The short stories of Steele Rudd

Courtesy of: Mel U from The Reading Life

Steele Rudd (1868 to 1935) was the pen name for a very famous writer of Australian Bush Tales, Arthur Davis.

Davis was born in the outback region of Queensland Australia to a Welsh father and an Irish mother.   He left school at age 11 and worked at various jobs on outback stations and farms.   At age 18 he got a job in the local  sheriff's office and about this time he sent in a short story to The Bulletin about some of his father's experiences working and making a life for a family of eight in the harsh bush country, the outback.   The editor of The Bulletin encouraged him to write more stories and Steele Rudd became a very popular author of simple, good natured stories about life in the outback in late 19th century Australia.   The stories poke gentle fun at the country ways people in the region but they do not show them as buffoons or fools.   The people in the three stories I enjoyed reading were super resourceful, very strong in their bodies and minds and subject to the loneliness  that other Bush Authors like Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton have shown us in their stories.   There is some slang and use of dialect in the stories but I could follow the conversations and I enjoyed learning some new slang.


"Starting the Selection" 7 pages, 1898

"Starting the Selection" is about the first few months that  the father, referred to as "Dad" spent on the farm by himself preparing the land to be farmed for the first time.  I could not but admire the tremendous hard work that this would have taken.     Everybody suffered tremendously from the isolation.

"Our First Harvest" (eight page, 1898) 

 

"Öur First Hand" gave us a poignant look at the financial difficulties faced by early farmers.   Dad and his five sons worked very hard to bring in the first harvest and get it into the local store for sell.   They were elated when the store owner told them the harvest would yield 12  pounds.  I could feel the shared heart ache of Mom and Dad when the store owner told them he was going to deduct nine pounds to pay their account with him.   Rudd does not say but we get the feeling there might be some shady bookkeeping involved.   Mom and Dad just give each other strength and go on.

"The Night We Watched for Wallabies"

In  my limited research on Rudd I did not find any stories consistently listed as his best work so I was on my own as to where to start in his work.    After completing these two stories I found one entitled, "The Night We Watched for Wallabies" and I thought OK sounds like fun and it was.   Dad tells his sons they all have to spend the night outside the house to stand guard for roving bands of Wallabies (small kangaroos) which can have devastating effects on crops like wheat and corn.   Rudd's style is straight forward while showing a keen eye for details.

There is a surprise ending that does sort of poke fun at the people in the story a bit (though not in a mean way) so I will not reveal more of  the plot.  

These stories are easy to read, straight  forward  works that the people they are written about could enjoy.   They let me see what family life was like in the Queensland Out Back in the 1890s.    You had to be tough, self reliant, and a good sense of humor was a big help also I think.   

Older Australians may recall the very long running radio program (1932 to 1952) Dave and Dad which was inspired by the stories of Rudd.   In the program the dignified intelligent people in his stories were reduced to slack jawed outback yokels.   Rudd was always very offended by this and himself had the greatest respect for the people of the outback, especially   the women.   

I liked these stories.    Maybe the are not  great art and I admit they were in part historical curiosity reads for me but I am glad I was motivated to take the time to learn about Steele Rudd.   All of these stories can be read online at Free Reading in Australia (a great resource).   My basic source of information on Rudd is the Australian National Biographical Dictionary.    

Old Tales of A Young Country by Marcus Clarke - Australian Convict Stories

Courtesy of: Mel U from The Reading Life

Old Tales of a Young Country by Marcus Clarke (a collection of stories about transported convicts to Australia) 1871, 125 pages

One of the great things about book blogging is that it can open up for us totally new to us areas of reading.

Until recently I admit I never knew there was a large group of wonderful short stories, poems, and some novels by a group of Australian Writers ( 1870 to 1925 or so) know as Bush Writers who told real life stories of the experiences of those living in the vast sparsely settled areas in the huge interior of Australia.   Now I am  fascinated by this new world of reading.

So far I have read stories by three of them, Henry Lawson and Banjo Clarke and Barbara Baynton.   I will here be posting on a fourth, Marcus Clarke.    As I mentioned in my post on Barbara Baynton, when a nationwide  weekly publication, The Bulletin, in 1886 asked its readers to submit stories about life in the Bush or the Outback a big amount of material came to be published.    Before then the main source for publication for Australian writers was the Australian Monthly.   In addition to stories about the life in the outback there was a lot of interest in stories about the lives of convicts transported from the United Kingdom to Australia.  

I have done a bit of research on convict tales and it seems one of the best known writers in this area is Marcus Clarke (1846 to 1881).

Clarke was himself an immigrant from England.    Clarke was born into a very affluent family but in his early teens the family fell onto financial ruin (my basic source of information on Clarke is The Australian Online Biographical Dictionary, a great resource).   Clarke was considered a totally spoiled boy with little grasp of how he might make his way in the adult world.   His family decided he should immigrate to Australia (or they wanted to get rid of him!) so at sixteen he left England for New South Wales.to live with one of his uncles who was well established already.   Clarke tried with bad results several careers ranging from bank clerk to managing an outback station owned by his uncle.   Clarke had always considered himself a writer (by coincidence he went to school with Gerland Manly Hopkins) and he began to contribute short pieces to magazines and newspapers.    His work was well regarded and Clarke then used some money he had received in an inheritance to buy a well known publication, The Australian Monthly.  All of his future publications, including his collection of stories about live in the first Australian Penal colony in Botany Bay, Old Tales of a Young Country, would from then on come out in his publication.  

Old Tales of A Young Country is a collection of 15 stories about life in the penal colony.   Most of the stories are written as short based in reality tales of particular persons in the colony.   The majority  of the stories center on convicts but he also writers about the British officials.   The diction and grammar of  the stories are perfect newspaper journalistic prose.    The stories in the collection I read were all very well written, easy to follow and did let us see  the convicts as real people of whom one might sincerely say "There but for the grace of God go I".

The lead story, "The Settlement of Sydney" details who was on the three ships that were the first to arrive and what supplies and animals the ships carried   We get a clear sense of the business like way the colony was intended to be run.   Punishments for the smallest offenses were very harsh.    Many of the convicts had been transported for very petty crimes.   As Clarke tells us, some convicts really thrived in the new country and others did not last a month.

The second story in the collection, "George Barrington, Pickpocket and Historian" is about a gentlemen  bandit from England.   Clarke's stories are written as if they are true stories but they are really stories based on facts but enhanced by Clarke's imagination.    After a series of crimes, all relayed in a very colorful way and all crimes against the decadent rich, Barrington is sentenced to seven years transportation at hard labor.   While at sea on the way to Australia, the convicts seize the ship with the idea of going to America.   Barrington talks his fellow convicts out of this idea and into surrendering the ship back to the officers.   The authorities are so impressed by this that on arrival Barrington is made supervisor of convicts.   He marries, raises a family, goes on to a life of comfort in his new home and ends up according to the story writing the first history of the Sydney Penal Colony.

These stories very much  the stories of a newspaper man, clear, direct, no fancy artistic flourishes, no references to Roman poets.   They are told with a passion for  the truth and an empathy for the dispossessed.  There is no condemning of the convicts or patronizing of their experience.      I endorse them to anyone wanting to read some good short stories and learn something about life in Australia in the 18th century

Old Tales of a Young Country can be read online at the web page of the library of the University of Sydney.

I also want to suggest that anyone interested in learning more about the transportation of convicts to Australia read the totally great book by Robert Hughes, Fatal Shore.

I am quite intrigued by  this new to me genre of writing , which seems to be called "Bush Stories" (convict tales are a sub-category).   In the near future I will be reading short stories by Louis Becke, Steele Rudd, and Price Warung.   The web page of the University of Sydney Library has their stories online.  I also owe in part my discovery of these wonderful authors to my overcoming a life time aversion to the short story.     To some extent these writers are of interest to us as a window into the past.   I am willing to say the stories of Barbara Baynton are the best of the four writers I have read so far.   I think if you like Flannery O' Conner you will like Baynton also.   As to my thoughts on Clarke, I enjoyed reading his stories and will read all of them in this collection in time, I hope.   You can read one online for free in just a few minutes and to me it seems worth your time.  Even you like it them  at least you have experienced one more author writing in what may be a new to you genre of literature, The Australian Bush and Convict Story.

An Iron Rose by Peter Temple (Australian crime fiction)

Courtesy of: Becky from Page Turners

When I heard that Peter Temple was the first Australian crime writer to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award I jumped at the chance to read one of his novels.

I don't normally read crime fiction, but I really enjoyed this. It was a tightly constructed, tense read; a first person narrative from Mac Faraday's perspective. Mac Faraday who has retired from city life and is working as a blacksmith in a rural area. He is living the quiet life; spending time with friends, drinking at the pub and playing with an appalling football team. His world is turned upside down when his best friend Ned is found hanging one night and he becomes the carer for Ned's grandson. Instincts from his old life kick in when he comes across press clippings of a young girl's gruesome murder in 1980's, near a facility for wayward young girls. When he begins to investigate this further he becomes mixed up in a dangerous and confusing web of criminal activity. As people from his past start coming back to haunt him he finds that his life is in grave danger.

The style of Temple's writing is hard boiled, a style epitomised by authors such as Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The writing is short, sharp and gritty.

The great thing about An Iron Rose is that this books adds a very Australian flavour to this style of writing. Temple provides us with an insight into the Australian language and lifestyle that is very authentic (which is not surprising from an Australian author, albeit one originally from South Africa).

Temple successfully paints the picture of a country town where a lot of the inhabitants know each other well and take their civic responsibility seriously. People share beers at the pub and have a laugh together at the footy. Some people might accuse Temple of stereotyping the Australian lifestyle, but I do think that this is very typical for a lot of people. I especially liked the way that Temple dealt with Ned's Aboriginality. It was mentioned in passing and then not mentioned again. Ned's background wasn't important in that sense, he was accepted as part of his community not because of his Aboriginality and not despite of it. It just wasn't a big deal. Acknowledging his Aboriginality without making anything of it within the story gave the book a more contemporary feel.

An Iron Rose is a wonderful mix of crime, noir and literary fiction and I can absolutely see how a book by Temple has won Australia's premier literary award. It is a very dark book; there is a sense of evil lurking under the surface that sends shivers up your spine.