On Our Selection

The Rudd family take up a selection in Queensland scrub and spend twenty years failing at it — drought, bark huts, one plow, a cow that dies, a crop that does not come. Steele Rudd was Arthur Hoey Davis, a selector's son who wrote his own family's losing struggle and made Dad and Dave into Australian household names. It is very funny, and the poverty underneath it is not a joke. Fifty-eight plates, from Roberts to Ollila, dwell on families in hard landscapes, the same stubborn family the Rudd selection sets down in Queensland scrub.