Never Never
April 27
Many of you would know, We of the Never Never, the autobiographical novel by Jeannie Gunn (published under the pen name Mrs Aeneas Gunn). It's is an account of the author's experiences in 1902 at Elsey Station near Mataranka Springs. She was the first white woman to settle in the area. Gunn was originally discouraged from accompanying her husband to the station on the basis that as a woman she would be "out of place" on a station such as the Elsey. In 1903 her husband Aeneas died of malarial dysentery and Jeannie returned to Melbourne shortly afterwards. As the wiki article I've linked to says, by 1945, 320,000 copies of the novel had been sold - which, given the size of the population in Australia at that time is quite extraordinary. By 1990 over a million copies of the book had been sold.
I confess that I have not read the book - though I still found the experience of visiting the cemetery where many of the 'characters' from the novel are buried. It's an isolated enough spot now, sitting off the highway between Katherine and Tennant Creek. Back in 1902 it is hard to imagine living and dying in that place if you had no historical or cultural connection to it.
I don't mean to suggest it isn't beautiful -it is incredibly gorgeous 
but you still have a strong sense of the difference between living in the land and living on it. One thing to immerse yourself in it and live within its rhythms and constraints - another thing altogether to be trying to farm it and force it to yield what European settlers would consider a livelihood. The many and various ways in which people had died (according to the headstones) were testimony to the harshness of the place.
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Comments
27 Apr 09 at 20:32
That is a very lovely piece of writing, intelligent and warm. You should read that book, it's fabulous. Also your blog is one of the hardest to read and to navigate in all bloggoland. The banner down the bottom is annoying and when you are on a post navigating to a different post seems almost impossible. You have a beautiful prose style by the way, very balanced and controlled but still alive and real.
...27 Apr 09 at 22:07
Paul - rest assured it's only an interim blog. We know there are lots of things that need to be sorted out but we wanted to get up and running in the meantime. Hopefully these issues will be sorted soon. (And thanks for you kind comment on the post).
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