"Steele Rudd" was the pen name used by the Australian short-story writer and playwright Arthur Hoey Davis from 1895, when his first stories about life on a small farm began appearing in newspapers and magazines. Later, especially 1912-ca. 1952, the pseudonym also became a generic attribution covering the various authors of an extraordinary amount of popular comedy material derived directly or plagiarized from Davis's characters and stories: plays, movies, cartoons, a long-running radio program, and a still ongoing oral tradition of mostly crude jokes. If success and impact are measured by sales, then Davis's stories, some revised and collected together as "novels," were by far the major Australian publishing phenomenon of the 1900-1930 period. However, even this success is overwhelmed by the popularity of the later legend of "Dad and Dave." These were the names of the father and one of the sons in Davis's "Rudd family" stories, but they...