mortgage meant. Knew how those on the land had to toil, how they had to fight against fire and flood, how they faced adversity and misfortune, and how, when seasons smiled, they rejoiced and shared each other’s society and successes. Why then, shouldn’t I tell these things—tell them with sincerity, with sympathy, and—who knows?—prompt legislative action in the interests of the struggling selector? Such was my ‘idea’, anyway. I know now it was wrong to dream such philanthropy; but I was young. I was sentimental.
How central such an idea was to Davis when he wrote On Our Selection is not at all clear, but the stories do have political implications, even if overt political references are brief. In ‘Starting the Selection’ Dave asks Dad why he had not taken up ‘a place on the plain, where there were no trees to grub and plenty of water’. Dad’s response is to ‘cough as if something was sticking in his throat, and then curse terribly about the squatters and political jobbery’. The text is laughing partly at Dad’s spluttering rage, and partly at the apparently mindless hard work which the family have to perform, but the point about the squatters and their power is made in this initial story, and it remains as background for the rest of the book. The inequality of the distribution of the rewards for hard labour is set out powerfully in the next chapter, when the Rudds harvest fifteen bags of corn from the four acres they have cleared by hand. Their backbreaking efforts earn twelve pounds, which all goes towards paying their debt to the storekeeper. Dad and Mother finish the episode gazing gloomily into the fire. In the fourth chapter Mother goes without meat so that the rest of the family can have some, and they run out of flour, tea, sugar, and cotton to mend the children’s ‘bits of clothes’.
Yet at the very start of the first story it is made clear that the selection was begun twenty years ago, and that the events described are safely in the past. From the comfortable present, it is possible to look back at such hardships and see them with humour. Davis employs a wide variety of types of comic writing, ranging from the well-established oral genre of the tall tale—such as the book’s opening description of how thirsty the family was—through to black humour when in ‘The Summer Old Bob Died’ the Rudds agree that it is a change to have a dead man around the place. Davis’s humour is often seen as typically Australian—laughter in the face of adversity; and sure enough droughts, fires, and a range of other difficulties are all the source of good, clean fun. A hailstorm is so severe that the selection is pelted with hail boulders which destroy the potato crop. But not all the potatoes are destroyed; the family get some, which they eat for Sunday dinner. As well as laughter in the face of adversity, there is also laughter in the face of success, as is the case when the family’s horses, Nell and Ned, having survived many hard seasons, finally die in the summer when feed and water are plentiful, when they had been broken into harness, and when there was the chance for the Rudds to make good money carting logs for the new railway line.
Modern readers are sometimes shocked by the violence in On Our Selection. There are instances of extraordinary cruelty to animals, such as the vicious treatment of the furrow horse in ‘A Splendid Year for Corn’. Dad has just acquired the horse from a neighbour, and has been misled about its abilities. It refuses to move, and then hurls at his head the hundredweight or so of mud that clung to its heels:
That aggravated Dad, and he seized the plough-scraper, and, using both hands, calmly belted Smith’s horse over the ribs for two minutes, by the sun. He tried him again. The horse threw himself down in the furrow. Dad took the scraper again, welted him on the rump, dug it into his back-bone, prodded him in the side, then threw it at him disgustedly...
He looked at the horse’s mouth again, then hit him viciously with his clenched fist.
Dorothy Green has suggested that such violence is the result of the brutalization which humans themselves suffer, arguing that Dad takes out his own frustrations on his children and animals. Green correctly points out that Cranky J
ack is a character who must have been brutalized by his father, and she argues that humour is not the dominant tone of the book.
Although it may seem surprising, particularly when this passage is quoted out of context, the treatment of the furrow- horse seems to have been intended to be humorous, and such incidents appear to have been read as funny by their audience at the turn of the century. Immediately after its publication, On Our Selection was praised as containing ‘more hearty fun, more honest laughter’ than any other book published in Australia, and of Davis it was said ‘his spirit is always the spirit of Humour’. It may be helpful for today’s readers to regard the violence in the Rudd stories as cartoon violence. Ultimately the horse, like many a Walt Disney character, appears to be unhurt by its vicious treatment, and even has its own minor revenge:
At length [Dad] unharnessed the brute as it lay—pulled the winkers off, hurled them at its head, kicked it once—twice—three times—and the furrow-horse jumped up, trotted away triumphantly, and joyously rolled in the dam where all our water came from, drinking water included.
Overall, On Our Selection is a very funny representation of a particular group of bush-dwellers. But as well as laughing at the selectors themselves, its targets include the clergy, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, police, journalists, and swagmen. Some of the most amusing passages are those which deliberately parody the nationalist mythologizing that was prominent when the book was being written. ‘A Kangaroo Hunt from Shingle Hut’ contains deliberate echoes of A.B. Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’, but employs a very different tone and gives a very different version of the mounted chase. On Our Selection needs to be seen as a partial qualification of nationalist mythmaking.
On the publication of On Our Selection in 1899, A.G. Stephens hailed Davis as ‘the first Australian humourist who has risen to the eminence of a Book’, and the tales of the Rudd family’s comic adventures have remained enormously popular for many generations of Australians since then. This return to the 1903 edition enables today’s readers to see this Australian literary classic in the form that its original audience enjoyed. The illustrations are a delight, and' they show us how at least one group of readers, the artists themselves, interpreted the stories; the advertisements for other contemporary publications provide a fascinating glimpse of the literary context; and the missing chapters are at last restored to their proper place, giving On Our Selection the shape it should have.