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Racism in the Never-Never: Disparate Readings of Jeannie Gunn
WE -- are just some of the bush-folk of the Never-Never. Distinct in the foreground stand:
The Maluka, the Little Missus, the Sanguine Scot, the Head Stockman, the Dandy, the Quiet Stockman, the Fizzer, Mine Host, the Wag, Some of our Guests, a few black "boys" and lubras, a dog or two, Tam-o' -Shanter, Happy Dick, Sam Lee, and last but by no means least, Cheon...The background is filled in with an evermoving company -- a strange medley of Whites, Blacks and Chinese; of travellers, overlanders, and billabongers, who passed in and out of our lives, leaving behind them sometimes bright memories, sometimes sad, and sometimes little memory at all.(1)
On 31 December 1901, a schoolteacher called Jeannie Taylor married librarian and part cattle-station owner Aeneas Gunn at Jeannie's family home in Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne. Three days later the couple began a difficult journey to their new home, `the Elsey,' a cattle station on the Roper River, nearly 500 kilometres from Darwin, where Aeneas had found employment as station manager. After only thirteen months of marriage, Aeneas died suddenly of malarial dysentery, and Jeannie returned to Hawthorn. She did not marry again, and lived in her parents' house for the rest of her long life. Jeannie Gunn wrote two novels about her time in the outback. The Little Black Princess Of the Never-Never (1905) and We Of the Never-Never (1908) were vehicles for more than simply personal memoir; apparent in both is Jeannie Gunn's desire to recreate the sense of belonging and happiness she experienced in those thirteen months in the outback.
As is evident in her prelude to We Of the Never-Never (quoted above), when Jeannie Gunn arrived at the Elsey she became the mistress of a large and fluid multicultural community. Her self-titled role of the `Little Missus' was made possible by the violent theft of the lands owned by the Manarayi and Yanman peoples of the Roper River, and these people also later provided her with a popular and marketable subject about which to write. Gunn's contributions to the discourse of white Australian colonialism are the subject of this paper. Her writings are not amenable to straightforward analysis; they are characterised...