On Our Selection is a 1912 Australian play by Bert Bailey and Edmund Duggan based on the stories with the same name by Steele Rudd.
[3] The main change the adaptors made to the stories was to add more of a plot, building up the character of Carey into a villain, making "Cranky Jack" a murderer and throwing suspicion on Sandy.
According to academics Roslyn Atkinson and Richard Fothering ham Rudd was "the last as well as the most important Australian playwright to be forced to operate under the old legislation, and to be seriously disadvantaged by it.
The imperfect laws covering intellectual property go a long way towards explaining why Rudd has been glibly dismissed as a poor businessman, and why early Australian dramatists in general found their trade to be financially a singularly unrewarding one."
[5] The 1932 version of On Our Selection, which starred Bailey and MacDonald, and its three sequels, owed more to the play than Steele Rudd's original stories.
[6] The play was revived again in 1979 by director George Whaley at the Jane Street Theatre with Don Crosby as Dad, Geoffrey Rush as Dave and Mel Gibson as Sandy, plus Noni Hazlehurst, Jon Blake, John Clayton and Kerry Walker.