Steele Rudd 1868-1935

Rudd’s next dramatic project was Gran’dad Rudd, an adaptation of a series of stories published as Grandpa’s Selection in 1916. The grandfather of the stories is a mean spirited bully, but by 22 September 1917, when Bert Bailey portrayed him at the King’s Theatre in Melbourne, he was the same old Dad that audiences loved, albeit a generation older. It was revived at the Grand Opera House in Sydney in 1923. With its title relieved of its annoying apostrophe, the play was filmed by Ken G. Hall in 1935.

In 1927 Rudd restarted Steele Rudd’s Magazine, and in it published a new series of stories called The Romance of Runnibede. He sold the film rights to an American producer, Frederick Phillips, and used one of the stories as the basis for the screenplay. He also invested heavily in the production. Not only the producer, but the director and the star – Eva Novak – were also American. Novak had previously starred in the 1927 epic For the Term of His Natural Life. The Runnibede shoot was dogged by inefficiency and bad luck, and the film turned out to be a box office disaster. Rudd lost most of his money and the Great Depression did the rest: he was virtually destitute.

There was some relief in 1928 when William Anderson produced The Rudd Family, with Edmund Duggan as director and star. The play had its origins back in 1917 when Rudd had called it On Sibley Settlement. After it was rejected by J.C. Williamson’s in 1921, Rudd retitled it On Grubb’s Selection and organised an amateur company to present it in Toowoomba and Brisbane in 1924. Anderson’s production drew excellent houses, but, like most things theatrical, it withered once the Great Depression started to bite. Again Rudd was impecunious, living alone in Brisbane in a ‘sunless, cheerless’ room. He struggled with alcoholism and subsisted on a Commonwealth Literary Pension of one pound a week.

With E.J. Carroll’s help, Rudd managed to contrive some modest royalties when Ken G. Hall filmed Bert Bailey’s On Our Selection in 1932. In 1935, when its sequel, Grandad Rudd was released, Rudd was completing a new screenplay based on his autobiographical piece The Miserable Clerk. It was never filmed. Steele Rudd – Arthur Hoey Davis – died in Brisbane on 11 October 1935. A few months earlier he had been awarded the King’s Silver Jubilee Medal. His papers are scattered though five Australian archives.

Dad and Dave have, of course, survived him: the Bert Bailey films, the George Edwards radio series, the comic strips and the seemingly endless permutations on stage and screen. There are bronze statues of Dad and Dave at the Snake Gully Tourist Centre at Gundagai on the Hume Highway. At Drayton there’s a memorial cairn near the site where Arthur Davis was born. Nearby, at Emu Creek, the site of the family’s original selection, there’s a monument and a replica slab-walled, shingle roofed hut built by members of a rural youth club. There’s a Steele Rudd College at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (ironically, it was originally called the A.H. Davis College), and the Queensland Government sponsors an annual Steele Rudd Award for the author of a collection of short stories. It’s extremely doubtful that the destitute Arthur Hoey Davis would have appreciated the irony, but it’s valued at $15,000.

Frank Van Straten, 2007