Steele Rudd 1868-1935

In 1907 Rudd and Beaumont Smith, a journalist who had contributed articles to Steele Rudd’s Magazine, collaborated on a new version of In Australia. It was optioned by J.C. Williamson, but not produced. In 1908 Smith organised a reading at the King’s Theatre in Melbourne, the theatrical haven of Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan. This seems to have been the start of an acrimonious split between Smith and Rudd. Smith claimed the dramatic copyright for himself, while Rudd submitted yet another version to Williamson, again unsuccessfully. In the end Bailey and Duggan reshaped the earlier Rudd/Smith On Our Selection and Rudd signed over the stage rights to Bailey for what turned out to be a fraction of their worth. His naivety robbed him of a considerable fortune.

Stoically Rudd rewrote his own version under its original title, In Australia, but, again, producers were not interested. Eventually, in 1919, E.J. Carroll paid him £500 for the film rights. Raymond Longford wrote the screenplay and directed a cast that included Percy Walshe as Dad and Tal Ordell as Dave. Their portrayals were sympathetic and realistic – a world away from the caricatures that Bailey and Macdonald had created. Walshe, tough, thin and sprightly, was far closer to Rudd’s original conception than Bailey’s portly, blustery know-all. This On Our Selection premiered in July 1920 and was so successful that Carroll immediately embarked on a sequel, Rudd’s New Selection. This time Longford and Ordell were back, but there was a new Dad, J.P. O’Neill. Longford’s partner, Lottie Lyall was cast as Dave’s sister, Nell, and was given plenty of opportunities to demonstrate her horse riding skills.

In 1986 historian and author Richard Fotheringham discovered a copy of In Australia, or, The Old Selection in the Australian Archives. It was subsequently published and has been produced commercially as The Old Selection. In 1991 George Whaley created and directed a musical version, The Selection, for the Melbourne Theatre Company at the Arts Centre Playhouse – but this retained very little of Rudd’s original. Peter Cummins had the Dad role and Ben Mendelsohn played his son. Peter Best supplied the music and lyrics.

Steele Rudd’s second play was Duncan McClure. Its genesis was a story called The Poor Parson, published in 1907. The ‘selection’ setting was familiar, and the eponymous hero, an ebullient Scots settler, was the counterpart of Dad in the earlier stories. Rudd himself financed a series of amateur performances in the Toowoomba Town Hall in August 1915. The play’s allusions to the contemporaneous tragedy in Gallipoli moved audiences deeply, and just before opening night, one of Rudd’s sons enlisted.

Duncan McClure was received benignly, and Bert Bailey obligingly bought the rights and the sets.  By the time he produced it attitudes to the war had shifted, so a sub-plot involving a German spy was excised and references to the war all but disappeared. What remained was a broad bucolic farce. With Bailey in the lead and its title expanded to Duncan McClure and the Poor Parson, it premiered at the Theatre Royal in Sydney on 5 August in 1916. Audiences liked it – but it was no On Our Selection.