We Of The Never-Never

Mrs Aeneas Gunn, 1908

Of  the classic accounts of the pioneer experience Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the Never-Never is the first and in some ways the most inward of all of them. Jeannie Gunn was born in 1870, the year Bismarck unified Germany, and she lived to see John F. Kennedy inaugurated as president in 1961.

We of the Never-Never is a strange awkward book full of inverted commas for emphasis and bursting with enthusiasm for a new world of mateship which can accommodate a woman into its midst while intermittently indicating the deep poignancy of life and the raw strangeness of these men who considered a woman almost as a new species. She came from Melbourne in 1902 to the Northern Territory where her husband, always referred to as ‘the Maluka’, ran Elsey cattle station on the Roper River, nearly 500km south of Darwin. There are early scenes where one of his Scottish henchmen refuses to believe she could be got across a river and this in turn is simply a subset of his belief she has no place on the station at all and what are they supposed to do with a creature who wants feather-stuffed pillows? All of this is conveyed in a radically stilted, awkward variety of point-of-view writing, a kind of improvised free indirect style which comes across as strange and oddly candid at the same time.

Jeannie Gunn seems to have been some kind of born writer while never having learnt how to handle the kind of narrative she is writing. It does not matter because there is something very buoyant about the account of how she became one of the boys by being the only white woman for hundreds of miles. Because it is all done from life it is artless and totally credible.

Then the Sanguine Scot said that he would ‘tackle the lubras1 for her’. And in half an hour everywhere was swept and garnished and the lubras were meek and submissive. “You need to rule them with a rod of iron,” Mac said, secretly pleased with his success. But there was one drawback to his methods, for next day, with the exception of Nellie, there were no lubras to rule with or without a rod of iron. Jimmy the water carrier and general director of the woodheap gossip explained that they had gone off with the camp lubras for a day’s recreation.

She is funny about this sort of thing and she creates a sense of the Aboriginal women, as easy-going funsters who could not quite believe she was real, any more than the bushman could. It is a worm’s-eye view of a young woman as a kind of innocent abroad who is also doing her best to manipulate the situation as she sees it by virtue of her own naivete and her nakedness in the face of every wind that blew. Again, there are the easy-going racketing Aboriginal women who think she is a hopeless weirdo.

Undoubtedly I made myself attractive to the blackfellow mind; for, besides having proved an unexpected entertainment I had made everyone feel mightily superior to the missus. That power of inspiring others with a sense of superiority is an excellent trait to possess when dealing with a black fellow, for there were more than enough helpers next day, and the work was done quickly and well, so as to leave plenty of time for merry-making. The Maluka and Mac were full of congratulations.

It is in some ways a totally weird world she evokes, not least because of the way she can relate or she can create, blow by blow, a bushman’s sense of how his mate is sacred to him “passing the love of women”:

“If the boss’ll excuse me, me mate’s dead-set against a woman doing things for him. If you wouldn’t mind not coming. He’d rather have me. Me and him’s been mates this seven years. The boss’ll understand.” The boss did understand, and rode across to the Warlochs alone, to find a man as shy and reticent as a bushman can be, and full of dread lest the woman at the homestead would insist on visiting him. “You see, that’s why he wouldn’t come on,” the mate said. “He couldn’t bear the thought of a woman doing things for him and the Maluka explained that the missus understood all that.”

The mate holds out: “he’d rather have me”

… “A good mate’s harder to find than a good wife,” his gentle, protecting devotion increased tenfold.’

The contemporary, especially youthful reaction to which is to say “It’s a bit gay” is irresistible but not quite right. The Never- Never is a world of men without women— or rather, in practice, where the narrator is the only white woman—the rest are black or Chinese from whom intimacy could never be conceived of as coming. And, despite the fact that she is a typecast carer, it makes perfect sense that the dying man should want the care of the one person who is intimate with him, rather than the woman (the lady) of the station who symbolises tender loving care—and isn't that the meaning of womanliness?

So We of the Never-Never is a kind of bildungsroman, if not a portrait of the artist then of the woman who defines herself against a world in which she is doing everything in her power to assimilate herself with and which welcomes her as a vision but also as a stranger in what she comes to see as a strange land (while doing her damndest not to be blinded by the irony).

There is a magnificent section about white justice and black justice:

The white man has taken the country from the blackfellow, and with it his right to travel where he will for pleasure or food, and until he is willing to make recompense by granting fair liberty of travel, and a fair percentage of cattle or their equivalent in fair payment—openly and fairly giving them, and seeing that no man is unjustly treated or hungry within his borders—cattle killing, and at times even man killing by blacks, will not be an offence against the white folk.

A black fellow kills cattle because he is hungry and must be fed with food … and until the long arm of the law interfered, white men killed the black fellow, because they were hungry with a hunger that must be fed with gold, having been trained in a school that for generations has acknowledged “Thou shalt not kill” among its commandments … Truly we British-born have reason to brag of our “inborn sense of justice”.

Mrs Aeneas Gunn has to do a double take in order to get a moral perspective, but she gets one eventually. Still it is fascinating and a bit creepy that this young woman, just after Federation, can have to come to grips with what seem like better than average men riding out with a theoretical willingness to pull a gun on a ‘blackfella’ who has done nothing but kill a bit of cattle at the time of a corroboree.

We of the Never-Never is characterised by the lyrical and impassioned outbursts in the midst of the mystery of moral confusion. The death of her husband Maluka who believes “Behind all Shadows standeth God” is rendered by “the silent hearts of the men of the Never-Never”.

And as those great hearts mourned, ever and anon a long-drawn-out, sobbing cry went up from the camp, as the tribe mourned for their beloved dead—their dead and ours—our Maluka, “the Best Boss that ever a man struck”.

Jeannie Gunn was a kind of Mary Poppins in a strange masculinist world which did not believe in white magic and the tribe that mourned it and half-obeyed it are then flung, half in fun, half with the pang of loss. It is a funny book with plenty of pathos and the only reason we think of it as some kind of classic is the vibrancy with which it displays the contradictions it rehearses.

It is sometimes remarked on that there are some books which can only be classics on the ground they represent and Jeannie Gunn gives us the dirt beneath the pastoral fingernails. We of the Never-Never is some approximation to an Australian ‘novel’ we shrink from.

And it is interesting in this respect that the 1981 film We of the Never Never—which should by rights have been the best chance to revivify the book’s status as canonical— does not quite do this despite the fact that it is filmed on location and gives us the full majesty of the gallop of the horses and the rich golden beauty of the territory as it’s captured by the camera. Central to the difficulty of the film is that it doesn’t solve the problem of how to dramatise material that is presented in the book via the effusion of the narrator’s interior reaction rather than anything she directly says or does.

We of the Never-Never is a concerted lyrical act of recollection but an incident like that of the dying mate (and the mate that looks after him) needs to be opened out if it is to work as cinema. That is true of the death of the old Aboriginal who thinks he is dying of the curse that has been laid upon him.

When it was released, there were overseas reviews which thought the film’s response to the indigenous characters was at once old- fashioned and patronising. This was partly because the film follows the minimalism of the representation and partly because it attempts to circumvent it. There is an attempt to make Bet-Bet prominent and she is, of course, the central figure in Aeneas Gunn’s Little Black Princess which was published before We of the Never-Never. But there is no real attempt to come to terms with the idea of a punitive expedition against the Aboriginals being countenanced by the heroic and civilised Maluka, though we do get Dandy—played by John Jarratt—saying the moment when the station hands celebrate King Edward by shooting into the air is ‘our fault’ in terms of the reaction, the delineated panicky reaction, it provokes among the blacks.

Angela Punch-McGregor does everything she can with Jeannie Gunn: she is hesitant, commanding, querulous, and brave but the film has the air almost of a quasi- documentary in the lyrical mode and this is because it does not consistently have the words and actions which will make for the full realisation of dramatic cinema.

Mrs Aeneas Gunn was writing to capture the broad strokes of the memory of her couple of years at a cattle station in the Territory, but the film wants specification without realising the degree of invention and fleshing out this requires. And when we do get it there is too little of it and it seems to be a footnote to the action rather than a re-imagining. It does not help that Arthur Dignam seems miscast as the Maluka where Sam Neill, say, might have been able to carry off this blatantly leading man role which has the added difficulty that he is represented in the book not only as the Master Spirit (that seems to be what his name means) but as one who is given the halo and the elegiac idealisation that comes with the intensely personal. Dignam is reasonable, thoughtful, reticent in a way that does not evoke a leader among gun-toting horsemen and the slenderness of the script does not help.

It is fine for Angela Punch-McGregor to talk about herself as a little wallflower who should have stayed in Melbourne, but the film has to fill in gaps that the book glides over in the way it performs a kind of exorcism of a rite of passage which in the book is full of gaps and blanks and silences. Why don’t Jeannie and Maluka have a child, or try for one? Why is her isolation as a woman something she baulks at but is at the same time complicit with?

None of which is to deny that the film version, We of the Never Never, rather powerfully evokes the book’s status as a set of mood pieces in quest of a storyline. We do feel the pang of the near desolation of being that conundrum of a thing—a woman—in a man’s world that has no place for such a creature.

In terms of a putative Australian canon, We of the Never-Never can be taken as an allegory in terms of the Australian way of life and the way many women well into the middle of the 20th century were seen superficially as marginal to a circumambient mythology of mateship, where they in fact had a centrality which stood in judgment on the masculinist values that domineered over it or excluded it.

The book is the ‘novel’ of an outsider who is in fact the emotive centre of a world that cannot locate her and which seems to be no place for her. Jeannie in film and book is coterminous with the nom de plume that was also her married name, Mrs Aeneas Gunn. It is a weird paradox: only women (or let us say largely women) read novels yet stories of roughing it pioneer-style in the bush are very much a man’s prerogative and pastime.

We of the Never-Never uses a technique as a kind of overarching naivete which is a form of fictionalisation even though the publisher Random House reissued it as non-fiction. What it does not have, however, is that masterful sense of self-possession with which the Durack matriarch speaks in Kings in Grass Castles. None of which has stopped We of the Never-Never from selling a million or so copies in the 115 years of its existence.

But if we step back and allow politics and society a bit of leg room, this is a Federation book that captures the mood of a society that gave women the vote before anyone else. It is a cri de coeur and to use Joseph Furphy’s phrase it is almost offensively Australian. But like Helen Garner long after her Jeannie Gunn captures a piece of subject matter: the women stand with the girls, while the men drink and ignore them. What could be more pioneering?

Editor’s note: According to current dictionaries this 19th century term for an Aboriginal girl or woman is in current usage ‘usually offensive’ (Merriam-Webster) or more usually simply ‘offensive’ (e.g. Collins), but in earlier times it was less obviously so. Wiktionary indicates is it ‘now racially offensive’ (emphasis added).

The commentary by literary critic Peter Craven first appeared as “Pioneer Life Comes Alive” in the Autumn 2023 edition of the IPA Review.