Main Cast: Angela Punch McGregor, Arthur Dignam, Tony Barry, Tommy Lewis, Lewis Fitz-Gerald
Release Year: 1982
Country: AU
Run Time: 136 minutes
MPAA Rating: G
Plot
Even today, the Australian outback (the never-never of the title) is a daunting place to be left alone. In 1901, it was even more rugged and wild. In this artful drama, Jeannie Gunn (Angela Punch McGregor), a very genteel and citified Victorian-era newlywed, joins her husband in the Northern Territory to help manage a station ("station" is Aussie for "a large ranch"). There she gradually sheds her prim ways and, thanks to her friendship with the local Aborigines, becomes a representative of an entirely new class, sometimes called "Australian outback women." In addition to chronicling the transformation of a Victorian woman, this film offers insight into the situation of Aborigine society at the time, and it received high praise from Australian reviewers. It is based on the diaries of Jeannie Gunn herself. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
Review
The life of the frontier wife, familiar to fans of Western literature and films, has this counterpart Down Under, with the same components: physical hardships, mistrust by men, and relationships with the native residents. Jeannie Gunn (Angela Punch McGregor) was a proper Victorian lady who, in 1901, agrees to accompany her new husband, Aeneas, from Melbourne to his assignment as administrator of a station in the bush. This is no travelogue of the exotic flora and fauna of Australia, nor a catalogue of Jeannie's adjustments to primitive living conditions. (She is able to have many of her furnishings shipped to her new home.) We of the Never Never is a tale about relationships: between Jeannie and her husband, between Jeannie and the men who work for Aeneas, and between Jeannie and the Aborigines. The men are wary of Jeannie, and in one memorable sequence, a traveler who has fallen ill agrees to be brought to the station for medical help only if Jeannie will not nurse him. Aeneas and his men keep a distance from the Aborigines, while Jeannie embraces them. "I don't want to teach them anything," she says, "I want to learn from them." When she takes in a young girl with a troubled home life, it's not to civilize her, but to provide her with some measure of stability and comfort. The film is best at exploring the complex interplay between the races; the Aborigines camp nearby and sometimes help out with domestic chores and accept sugar and tobacco from the white men, but they keep a certain distance. The film's first half is randomly episodic, but in the second hour, Jeannie has to deal with three similar crises that test her and elaborate on the film's gender and racial issues. To its credit, We of the Never Never deals with these issues deftly, in part because of McGregor's luminous performance as the gently assertive heroine. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Martin Vaughan - Dan; John Jarratt - Dandy; Danny Adcock - Brown; Ray Pattison - Johnny Wakelin; John Cameron - Jimmy Dodd
Credit
Brian Rosen - Associate Producer, Igor Auzins - Director, Clifford Hayes - Editor, Phil Adams - Executive Producer, Peter Best - Composer (Music Score), Josephine Ford - Production Designer, Gary Hansen - Cinematographer, John B. Murray - Producer, Jane Taylor Gunn - Book Author
We of the Never Never is an autobiographical novel by Jeannie Gunn. Although published as a novel, it is an account of the author's experiences in 1902 at Elsey Station near Mataranka, Northern Territory in which she changed the names of people to obscure their identities. She published this book under her married name of Mrs Aeneas Gunn.
Mrs Gunn was the first white woman to settle in the area. Her husband was a partner in Elsey cattle station on the Roper River, some 300 miles (483 km) south of Darwin. On 2 January 1902 the couple sailed for Port Darwin so that he could take up his role as the station's new manager. In Palmerston (Darwin), Mrs Gunn was 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. However, she travelled south and her book describes the journey and settling in. However on 16 March 1903 Aeneas died of malarial dysentery and Jeannie returned to Melbourne shortly afterwards.[1]
By 1945, 320,000 copies of the book had been sold. This novel, together with her other book, was adapted for Australian schools.[1] By 1990 over a million copies of the book had been sold.[2]
We of the Never Never was translated into German in 1927.[1]
Over the years newspapers and magazine articles chronicled the fortunes of the Elsey characters; Jeannie outlived all but Bett-Bett.[1]
The book is regarded as being significant as a precursor of the 1930s landscape writers. Already in 1908 Australia was a significantly urbanised country and the book was seen to provide symbols of things that made Australia different from anywhere else, underwriting an Australian legend of life and achievement in the outback, where "men and a few women still lived heroic lives in rhythm with the gallop of a horse" in "forbidding faraway places".[2]
In 1988 the book was referred to as a “minor masterpiece of Australian letters” by Penguin’sNew Literary History of Australia.[3]
