Having accepted the job, Aeneas defies the conventions of 1902 and takes his adventurous bride with him into a harshly exotic, beautiful wilderness. The heroine is the author, Jeannie Gunn, recalling the savory and bitter experiences of her first year of marriage to Aeneas, who after several sedate years as a Melbourne librarian, leaves to manage a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
The book was made into a film also called We of the Never Never in 1982 and shot on location in the Northern Territory - the setting of the novel.Like the Australian period films that preceded it, notably "My Brilliant Career" and "The Getting of Wisdom," the new Australian import "We of the Never Never" evidently turned to a work of autobiographical fiction published around the turn of the century. In 1988 the book was referred to as a "minor masterpiece of Australian letters" by Penguin’s New Literary History of Australia. 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". The book is regarded as being significant as a precursor of the 1930s landscape writers. By 1990 over a million copies of the book had been sold. This novel, together with her other book, was adapted for Australian schools. By 1945, 320,000 copies of the book had been sold. We of the Never Never was translated into German in 1927. On 16 March 1903 Aeneas died of malarial dysentery and Jeannie returned to Melbourne shortly afterwards.
However, she travelled south and her book describes the journey and settling in. In Palmerston (Darwin), 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. On 2 January 1902 the couple sailed for Port Darwin so that he could take up his role as the station's new manager. Her husband was a partner in Elsey cattle station on the Roper River, some 483 km (300 miles) south of Darwin. Gunn was the first white woman to settle in the Mataranka area.
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