Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Gentility in the Never Never

The other day my wife hired the video of the 1983 Australian film We 
Of The Never Never. She'd heard that it was very beautiful to look at 
(indeed, the cinematography by Gary Hansen won an Australian Film Institute 
Award) and thought she'd give it a try.

At the time of writing this she has not yet viewed the film so I cannot say 
whether it lived up to her expectations or not. I do know that by sheer 
coincidence, ABC Radio National's Background Briefing chose the same 
week to question whether We of the Never Never is "a legacy of 
nation-building or the biggest lie in the land"?

The book was written by Mrs Aeneas Gunn (like society matrons even today, 
Jeannie Gunn was always identified by her husband's name), a city girl from 
Melbourne who married the owner of Elsey Station, a big cattle station in 
the Northern Territory. Some presumably tourist-minded bright sparks in the 
Northern Territory are today planning to erect big concrete statues of her 
and her husband.

Earlier editions of Mrs Gunn's once popular book recounted the "nigger 
hunts" which her husband and "the men" carried out on Elsey Station. 
Ironically, and after a nine-year battle, the local Mangarayi people will 
soon receive the title deeds to Elsey Station — their traditional home.

It's a safe bet the Mangarayi won't be putting up any statues to the Gunns.

More recent editions of the book have had the "nigger hunts" deftly 
removed, so as not to offend. This tidying up of a true story may keep the 
shine on Mrs Gunn's image but it portrays a false picture of both the 
author and her times.

The reality of white settlement, particularly by the squatters who seized 
vast tracts of land for cattle raising, included "nigger hunts" and worse. 
Removing it or otherwise covering it up leaves us with the phoney image of 
the squatter's wife, Mrs Gunn, "adapting to the uncivilised ways of living 
on the land, whilst showing her gentle nature by befriending the local 
aboriginals" — to quote from the video cover.

Like most people, I read We Of The Never Never when I was young. 
Even then I thought her book was a pain, her prose mushy and the author a 
prig.

The book is so genteel. You cannot imagine Henry Lawson's shearers or 
struggling selectors and their wives being very impressed with it.

According to Mrs Gunn, the men on her husband's property thought the Never 
Never was "no place for a white woman". It was all right for Aboriginal 
women though.

It's a book for the middle class and for those who actually own the land. 
Bankers' wives would have found Mrs Gunn's account of life as the wife of a 
big property owner in the uncivilised Never Never quite fascinating — even 
enthralling.

As for the Aborigines, whether hunting them, insulting them, treating them 
with contempt or even, occasionally, trying to learn from them, the whites 
of Elsey Station never for a single moment gave a thought to them as the 
rightful owners of the place where they were now being bossed about. 

Commercial, not artistic, reasons must have driven the decision to film 
this very dated book. It could have been filmed with a modern-day awareness 
of all the harsh deficiencies in Mrs Gunn's account, using her original as 
the basis for a realistic reworking of the story of Elsey Station. 

Instead, the producers chose to present as unreal a picture in its own way 
as Mrs Gunn had done: beautiful scenery, safe period atmosphere, bland 
relationships and — to satisfy modern attitudes — a heroine whose 
perception of Aboriginal culture was suddenly very ahead of her time.

Not surprising really. The film version was produced by Adams Packer Film 
Productions, a joint venture between the former advertising guru Phillip 
Adams and Kerry Packer. 

* * *

Bolshie Scots

After a lapse of a few hundred years, Scotland has its own parliament 
again. One of its early acts will be long overdue land reform.

The Tory Telegraph is outraged. Its correspondent Matt Ridley 
wailed: "The result of the latest land reform proposals would be on a par 
with the worst excesses of the Bolshevik revolution."

Commented the New Worker: They must be doing something right then.

* * *

Bolshie MPs

Opponents of fox hunting in Britain copped a serve last month from none 
other than the Duke of Buccleuch, one of the country's biggest landowners. 
The noble Buccleuch, confined to a wheelchair since falling from his horse 
during a hunt in 1971, labelled the campaign against fox hunting as "class 
warfare disguised as animal welfare".

He called anti-hunt MPs "pink politicians" who believed a ban on fox 
hunting "would be one in the eye for the toffs and the idle rich". Well, so 
it would, but that doesn't mean the animals wouldn't benefit too.

* * *