Richard Fotheringham was born in Roma, Queensland. He completed all his academic qualifications at the University of Queensland. He is an adaptor, author, director, editor, playwright and academic. Fotheringham founded the Popular Theatre Troupe in 1974, wrote and acted for the Queensland Theatre Company and has served as Head of the School of English, Art History and Media Studies at the University of Queensland and was Executive Dean of Arts prior to his retirement in 2011. In 20 November 2004 he was elected to Fellow of the Australia Academy of the Humanities. In 2019 he was a recipient of the Order of Australia . He is Emeritus Professor at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. His full biography is on Austlit.

Thomas Davis arrived in Australia in 1847 with a conviction for petty theft. In 1852 he married Mary Green, sent to Australia under the Orphan Girls' Emigration scheme from Ireland in 1848. They took up a 160 acre selection at Greenmount in 1870, had 13 children (only 9 survived past infancy), and one of their children was Arthur Hoey Davis (also known as Steele Rudd). Thomas Davis died in 1904.

Arthur Hoey Davis was born on 14 November 1868 at Drayton, Queensland. He was the son of Thomas Davis (1828-1904), a blackshmith who was sent to Australia in 1847 for a conviction of petty theft and Mary Green (1835-1893). While working at a sheriff's office he began writing a column on rowing in a weekly paper and this is where his pen name of Steele Rudd began. What was to become the first chapter in On our selection was published as an article 'Starting the selection', in the Bulletin on 14 December 1895. This article was based on his father's experiences. Davis became a regular and popular contributor. On Our Selection, was published in 1899. This was followed four years later by Our New Selection, the second of ten volumes that deal with the Rudd family. He died on 11 October 1935.