Short stories
On Our Selection
Steele Rudd · 1899
Opening lines
It's twenty years ago now since we settled on the Creek. Twenty years!
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Dad, his wife and their many children settle on a selection, Shingle Hut, a log house near a waterhole; the narrator, Joe, is one of the sons. They clear the land by hand, sow maize and wheat with the hoe; drought, grass fires, kangaroos, wallabies and crows follow, and the first maize harvest goes to the debt owed to the storekeeper. Dad pins his hopes on a racing mare or the horse trade, and every project goes wrong; a farmhand with a disturbed mind alarms the household, and Dan, the eldest, leaves after a quarrel with Dad.
Context
The stories first appeared in the Bulletin, the first on 14 December 1895; A. G. Stephens advised linking them to a single family, and the newspaper collected them in 1899 in a volume illustrated by Fischer, Lambert, Mahony, Vincent and others. Printed in three thousand copies, the book passed twenty thousand in four years and two hundred and fifty thousand around 1940. Bert Bailey brought it to the stage in 1912, Raymond Longford and then Ken G. Hall to the cinema in 1920 and 1932, and from 1937 radio made Dad and Dave into figures of folklore; the author disliked seeing his family treated as comic rustics. Ken G. Hall's film is On Our Selection.
Who it is for
Twenty-six short stories in English, which can be read separately; the language renders the speech of the settlers.
Prizes and reception
Praised from its publication by The Queenslander and the Western Mail; its two heroes have passed into Australian folklore.