Dad & Dave

The Complete Works of Steele Rudd.

Contains four of Australia's best-loved comic classics: 'On Our Selection'; 'The Old Homestead'; 'The Rudd Family'; and 'A City Selection'.

Steele Rudd was a comic writer of genius who created the inimitable Dad and Dave, Mother and Sarah, Dan and Grandpa, and gave them an immortal place in Australian folklore. Told with robust humour and rollicking satire, Rudd's stories are as fresh and entertaining now as they were at the turn of the 20th century. They are full of human and historical detail, and through them pulses a sense of rough and almost indestructible life.

Steele Rudd is best known for his stories charting the misadventures and misfortunes of life on a small selection, where families face the great and small crises of everyday life with larriking humour, farcical confusion, and finally a sardonic acceptance of fate. There are, as well, a range of settings and a whole gallery of diverse and fascinating characters, from squatters, bankers, parsons and politicians, to soldiers, clerks and criminals. Yet Rudd treats all his characters with that affectionate derision Australians reserve for themselves, and this, combined with an acute observation of the way people behave, has brought him great popularity as a storyteller.

'On Our Selection' also contains the first complete bibliography of Steele Rudd's work and an important foreword by the late Cecil Hadgraft, formerly honorary reader in the Department of English at the University of Queensland.