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 humourous Herald columns written during the 1920s and 1930s by C. J. Dennis.
Ben Bowyang, a philosophical farmer from "Gunn's Gully" first appeared — as the author of "A Letter from the Bush" — in C.J. Dennis' regular Herald column, [1] The Mooch of Life on 12 June 1922. [2]
When I was a boy the bowyang was worn by
most bush-workers, and by labourers generally.
It is never seen today. The bowyang — in case
you do not know — is a strap worn just below
the knee of the trousers. Its purpose was to take
the drag from [the] braces or waist-belt, and to
lift the trouser-ends well clear of the ground. And
very comfortably it performed this service, too. …
Bernard Cronin (1952). [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. This is Wells's impression of them after a visit to Gunns Gully" — and presented 'caricatures' of the fictional pair, as if they were, indeed, real people. [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. [5]
Prompted by the fact that the last-ever letter written by Ben Bowyang, appeared in the Herald on Saturday, 30 September 1933, [6] and the need for a seamless transition, Gurney's first daily strip was published in The Herald a week later, on Saturday, 7 October 1933. [7] [8]
On 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. It ceased publication in 1979. [12]
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