Steele Rudd’s Real Dad: An Exiled Convict?

Abstract

Steele Rudd has recently been designated one of the fifty 'greats' who most helped to shape Australia. His selection stories and their varied stage, film, and radio adaptations, revolving around the pioneer farming vicissitudes of 'Dad', 'Mother', and their large family on Queensland's Darling Downs, 'have become a central part of Australia's folklore'. His stories, recently described by Frank Moorhouse as 'part of the bedrock of our culture', have been used extensively by historians to illustrate the one sided nature of the struggle between man and nature in Australia, the gap between reality and mythology in the agrarian ethos, and the wasteland of family life, while his characters have become pathetic stereotypes of the Australian psyche.