Great Aussie pubs: Rudd’s Pub, the spiritual home of Steele Rudd

WHEN Sam Little, pictured with wife Robyn, was growing up in the northern Victorian town of Katunga, one of his earliest memories was sitting by the radio listening to Dad and Dave.

Select location: Sam and Robyn Little run Rudd’s Pub in Nobby, a drinking hole and hommage to author Steele Rudd near Toowoomba in Queensland.

WHEN Sam Little was growing up in the northern Victorian town of Katunga, one of his earliest memories was sitting by the radio listening to Dad and Dave.

“Back then it was before TV and I remember we’d rush to get our jobs done so we could sit and listen to Dad and Dave (a long-running radio drama based on a loveable selector family),” Sam recalls.

“Probably a lot of it went over my head. As I grew up I knew Steele Rudd (the author of the original Dad and Dave stories) was up there with the great Australians.”

Little did Sam realise that 60 years later he would not only live in the spiritual heart of Steele Rudd country, but he would also run a pub dedicated to the author, born Arthur Hoey Davis.

For the past 11 years, Sam and his wife, Robyn, have run Rudd’s Pub in Nobby, a town of about 500 people in southern Queensland, near Toowoomba.

It’s the town Steele Rudd lived in from 1909 to 1917 and where the author penned some of his best known tomes, including On Our Selection and The Rudd Family.

“Folk lore has it that he wrote in the pub while sitting by the fireplace, but he definitely frequented the hotel,” Sam says.

Built in 1893, the pub was originally called the Davenporter, renamed in the 1980s to recognise the town’s most famous son (pastoralist and politician George Davenport), and today, alongside its counter meals and beer-on-tap, the establishment has become something of a museum, a homage to the town and its cultural past.

“It’s a little bit different, isn’t it,” says Robyn on a tour of the building. “It unfolds like a deck of cards, it keeps going and going.

“When I arrived here we didn’t know much about Steele Rudd apart from Dad and Dave and I learnt the history of the town and pub by reading the walls.”

Every available space on the pub’s walls is taken up with historical photos and artefacts, including the original title to the 60ha Nobby farm Rudd lived on, called The Firs, where he wrote four of his 24 books.

The pub has a first edition of On Our Selection, published in 1899, one of 3000 copies.

There are also hundreds of items, including farm implements (such as rabbit traps), vintage signs, tobacco cans, a ration book from 1893 and numerous old bottles, all from the local district and all donated.

“People still bring items in weekly to donate. They want to know it’s appreciated and on display,” says Robyn, 62, who grew up in Cobram and moved with Sam to Queensland in 1979 for work.

“They aren’t donating to us, but to the hotel. These items will be here as long as the hotel is here. People say it’s like eating in a museum.

“We won the best themed pub in Queensland, but we told the organisers of the competition that we aren’t themed. This pub has evolved naturally, all donated from farmers and local residents.”

The couple says southern Queenslanders know much about Steele Rudd — with a building named after the author at Toowoomba’s University of Southern Queensland, and even a trucking company and service station bearing his name.

Yet so many people go off the beaten track specifically to see the pub (they serve 750 meals a week) that Sam and Robyn commissioned a local historian to write about Steele Rudd’s Nobby connection.

“Our staff were always asked a million questions, like ‘what has Nobby got to do with Steele Rudd,’ that we decided to answer all the questions in a book,” says Sam.

“Some people come here and think it’s a pub dedicated to (former prime minister) Kevin Rudd.

“But it’s about trying to keep Arthur Hoey Davis alive and Australian history alive.”

Sam worked as a builder and Robyn in banking when, in the mid-2000s, they were looking to become publicans and searched all over Queensland, settling on Nobby — a town also famous for Sister Elizabeth Kenny who was instrumental in the treatment of polio in the early 1900s.

“For me it was love at first sight,” Sam, 62, says.

“I could see what we could do with it and I could see the lure of the town.”

Since buying the pub, they have developed it in the style of the Rudd era, down to the post and rail fencing and a slab hut out the back.

“We are very protective of maintaining Rudd’s legacy,” Sam says.

“He based his books on original characters of the town and he pinpoints the harsh conditions people lived in.

“His writing is about the pioneers of rural Australia, the battlers and characters.”