Ben Bowyang

Ben Bowyang was an Australian newspaper comic strip, first published in the Melbourne Herald on Saturday, 7 October 1933, created by the cartoonist Alex Gurney, that followed the misadventures of two archetypical Australian bushmen, Ben Bowyang and his mate, Bill Smith, of "Gunn's Gully": characters that first appeared in the humorous Herald columns written during the 1920s and 1930s by C. J. Dennis.

[3] The characters, Ben Bowyang and Bill Smith, featured in so many of the comical letters published in Dennis' columns, and became such favourites among the Herald's readers that, a year later, the Herald's resident caricaturist Samuel Garnet Wells pretended to have visited Gunn's Gully — "Correspondents have frequently asked what Ben Bowyang and Bill Smith are like.

[4] Ten years later, based upon Dennis' columns and Well's (1923) caricatures, Gurney (at the time also a Herald employee) went on to create the characters for his successful comic strip.

[7][8] On Thursday, 23 November 1933, the Adelaide weekly, The Chronicle, published the first of its regular single page presentations of five Gurney strips,[9][10] each of which had, independently, appeared earlier in the Melbourne Herald.

[11] The strip was also drawn by Mick Armstrong, Keith Martin, Sir Lionel Lindsay, Alex McRae, and Peter Russell-Clarke.