On Our Selection

Steele Rudd's On Our Selection is a foundational work of Australian bush literature, assembling comic sketches of the Rudd family's struggle to wrest a living from a small "selection" in rural Queensland. Written in vigorous vernacular prose, it blends farce, pathos, and social observation, turning drought, debt, hard labour, and domestic chaos into episodes of resilient humour. In the literary context of the 1890s, it stands beside the Bulletin school's democratic realism, yet its affectionate portrait of settler hardship gives the bush myth a distinctly homely and comic form. Steele Rudd was the pen name of Arthur Hoey Davis, whose own upbringing on a Queensland selection deeply informed the book's world. His intimate knowledge of farm labour, family economies, and rural speech enabled him to write not as an outsider romanticising the bush, but as one shaped by its privations and absurdities. On Our Selection is recommended to readers interested in Australian literary origins, comic realism, and the cultural making of rural identity. Its humour remains lively, while its historical value is substantial.