We of the Never Never

[1] 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.

Her husband Aeneas was a partner in the Elsey cattle station on the Roper River, some 483 km (300 miles) south of Darwin.

Jeannie Gunn lived on the cattle station for about a year before her husband, Aeneas, died of malarial dysentery on 16 March 1903.

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".

[4] In 1988 the book was referred to as a "minor masterpiece of Australian letters" by Penguin’s New Literary History of Australia.